On Walden & Civil Disobedience

Thoreau is an interesting guy—he seems a bit naïve at times, perhaps a bit of a neckbeard (literally and metaphorically), but he has good intentions. In Walden, he reflects on living away from human civilization, relying on only his own abilities and the environment around him. When I first read excerpts from this text back in high school, I thought that Thoreau had gone really deep into the boondocks, out in the middle of nowhere. When I realized he was only a mile or two away from Concord (which he regularly walked to by traveling along local train tracks), I began to feel that he was a bit of a joke. That thought process is a bit unfair, Thoreau is doing his best to develop a sense of “self-reliance,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson would put it. He wanted to live deliberately, without too many distractions, and the hopes of arriving at some sort of pristine state. He waxes poetic about his two years living along Walden Pond, which is nice, but it makes me wonder why he bothered going back to “civilization” if it was so good. His reasoning was that he “had several more lives to live, and could not spend any more time for that one.” Honestly, this is as good of a reason as any, although it still doesn’t do much to explain why.

In Walden, I really liked the passages about the loon—they’re short and scattered throughout the text, but I feel that Thoreau was able to find some company by sharing his pond with a recognizable neighbor like this. At times, Thoreau seems to have a penchant for violence, or at least violent thoughts. One passage he wrote, that made me cackle, went a bit like this:

“As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”

He also complains a bit about common phrases that become platitudes. For instance, he cites the example of men who claim that mortar continues hardening on bricks even after fifty years. HIs response is that “such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them.” The last case that stuck out to me of Thoreau’s suggestion of violence towards people who disagree with him was something like: “Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one’s self.” Honestly, these lines are hilarious.

“Civil Disobedience” is a much more restrained piece where he argues that all people within a state are culpable for that state’s excesses. It may be easy to blame Southerners for slavery or slaveholders for the Mexican-American War, but all Americans indirectly supported those endeavors. For all of the virtue signaling (although this word did not yet exist) done by the people of Massachusetts toward these two issues, few of them did anything to prevent them—votes do not count as, in his view, they are simply a way of showing mild support (or lack of) for specific policies. For those truly opposed to a government’s program, it is necessary to attack the state in some way. For Thoreau, his most frequent encounter with government is through the yearly tax collector, and his way of disobeying the state and registering his protest is by refusing to pay taxes that would support the Mexican-American War. Naturally, he gets thrown in prison, and it was all for nothing, as a neighbor instead paid the tax on his behalf. However, should enough people coordinate civil disobedience in this way, Thoreau suggests that citizens would have far more power than they already do.

It makes sense to put these two works together, although they do have distinct themes. Taken as individual texts, I have to say that I liked “Civil Disobedience” more than Walden, although I do recognize its importance.