Who shaped your thinking ? What made you really tick the way you do ? What were your key influences, and who were your enduring heroes and heroines ?
Nearly fifty years ago a good friend introduced me to Thoreau and I was instantly hooked. Thoreau, known so often by his surname, was Henry David Thoreau, and his most famous work was Walden. Multiple copies of Walden litter my shelves, and Thoreau in my house is a bit like urban rats: you are never more than 2 m from a copy wherever you sit down.
I hated school and never enjoyed working. Both seemed like a waste of my sunny days. There were so many things that seemed so much more absorbing, satisfying, enchanting. It has always seemed to me that any experience where you have to wear a jacket is likely to be a waste of time, as well as a crime against common sense.
Thoreau, with a turbo-charged brain several sizes larger than mine, appeared to have thought the same sort of thing. Not for him the lucrative family pencil business, but rather the call of an entirely different reality.
I love Catullus and Martial, and revel in their verse. But Thoreau shifted my whole word view seismically as nobody else ever did.
I wanted to escape from the life that beckoned me to dull and empty convention. Thoreau had a larger vision. He wanted to escape, not from his life, but to a radically other way of living.
Thoreau's account of his life at Walden Pond isn't just a simple description of an alternative. It is a call to arms, an incitement to notice truths which are right under our noses, and yet are never noticed.
There is never a day, no, not a single day, when I do not feel that my life is changed because of Thoreau. Thoreau was like the last lens that the optometrist holds up in a sight test which suddenly pulls the chart into sharp focus. He made perfect sense in an exciting world that convention conspires to make dull. Some mental process filters all my thinking past Thoreau. His was a message of irrepressible hope and the vibrancy of possibility, and he has seen me through some dark days as well as summer uplands.
In my sitting room is a carving: I love a broad margin to my life. It is a quote from Thoreau. I have tried to live my life in not Thoreau's broad margin, but in my own. That I have a broad margin at all is thanks to Henry David Thoreau, and every day I am grateful to him.
Let Thoreau himself explain. The 'cars' he mentions are railroad cars, railway wagons. Easy enough to imagine what he would have thought of the cars of today.
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?
Here, below, is a short section from Walden, where is talking about his experience in his first year at the Pond. (Forgive the US 'z'.)
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.
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