Guy Posts

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost.

In the way that “real” maple syrup, liberated from indigenous growth trees somewhere in Canada by a man in a flannel jacket is to the Log Cabin® type— manufactured and bottled into convenient 64 ounce containers for purchase in a 2 pack at Costco— Thoureau’s naturally impure, rough, and inefficient narrative heighten the authenticity of his reflections and manifest a deeper spirit in his decision to undertake a simpler life in the woods. 

Thoreau takes a critical look at the antebellum farmer and does not see the great steward of New England’s breadbasket, but instead a man no freer than men enslaved a few hundred miles to his south. He asks, “who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?” 

Thoreau sees a reflexive relationship between one’s chosen lifestyle and the labor one must undertake. To him, the cost of living enslaves man into unnecessary industriousness to sustain that cost. The mansion must be furnished, maintained, and kept up to date, which becomes its own job. A farm must be plowed, tilled, and planted, just to support the very infrastructure needed to plow, till, and plant it. Once you’re stuck— for you most definitely are stuck in society according to Thoreau— the inertia of the situation takes over and man becomes trapped, enslaved. 

For Thoreau, the problem is complexity. Complexity does not make happier people, though it creates slaves to circumstance. Thoreau materializes his critique of farmers by introducing us to a farmer, John Field: 

I told him, that as he worked so hard at bogging, he required thick boots and stout clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but I wore light shoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so much, though he might think that I was dressed like a gentleman… and in an hour or two, without labor, but as recreation, I could, if I wished, catch as many fish as I should want for two days, or earn enough money to support me a week. If he and his family would live simply, they might all go a-huckleberrying in the summer for their amusement.

Thoreau does not stop here, for his tale, this account, would be far from a reflection of enlightenment thinking were it to end with the conclusion that man is irreversibly trapped by the world he’s born into. No, he goes beyond this, and foreshadows his intent when he asserts “the best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself…” 

Thoureau uses the metaphor of dawn, the rising sun, and the hour when man awakens to expand on his struggle for freedom. 

He reveres the morning:

That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in a morning atmosphere.

Yet, there’s more to simply being present at the sunrise. One must consciously awaken the spirit within and witness the morning and embrace the day on their own accord. Thoreau reminds us, “little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor.” This is important to understanding Thoreau’s worldview; to truly escape the servitude society thrusts one’s way, one must be active in cultivating a personal awakening from within. This, Thoreau notes, requires a commitment, a fortitude, and a confidence that does not come naturally to most men. 

It takes but a paragraph for him to deliver his emancipation proclamation:  

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours… He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary… In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. 

He allows us to build castles, but tells us that it’s one thing to dream them, it’s another to make them reality. No two foundations are the same, and the construction may be daunting, but he attempts to inspire the reader into action with a story of resiliency:

Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts, — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this?

He extends this to humanity and asks, “whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society?”

He hopes to reach the man in the midst of his “quiet desperation”, the man enslaved to his farm, the man seeking for a way out of the cycle of two steps forward and three steps back. That’s his goal, but Thoreau realizes that he can only hope to confidently present his argument, for the sun only shines on the man who has roused himself from slumber.