Walden by Henry David Thoreau: Reflections and Digressions

September 12, 2024

I started reading on May 29th, 2024. The following are scattered notes, reflections, and takeaways. You've been warned that this will probably be not easy to follow. Take them as Walden-inspired ramblings, rather than a book review.

• I needed to find a book to read, and I told ChatGPT what books I had read and what kind of mood I was in. Then, I downloaded this one and started reading it. I was telling people about my reading of Walden and anthropomorphized ChatGPT and called it a “he.” Is it joever? I never learned what “joever” meant. A friend of a friend said it, and it seemed to really encapsulate the cooked-ness, so I guess it’s part of my idiolect. Okay, okay, back to the topic. The day I started reading Walden, or the night after my prompt suggested I did, I also wrote one of the first things on the “deeper ends” on my site. And, so it began. Of course, the book-reading journey was fragmented, online, and extended. But to mark my soft departure from this story I never really got, we get a new post: the first one of September!
• It’s been a busy time. I like it. I like California. I’m at the Lawrence Lab right now, wrapping up this write-up of my thoughts. The average attire requires some olive green, tan, or linen pieces. The shuttle goes over the hills, the highest points in the city, and I awkwardly walk around because I still feel like I’m playing pretend—it’s amusing. This place is the remnants of an era where we built, huh? I think I’d want to work at a National Lab someday. This is conditional on a green card, of course. The noise in my brain seems to slow when I’m here. I spend my time at the Genomics Institute. I’m supposed to spend my time at Warren Hall, but there’s no rule of where I should be. I choose. So I’m at the big kids Berkeley Lab. Maybe I’ll pull up to Warren tomorrow. If my PI or Kailin (my lovely graduate student) happens to be reading this—I promise I’m well-behaved.
• Anyway, enough ramblings. On Walden: I never felt like I started reading this book, nor did I ever feel like I stopped. Reading this book always felt like I was consuming excerpts that were almost entirely independent from one another. Walden is a book that reads, and just are, the diary entries of a tired man who goes on a retreat in rural Massachusetts, more specifically Concord, Massachusetts. It’s always interesting writing these reading reflections. By that, I mean this post because, on the one hand, I want to capture my authentic reactions. However, referring to secondary sources or the book itself feels impure. But after sharing that line of reasoning, I realize that is stupid: remember, “Write for yourself and write for others.”
• I don’t think I usually do this, but I read Walden reviews online when I started reading the book. The main takeaway from these reviews was that this book may be the most “useless” you could read. With this, while there weren’t precisely well-defined takeaways, it was not useless. I like to think about the book as a book of quotes. Take from that what you will.
• Some reflections on what “society has become” are still relevant today. Given that this book was published in 1854, it shows the consistency of human nature. He scorns those who read but forego the classics, members of a culture that doesn’t value art. The book reads of the wisdom of your grandfather on a late summer afternoon: here’s everything I wish I had known, the product of my experiences that have enlightened me. He writes:

Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.

