Category: Books & Writing

I am still wending my way, slowly, deliciously, through Walden.

I so fervently wish that, like Thoreau, I could go off and stake out a piece of land, cut my own lumber to build my own cozy little abode. I will have to be content with slinging Jeff’s machete to take down the vines squeezing the life out of my trees. Except I’m not allowed to play with the machete. Or the axe.

My favorite part, as a child, was how he tallied up the costs of building his house on the land he claimed “by squatter’s right”:

Boards………………………………………$8.03, mostly shanty boards.
Refuse shingles for roof and sides 4.00
Laths………………………………………….1.25
Two second-hand windows
with glass……………………………2.43
One thousand old brick………………4.00
Two casks of lime……………………….2.40 That was high.
Hair…………………………………………….0.31 More than I needed.
Mantle-tree iron…………………………0.15
Nails……………………………………………3.90
Hinges and screws………………………0.14
Latch…………………………………………..0.10
Chalk…………………………………………..0.01
Transportation……………………………1.40
I carried a good part on my back.

In all………………………………..$28.12 1/2

It was with particular delight that I encountered this passage again. It was just as I remembered it; for some reason that doesn’t happen a lot when I reread childhood favorites. The telling is shifted and changed in my memory, by time and circumstance.

Anyway, the boards were recycled from a shanty that Thoreau buys for $4.25, after a particularly pretty recounting of his experience hewing and mortising the main timbers (no, I don’t know what that means, but it sounds manly). He reflects that

“They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man’s discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.”

He sees a snake “run into the water” and lay there for a long period of time, because it had yet to leave the torpid state. He muses,

“It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity ride to a higher and more ethereal life.”

In the next paragraph, he describes the shanty he is about to purchase from James Collins;

“James Collins’ shanty was considered to be an uncommonly fine one….The roof was the soundest part, a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Doorsill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door-board…It was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish.”

Ah, yes, it does sound uncommonly fine.

So here we have a man who is obsessive, frugal, preachy; recycles; uses his communing with nature to inform his poetic musings on the nature of man; and then, in the next paragraph, gives a snarky description of another man’s home.

I am so in love with Henry David Thoreau.

The edition that I have borrowed from the library (and sadly, will soon have to return) is the 150th (!) Anniversary edition, an oversized hardback with lush photography of present-day Walden Pond. It is the sleek black Jaguar XK edition of this book. It is beautiful.

As much as I covet Amazon’s Kindle and its ability to fit 200 books into its seven-and-a-half inch body, its search feature– oh, how I long for the search feature– there is no way it can compare to the experience of supporting the heft of this book, and turning its crisp, smooth pages.

I just flicked over to Amazon to grab the code for the Kindle link, and read through all the features, and now I really really want the Kindle.

Thankfully, I have my lovely stoic Henry David Thoreau to stay my hand. He reminds me that putting $399 on my credit card, plus the cost of uploading books thereafter, is a loser’s proposition. After all,

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…
But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

Buying things on credit is never the solution. Debt is slavery;

“Always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow,
and dying today.”

Yes, Henry David. I am calmer now.
I am so lucky to have you here, at my bedside, for another twelve days. So glad to

“follow the bent of [your] genius,
which is a very crooked one…”