Thursday Thirteen Two: Thoreau

In my first Thursday Thirteen, I responded to a comment by saying that I could probably do an entire Thursday Thirteen just on Thoreau quotes and Storyteller requested (or was that a challenge?) that I might do just that, so here it is, an entire blog entry based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Since I'm teaching Walden right now, that should be easy enough. Anyway, how can I turn down the opportunity for an alliterative title?

1. “We are sometimes inclined to classify the once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.”
Sometimes, we just don't get really clever people, to say nothing of real geniuses. Students, I've seen, have a natural tendency to think anything they don't understand easily is stupid.

2. “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 and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, this is the highest of arts”
Being able to control your thoughts and feelings about something is essential not just for happiness, but for success of all kinds.

3. "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of a man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor."
Self-help pop psychology has made it sound a bit trite, but it's an important point to remember. We have enormous power to change our own lives.

4. “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."
We very easily fall into patterns in our daily life and fail to live consciously, fail to live the way that we, in our inmost selves, really want to live. A change of environment--even one less drastic than moving out to the woods--often does wonders for our perspective.

5. "To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written." --Henry David Thoreau
Well, I wasn't going to leave it our just because I used it before, was I?

6. "Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other." --Henry David Thoreau
Nor this one either! Imagine if we interacted with others, consistently, in a way that brought value to others, that taught them something new, that elevated their lives. 

7. “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.”
I've felt like this at one time or another. The last part particularly rings true--sometimes it feels lonelier to be out among strangers than it does to be home alone doing something satisfying.

8. “Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others are entirely unknown.”
Wants become needs and people forget how to tell the difference.

9. “In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter.”
In 2006, Bush cited a home ownership rate of 70%, but that counts everyone paying off a mortgage; the recent mortgage crisis shows that some of those will never be paid, and we know that other families owe more on their house than it's worth. Even those who eventually pay off their mortgage will have paid twice the cost of the house by the time they're done. In 1999, only 38% of Americans owned their home without a mortgage.  It is possible for people to build houses that cost less to build and are more energy efficient, for people who take the time to learn, the time to do large portions of the work themselves, and people who have the independence to build a house that isn't just like their neighbors', that doesn't try to top the neighbors in terms of square footage or extravagance. See also the earlier quotation on luxuries and necessities.

10.  "Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."
You'd think eventually we'd figure out that mere fashions aren't worth following...?

11. “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.” Or, as he says later in that chapter: “...it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.”
People work so hard to get more and more stuff, but old wisdom and modern research tell us that beyond a certain minimum, material possessions don't make us happier. Nonetheless, most people think they have to live this way mortgaging their happiness for mere things.

12. "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve."
Many of the problems in the world are systemic, and solutions that do not address problems with the relevant system won't do much good. To put it another way, "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will drink beer in a boat all day be fed for a lifetime."

13. “Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.”
The way I read this in my own life, the point is strongly tied to something I quoted last week:  "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." --Aristotle

tags: thursday thirteen  thoreau  walden  

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