How to Think — Like a Transcendentalist
On Living Deliberately
Today’s meditation is part of Reading & the Good Life, a weekly series (and Book Club) that explores classic texts on the art of living. Every Friday at Noon EST, Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living!
What is Transcendentalism?
Transcendentalism is an American literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement of the early nineteenth century centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Another important transcendentalist was Henry David Thoreau. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the transcendentalists understood that a new era was at hand. They criticized their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity and urged that each person find, in Emerson’s words, “an original relation to the universe.” Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature and in their writing.
Who is Henry David Thoreau?
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American philosopher, poet, environmental scientist, and political activist whose major work, Walden, draws upon these various identities in meditating upon the concrete problems of living in the world as a human being. He sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a way of life, not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse. An eclectic variety of sources informed Thoreau’s work. He was well-versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy (and poetry), from pre-Socratics to Hellenistic schools. He was also an avid student of the ancient scriptures and wisdom literature of various Asian traditions.
Living Deliberately
Thoreau opens Walden (1854) this way, “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.” Relatively neglected during Thoreau’s lifetime, Walden achieved tremendous popularity in the 20th century.
In chapter two of Walden, Thoreau explains,
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life… .
Thoreau set out nearly two centuries ago to achieve what we are attempting today — to live deliberately. His description of the physical act of living day by day at Walden Pond and his command of a clear, straightforward, but elegant style helped raise it to the level of a literary classic.
Selected Passages from Walden
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? … 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. […]
—
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. … The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. […]
—
We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. … The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. […]
Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
P.S. For more daily meditations on the art of living (or to learn more about Reading & the Good Life), check out the Perennial Meditations newsletter.