Henry David Thoreau lived a good life. The best part? He lived before life got complicated for the rest of us.
No Wi-fi? No problem. No television? No worries. No phones? No ET phone home. No cars? No matter. What you needed back in Thoreau’s time was well within walking distance. Besides, if it were more than a walk away, there were always horses.
“How blind that cannot see serenity.”
If this were true in the 1840s, how much truer are these words in 2025?
The answer, at least for me, is one reason I chose to buy a used copy of Thoreau’s “Walden and Civil Disobedience.” In part, I suffer from extreme post-post-modern depression. The world isn’t just too much with us; it is rushing at us with the speed and severity of a tsunami.
Life, let’s admit it, has become unbearable. My entire disposition has been in a terrible state of disequilibrium since the so-called COVID-19 pandemic. Aside from wondering when the “next” pandemic will be ushered in, and wondering what type of livable future awaits my grandchildren, I can only speculate on the possibility that an atomic weapon will NOT be used in the near future.
Thoreau, born in a farmhouse in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817 (making him a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln), also wrote the following words in his opus Walden: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
He already knew that. Life is precious. His older brother, John Jr., died at the age of 27. A sister, Helen, died at the age of 37. Thoreau died at age 44 of tuberculosis in 1862.
People didn’t live long then. People don’t live long today, either. It’s just that there are many more people than there were in the mid-1800s.
However, between the years 1845 and 1850 – the years of Thoreau’s experiment on Walden Pond – Thoreau and his generation didn’t have the distractions of mobile phones, computers, laptops, tablets, television or radio; I’m sure there are others, but these are enough.
That should be enough, especially for those who grew up with rotary phones, party line, and television with just a few functional channels, or worse, 8- or 16-bit video games. Try Pong. But I loved it.
I don’t know what else to add. Except, take more time to think and to reflect, and less time to react.
And, if life passes you by (and it will), know, too, that life also passed by Thoreau. But it wasn’t life that passed him by. It was the life not worth living that he avoided.
It must have been easier for Thoreau to live a deliberate life. Not really. Human nature hasn’t changed since the fall of man. The only things that have changed are the ways and means of human life and interaction.
I’d be lying if I didn’t believe I was born out of time. I would have preferred to live during Thoreau’s generation, meaning I would have been too old to fight during the Civil War. I’d wonder if the lack of something in the 1840s by 21st century standards would constitute a personal crisis or if doing without something in the 21st century would constitute a personal triumph of self over social media and life’s other diversions.
I can’t say how old I would have lived, but as long as I sucked the marrow out of life, and lived deliberately, the reward would have been in the life that was lived, and Thoreau believed that life was lived in the present, not in the past or the future.
God bless Thoreau for avoiding the apocalyptic age. God help us who remain.