• He mentions the value of being lonely and alone—how they are very important. He mentions his appreciation for being alone when he describes Hollowel Farm. They are not bad things (the isolation, I mean); in fact, they are imperative for anyone really looking to become the person that they are—this is an individual experience, and the journey must be experienced alone. I think about this with “work” as well. I’m a terrible co-worker. This is not to be mistaken with academic socialization, but it shouldn’t be misconstrued.
• His complaints about society are tropal. Here are some of them:
  • Man works themselves to death with no meaning. Bertrand Russell would approve, as we observe in his work, “In Praise of Idleness.” He describes the pursuit of whatever it is corporate slaves are at the mercy of as a “blundering oracle.” Now, I read the first section of the book, and I’m tempted to roll my eyes, but Thoreau redeems himself. There is something about letting ourselves be that is a tender thing, that is valuable, that we should extend to others, that lets ourselves flourish.
  • He says that men lead lives of “quiet desperation.” I think that’s interesting. I was speaking with a friend yesterday, and fittingly, we talk about Bay Area culture and the general push to always be working: it’s dumb sometimes, announcing that you’re “busy”, that you’re “grinding” or “working.” It is something to commend, sure, but there is some ingeniousity in the burden that it is. It makes it harder to truly relax because you’re always on edge, and it’s not necessarily making you more productive either. Thoreau mentions how it was “once admirable to live.”
  • An interesting line was his remark about Christianity being merely “an improved method of agriculture.” By that, he seems to suggest that caring for the following generations is a planting act, laying the foundations for them to reap more than their successors.
  • It’s important to smell the flowers: cheesy, I know—leave me alone. As he digs burrows, he mentions his appreciation for the geographical feat that is the terrain he does it on: some natural, but still bizarre, and poorly understood sequence of events that led his choice of spot to look exactly as it is.
  • Help from others was for the benefit of neighbourliness, but not even the friends or friendship itself. It’s a virtue of sorts: I agree!
  • He alludes to autodidactism. He talks about how his residence is better than a university for learning. I think of Deep Springs College—my current escape fantasy, with a heavy emphasis on the fantasy. Interestingly, if Concord isn’t the place where people embrace English literature, annoyingly so, then why is it the best place for him to learn?
• This book is what you would imagine yourself writing if you actually live out the corporate person's hermit escape fantasy.
• Thinking about yourself as a character: make that book as good as possible. Eat good food because you can use nice adjectives to describe it. We love a cruciferous vegetable with a crunch that is so satisfying; it feels like victory to bite into. Keanu Reeves said it right: “None of us are getting out of here alive, so stop treating yourself like an afterthought.”
• A meta-thought, maybe even a meta-meta-thought of mine, has been the time I spend in the mental state of how I think about the how I should be thinking of how to live my life: the time I spend in the thinking, the frameworks I adopt to do it, the feelings I have towards doing it.
• Anyway, they’re maybe something to post here later about my choices, where I am, and so on. But, I feel like some candour is afforded, an openness I’m nervous about writing about and rambling and fumbling to get into. The past year was very interesting to say the least. I feel like in the past two, month-by-month I changed a lot. Part of that is feeling comfortable to make changes and also thinking it's worthwhile to just act on changed beliefs. The past year was pretty, um, windy. And it's been kind of confusing to wrap my mind around Anyway, on the downturns, perhaps the problem was too much expectation. Maybe it was too little action, low enough that rumination was too familiar. I saw myself, realized how little was my own, and had time to exist as whatever I was, which to my surprise was pretty sobering. With that, I've come out of the troughs by trying to be more intentional. Growing up is so weird. You'll learn later that I over-estimated Henry's age in the book, but his post-college status makes all of this book make much more sense. I empathize. It's an active choice to slow the pace of it all, and it's worth much.
• Anyway, I’m doing pretty good now, and I’ve realized much. There’s much more to realize, but I’m in a fortunate place to take steps to do it well, and I’ll try. I want to.
• It was an unexpected event, and I saw my mortality for something, maybe not what it is, because I don’t think anyone alive to prognosticate can do its discussion all the justice it warrants. I felt that I was here for a time. And in those times, sometimes the thought of decades would be a forever I couldn’t stand to think about. I’d get into bouts of worry because the time was only as short or long as circumstances beyond my control would decide. I was annoyed, angry, sad, and hopeless that I hadn’t gotten over many things from years prior, things that the other Hamidah I’d grown up from lived through. All the cliches, all the mental health stuff, the take-care-of-yourself-because-you’re-worth-it, it all meant something. It’s not that deep until it is, and you’ve fallen into the wormhole: unsuspecting, inventory-less, and alone.
• One piece of cope that I’m trying to articulate, inspired by the book, is that you’re special. You’re special—in that you’re you—and there’s a unique set of experiences that made you, made your life, made your options. And at the end of the day, you should decide—be agentic or whatever. When we choose, even when we don’t have to—let’s be honest; inertia is a wave that can be ridden to the grave—we allow our most actualized selves to win, and we’re better when this is the case: the world and ourselves. We have the right to choose, and I think the universe is better if we write our stories and let them happen with as much uniqueness as they can. Let what is special be unique to you; make you the sappiest, the cutest, the best. Be Thoreau and go to Concord or Fiji or stay in New York, but treat your life with the respect that a man who wrote 262 pages about his relatively boring one did—his time was meaningful because he made it meaningful.
• I mentioned that I’d read this book and was recommended Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work by Michael P. Farrell. I was told my takeaways would make good content for this blog, so it’s next on my list. I did some light digging to confirm the thesis of this book, which is that “successful people” have their circles as non-trivial monuments to their success.
• When I read this book, I assumed Thoreau was in his 30s, unmarried because he was eccentric and away from the world in reconciliation. But, at the time, Thoreau isn’t much older than me. From reading a biography, I learned that Thoreau had just graduated from Harvard before spending time in Concord. There, he studied languages: Greek, Latin, and German. He’s at a crossroads, unsure what to do next: he retreats in the woods. He does what I think I should do. He does what a friend of mine recently chose to do. Ralph Waldo Emerson is his new friend during his time at Concord. Ralph Waldo Emerson is also a transcendentalist writer.
• Whether they explicitly work together or not, everyone influences each other. Convergence is real; most flourish and would have been great regardless. Of course, because this book is an extension of my “spirited man” era. It was cool to realize that Van Neistat recommends this book in his video. He’s also part of a collaborative circle himself, albeit somewhat dismantled. Back in New York with Casey, there’s Nev Schulman and Max Joseph, and the other tenants at 368 Broadway.
• 368 Broadway, by chance, housed a generation of angsty film artists: it's the "NYC Building that Nurtured the Film Careers of Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, the Safdie Brothers," and so on. We have another example of a collaborative circle, where successful groups come together serendipitously, each member an outcast in their own right but banding together in their exclusion from society. After all, not all friend groups are worthy of mention in a book like this. By that, I mean a group where all members are consequential in a worthy way is a unique phenomenon. You could consider Thoreau a part of one of these collaborative circles, with his peers being: Bronson Alcott (Louisa's father), Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ellory Channing, and Margaret Fuller. I'll be frank. I'm not familliar with these authors, but they've done good work–or so I'm told.