"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." It's an arresting sentence anyway, and comes, as most people know from Thoreau, author of Walden. He was a graduate of Harvard who for two years lived in a shack beside a pond in a wood some two miles from his home in Concord, Massachussets. This was in the mid-19th century when he felt that society in the United States was becoming too pleased with itself, above all with its material prosperity.
Thoreau and others abhorred much about it: slavery, capital punishment, the lack of women's rights, the treatment of the poor and the insane. In all of this he agreed with a movement known as the Transcendalists, of which it was said that they were a club of the like-minded because no two of them thought alike. "Unity in diversity," as Michael Meyer put it in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Walden. Thoreau and his like were, in some ways an advance guard of the New Age travellers or people of similar lifestyle today.
Thoreau claimed to fear and reject material possessions. What does an Irish farmer think of the following: "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 . . . Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?" But it is not all as fey as that. Thoreau worked on the land himself, Harvard degree and all, as a labourer. He said somewhere that six weeks' work gave him enough means to live for a year. Cultivating oneself was the essence of his approach to life.
On the other hand, he didn't always take to reformers: "If I knew for certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." He is not, in other words, intent on foisting his own views on the reader. "Each person should pursue his own way." And, in an apparently solemn book there is some humour. One of his books had an edition of 1,000 copies. About 75 were given away, 100 or so were sold, and the rest sent back to him by the publisher. Wrote Thoreau: "I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself."