"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the art."
Living simply is exhausting. We run from life's busyness and find ourselves as busy as ever. When journalist Sylvain Tesson left society to live in Siberia, he ordered his materials carefully. He planned his days so ferociously that one wonders if he abandoned society's trappings as thoroughly as hoped.
In Henry David Thoreau's (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862) Walden, an essential and meaningful work as any modern take on simple living, Thoreau announced an intention "to live deliberately."
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, to cut a broad swath and shave close.
I doubt Thoreau felt a need to abandon "fifteen types of ketchup" like Tesson did, but the underlying need to simplify, to route one's course, remained. To "escape life's busyness," as Mary Oliver, a disciple of both Thoreau and Emerson, noted in her mournful poem about escape.
Thoreau states it similarly:
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously course labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.
Thus, on July 4, 1865, with this desire to live life deliberately billowing his sails, Thoreau left society for the pebbled shores of Walden Pond in central Massachusetts, to a parcel of land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson to a hut he had prebuilt the previous May with neighbors' help. Of course, society was relatively nearby in Concord, and indeed, Thoreau received frequent visitors during his two-year sojourn in the woods. But so far as the finery of tea things, starched cravats, prayers at bedtime, or whatever else mid-19th century living entailed, he flung aside.
"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature," wrote Thoreau, "It is earth's eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his nature." I grew up near this lake in Michigan.And yet, despite his self-promise to live with only the essentials of life, there is quite a bit of domesticity in Walden, a fair amount of quotidian duties, which we might say keeps us from an essential life. Oliver discusses this aspect of Transcendentalism thought in her exploration of Emerson:
Emerson would not turn from the world, which was domestic, social, and collective and required action. Neither would he swerve from that unperturbable inner radiance, mystical, forming no rational word but drenched with passionate and untranslatable song. A man should want to be domestic, steady, moral, politic, reasonable. He should want also to be subsumed, whirled, to know himself as dust in the fingers of the wind. This was his supple, unbreakable faith.
From Mary Oliver's "Emerson: An Introduction."
I find Thoreau's "house-making" in the literal sense of forming his abode from scratch and the figurative process of making a home the most peaceful and rewarding aspect of Walden. Perhaps it's the vintage equivalent of contemporary closet organizing reels.
At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my acquaintances, rather improve so good as an occasion for neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my house. ... I began to occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped so that it was perfectly impervious to rain; but before boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pound on my arms.
Before winter, I built a chimney and shingled the sides of my house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane. I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite.
Thoreau works diligently to live simply. He familiarized himself with the land as if it were an extension of his intimate quarters, grew his food (those famous bean vines), built shelter, and replenished his wood pile.
He slipped out of daily doings to alight on deep thought: toward nature, a home, a concept of community, the value and limits of architecture - whatever struck him. It is easy to see how a man who triumphed in the benefit of daily walks would let his mind amble likewise.
If we ascribe a lack of deliberateness to a modern daily slog - what Albert Camus called "weariness tinged with amazement" - Thoreau's directed work and simultaneous desire to escape such futility may seem in conflict. But our acts are not futile; it is the passage of time spent in lulled mindlessness.
Thoreau directs emphatically:
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake 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 particulate picture or carve a statue and make a few objects beautiful, but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the atmosphere and medium through which we look, which, morally, we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the art.
"A green and silent spot, amid the hills,/A small and silent dell! O’er stiller place/No singing sky-lark ever poised himself." from "Fears in Solitude," a poem by William Wordsworth.In such deliberate living, what Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön called "moment-to-moment curiosity" in the latent greatness of small, insignificant things, which percolates the most endless depths of feeling and, more than feeling, knowledge.
There was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with a serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight.
[...]
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time and notch it on my stick too, to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.
Walden gives us bottomless pools of wisdom. But it is this business of deliberate living - that living in which we quiet the dominant noise and welcome in everything else - that I gravitate to most, resting in the fulcrum of two eternities.
The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part of October, when the severe frosts have come, and then in November, usually, on a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to ripple the surface. One November afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain storm of several days' duration, when the sky was still completely overcast and the air was full of mist, I observed that the pond was remarkably smooth so that it was difficult to distinguish its surface; though it no longer reflected the bright tints of October, but the sombre November colors of the surrounding hills.
After two years of deliberate living, Thoreau returned to society. I read and reread Thoreau to keep my eye on that eternity, to feel a vast peace as I tidy cupboards, turn the compost, make tea, and stroll the hills, all in sublime mindfulness. Affecting the quality of the day.
Carry into an imagined Walden a copy of Mary Oliver's poetry (she was a disciple of Thoreau), Annie Dillard's wander into a wooded state of being, my study of emptiness, or the positive effects of gardening on the mind's well-being.
