Wake up!

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not foresake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. (Thoreau, Walden, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For")

That, right there, really might do to sum up Thoreau in his entirety. As the last sentence shows, he's an idealist, asking us to strive for a sort of moral perfection in which every detail of our lives accords with our own highest ideals. At the same time, he is an optimist. He has earlier begun developing the metaphor of dawn, and one of the clear implications of that metaphor is that we continually have new opportunities to "wake up," to answer the call of our highest selves. As he says, "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable abilty of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." That's not to say that it's easy: Thoreau has earlier said that "The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake." Nonetheless, it is possible, if not necessarily even to achieve the highest states of humanity (Thoreau himself makes no claims of reaching this--quite the opposite), we can nonetheless "elevate" our lives and reach higher.

A couple of my students expressed frustration with Thoreau on this point. In essence, they wanted to know why--if Thoreau knows we can't actually achieve perfection--does he seem so intent on pushing us (and himself) toward it? I don't know that I have a good answer for this question, but I suspect that the energy needed by an individual to elevate his or her own life is sufficiently high that the exhortations needed to achieve any elevation have to be in no uncertain terms, have to admit no compromise, not because no compromise is possible but because we cannot make ourselves anything higher if we are willing to take an easy compromise. If we start from the premise that we must compromise our ideals, our ideal selves, then it is all the more difficult to move in the direction of those ideals.

tags: thoreau  walden  idealism  

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