Emerson's essay on "The Transcendentalist" provides a revealing profile of Thoreau's personality. The essay was written in 1841 while he lived in Emerson's house, and though Thoreau is not mentioned in it, his presence is evident in Emerson's description of the "exacting and extortionate critics" whose "insatiable expectations" demand they withdraw from societal values and public rituals. These youthful Transcendentalists have "found that, from the liberal professions to the coarsest manual labor, and from the courtesies of the academy and the college to the conventions of the cotillion-room and the morning call, there is a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim." Their temperaments and principles cause them to reject the world's work for their own, and with Thoreau that meant writing. Like the exemplary heroic individual that Margaret Fuller searched for on July 4, 1845, Thoreau was not to be detoured from his calling by money, by disapproval, or by fear, because he worked in faith. The pond was to teach him that the art of writing and the art of living were inseparable.
I especially found myself agreeing with the sentiments of Transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson regarding the materialistic mundanity of society as we know it, that "there is a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim." Or as the modern saying goes, we live to work rather than work to live. This reality may not have begun with capitalism, but the logic of such certainly seems to require and actively nurture this spirit. And it is this spirit which I find I must constantly fight against, but more often than not lose to; it is this spirit that is the cause of so much of the turmoil and suffering I experience within my heart.
As a society, we seem to have sacrificed the development and discipline of our souls for the comforts of daily drudgery and escapes into fantasy, for we have been led to believe that things like productivity, the experience of pleasure, and lack of want are the greatest goods in life. But when we are confronted with the quiet and solitude of our own minds, free from distractions, we begin to realize what lies underneath it all—an untrained soul not unlike a frightened child who is fragile and defenseless and needs to be entertained or else they will burst into tears. We discover in this state that we lack true peace and freedom, but not having the proper tools to fix it, we tend to retreat back into the familiarity of our daily routines and daydreams rather than investigate these feelings in more depth. We turn once again towards the pleasures and fancies and intoxications that shield us from having to face the darkness that lies beneath, a darkness that brings with it the fear of self-reflection and truth, but which is also the only gate through which we can pass into the kingdom of God and find true peace and happiness and freedom.
When Paul writes, "Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?" (1 Cor 3:16), I think he is saying something similar. God cannot be found in simply following the “societal values and public rituals” that we are taught and cling to and make room for on Sunday, but must be found within. Yet we are afraid to take that plunge into the darkness of our hearts and open ourselves up to that spirit and the luminosity that is our true self and which is also God. We are afraid of the unknown, of being unworthy perhaps, or of losing ourselves, or discovering that our existence has no meaning. That darkness is the veil between ourselves and the Garden, from which we have effectively exiled ourselves from and to which we long to return. But our hearts as they are, skeptical, aimless, asleep, and lacking true love, cannot bear to confront that darkness, so we pursue the comfort given to us by indulgence in sensual pleasures and the daily routines of life in our things-oriented society, where we have been taught to value the wrong things and are detoured from our calling by money, disapproval, or fear instead of working in faith, instead of waking up to truth. "What will it take for us to finally wake up?," I often wonder.
And then there is this interesting and complimentary paragraph from the beginning of Walden:
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 honor 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 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.
I find much to sympathize with here, too. We spend so much time and energy working to make a living that we have little of either to pursue our own self-development and are thus unable to enjoy the 'finer fruits' of life. We become slaves to our own whips of frugality and productivity, shackled by the morals of a society that values all the wrong things, trading the freedom of our souls for the bondage of material comforts. As he says earlier, "By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, [we] 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 [we] will find when [we] get to the end of it, if not before." It is at this point that we look back and find ourselves full of regrets about the life we did not live and a fear of death because we have wasted the time we were given to search for something deeper within, something more profound, something deathless.
In essence, I see it as a potent warning about eschewing a principled life for a life of mudanity and hedging our bets. Yet as much as I agree with the warning, I still find myself among those laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal, always thinking of 'tomorrow.' And I wonder as I read these words if I will ever have the strength or courage or wisdom to live a more meaningful life and search for a deeper truth, or if, instead, I will more likely than not be counted among the foolish and regretful souls who have squandered their time letting the opinions and expectations of others direct their lives for them.
