{"id":20111,"date":"2020-03-26T20:24:25","date_gmt":"2020-03-26T20:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=20111"},"modified":"2020-04-01T19:53:50","modified_gmt":"2020-04-01T19:53:50","slug":"what-walden-can-tell-us-about-social-distancing-and-focusing-on-lifes-essentials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/what-walden-can-tell-us-about-social-distancing-and-focusing-on-lifes-essentials\/","title":{"rendered":"What ‘Walden’ can tell us about social distancing and focusing on life’s essentials"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert M. Thorson<\/a>, University of Connecticut<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Seeking to bend the coronavirus curve, governors and mayors have told millions of Americans to stay home<\/a>. If you\u2019re pondering what to read, it\u2019s easy to find lists featuring books about disease<\/a> outbreaks<\/a>, solitude<\/a> and living a simpler life<\/a>. But it\u2019s much harder to find a book that combines these themes.<\/p>\n

As the author of three<\/a> books<\/a> about<\/a> essayist, poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, I highly recommend \u201cWalden<\/a>,\u201d Thoreau\u2019s 1854 account of his time living \u201calone\u201d in the woods<\/a> outside Concord, Massachusetts. I qualify \u201calone\u201d because Thoreau had more company at Walden than in town, and hoed a bean field daily as social theater in full view of passersby on the road.<\/p>\n

Published in over 1,000 editions and translated into scores of languages, \u201cWalden\u201d is the scriptural fountainhead of the modern environmental movement, a philosophical treatise on self-reliance and a salient volume of the American literary canon. In his introduction to the Princeton edition<\/a>, John Updike claims that Thoreau\u2019s masterpiece \u201ccontributed most to America\u2019s present sense of itself\u201d during the cultural renaissance of the mid-19th century, yet \u201crisks being as revered and unread as the Bible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another reason to read or reread \u201cWalden\u201d during trying times is that it gushes with sorely needed optimism and is laced with wit. And Thoreau befriends you by writing in the first person.<\/p>\n

Reality lies within us<\/h2>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Henry David Thoreau, 1856.<\/span>
\nNational Portrait Gallery\/Wikipedia<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As governments mandate social distancing<\/a> to protect public health, many readers may be coming to grips with solitude. Thoreau devotes a chapter to it, extolling the virtue of getting to know yourself really well.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy should I feel lonely?\u201d he asks, \u201cis not our planet in the Milky Way?\u201d Elsewhere he clarifies the difference between what we need and what we think we need, writing, \u201cMy greatest skill has been to want but little.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWalden\u201d doesn\u2019t have to be read straight through like a novel. For readers who have previously given up on it, I suggest rebooting in the middle with \u201cThe Ponds,\u201d which opens thus: \u201cSometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually dwell\u2026\u201d Thoreau then retreats away from the mindless distractions of community life toward an immersion into Nature, with water at its spiritual center.<\/p>\n

Next, flip back to the earlier chapter \u201cWhere I Lived and What I Lived For.\u201d Here Thoreau invites readers on a downward journey, from the fleeting shallows of their social lives to the solid depths of their individual lives:<\/p>\n

\u201cLet us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality\u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our brains build that reality \u2013 yours, mine, everyone\u2019s \u2013 by integrating external sensory signals with internal memories. Thoreau\u2019s point \u2013 which is supported by 21st-century cognitive and neuroscience research<\/a> \u2013 is that the real you precedes the social you. Your world is built from the inside of your skull outward, not vice versa.<\/p>\n