Генри Торо – Walden and Civil Disobedience (страница 2)

Thoreau’s gripe wasn’t about party politics, but the general approach to government in the US. Thus, the message of ‘Civil Disobedience’ infiltrated the upper echelons of power, causing politicians to analyze their common views objectively. In fact, all those who read it found themselves reflecting on their collective behaviour and wondering whether Thoreau might be right. ‘Civil Disobedience’ became a catalyst for cultural change, which is why the slavery issue took centre stage. It was the most obvious blot on the new cultural landscape that Thoreau had inspired people to hope for. Slavery became what less refined people practised, because they lacked the ethical and moral fibre to understand their wrongdoing.

This drive towards a better way of acting and reacting to the world became known as transcendentalism. At its root was the fundamental idea that humanity is good when stripped back to basics, and that society, culture, and religion only serve to corrupt this goodness when left unchecked. As humans are generally deferential in nature, they are easily drawn into regimes and the danger comes when no one knows any different. When normality is never contrasted with other ways of viewing the world, people lose the ability to reflect and alter the status quo. Thoreau encouraged people to transcend normality to achieve a better way of living life, by looking inwards at the basic human condition. Therein lies his basic argument against slavery: all humans are equal when societal and cultural layers are stripped away. When we take things down to what lies beneath, we are all nothing more than members of the same species.

Due to the insightful nature of ‘Civil Disobedience’, it has often been referenced when populations have been driven to civil unrest by governments or regimes. It has universality because it has a generic message that applies to any era. For that reason, Thoreau’s wisdom has lived on in his writing. It seems that humanity has a habit of settling on unsatisfactory societal norms, but that is because society is a human construct. There is no one right way of running society, but there are plenty of wrong ways, and Thoreau’s words are all about maintaining the process of self-monitoring in an effort to do our very best in perpetual pursuit of the ideal. The act of civil disobedience is therefore the driver to keep things evolving, while civil obedience only allows a society to become set in its ways, so that the rot sets in.

Thoreau himself was very much a renaissance man. He was a polymath and lived a life intellectually removed from popular society. He put his own theory into practice a few years before his death. He built a cabin in a remote location and lived there for two years, so that he could get back to nature and become lost in his thoughts. His rationale was that he could be more objective by living a self-reliant lifestyle. He documented the results in his book Walden, published in 1854. Among the people who visited his cabin was a runaway slave. The author helped him flee to Canada, where slavery was not practised. This event is among many that generate deep philosophical discussion in the book, about how American society should emerge into the modern world. He died in 1861, just when the great cultural shift in America was being played out in the theatre of battle.

ECONOMY

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders “until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach”; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars – even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them:—

Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,

Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,—

“From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,

Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.”

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance – which his growth requires – who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.