Henry David Thoreau is a very well known author and philosopher with many different works familiar to people around the world. One of his works, Walden, tells of his experiences when moving to and living in a house/cabin by Walden Pond. Throughout this book, he discusses various different things that make us as readers stop to theorize about what he is saying and how it can be applied to us. I will be choosing one passage that I think captures this idea of the reader stopping and theorizing as perfectly as possible.
The passage chosen for this blogpost is from the chapter “Where I Lived, And What I Lived For”, and consists of paragraph 21. In that paragraph, Thoreau discusses the idea of focusing on life, and not on things that are fake or do not matter. I think this passage works well for a variety of reasons, one of which is the fact that it is a very deep, logical passage of text. This happens in particular in the beginning line of paragraph 21:
“Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets.”
Basically, Thoreau is stating that we as people focus too much on superficial and unimportant things, and that it severely limits us. This makes us, the readers, think because it is still a very relevant idea, so much so that I myself can connect it to my relationship with technology. What I mean by this is, the modern equivalent of this idea would be the fact that so many people are preoccupied with their phones, laptops, tvs and more that they, or we, limit them/ourselves because we’re not looking at life as it truly is. This leads me into why it is necessary–it is necessary because it will almost always be relevant. It is a lesson to be learned and taught by many, in the sense that it is a very important idea. It is also necessary because people will always choose to focus on the “easier” things to handle in life, as opposed to the things they need to. Thoreau is basically “calling out” us as a society, showing us our issues and how we can resolve them in a pretty simple way. Not everybody will see this or learn from this though, which is why it is necessary–it will always be there to learn from.
Another good example from paragraph 21 would be this line:
“Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.”
Thoreau is pretty much throwing shade at adults, saying that their children have a better understanding of life than they do. This works because it makes the reader think about whether this is actually true or not–And I have to kind of believe that it is. It criticizes adults who don’t seem to focus on life or really care that it’s happening by basically saying their children know it better than they do. This really allows the reader to think about the way they go about seeing their life, as a metaphorical “child” or “adult”, and helps them see the issues with how they view it. Thoreau also makes this feel like a necessary spot to stop reading and to start theorizing because of the way he uses his criticism. He is basically allowing the reader to really think about their life through use of criticism in its simplest form–comparing one thing to another in an obviously critical way. By saying children know better than adults about how life should be, he effectively makes this a necessary area for theorizing because it causes the person reading to think if they are really less well-versed in life than a child, and effectively leads them to try and make changes to themselves and their unfocused views on life.