When I was in college, during my freshman year, in fact, I discovered Henry David Thoreau, the patron saint of simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. He was an emotional purgative for my triumvirate of poisons: loneliness, drift, and adolescence. (Perhaps that is all one poison after all.) His cabin by the pond became my philosophical mecca. During my sophomore year I experimented; I owned nothing (beyond my books, my bicycle, a desk, and a chair) that I could not carry on my back. I slept in a sleeping bag on a bare floor. I did a wash every other day (yes, I used the machines -- no pond was nearby with an available rock). I tried to cut off my liaison with material possessions so that my soul would not be bartered for them. I wanted to see how I would change under the onslaught of simplicity.
I lived like that for a year. At first I suffered from what could only be called the materialist equivalent of hunger pangs. I found myself wanting to buy a poster, one tiny poster, to adorn the bare walls of my room. I wanted my stereo back, and I wanted to buy records to put on it. Worst of all, perhaps, was food, for I had vowed to eat as simply and as infrequently as my stomach would let me. This meant no in-between meal snack, no late-night pizzas, none of those prandial amenities that make eating a luxury, that allow the delight of satisfied cravings.
But that soon changed, and more quickly than I had thought possible because, to my mind, the poisons of materialist appetites went all the way back to the cradle. I soon found an interesting peace residing in my veins, peace like a silence after a great static. I found it easier to concentrate on my work, easier to judge what was of value to think about, above all, simply easier to live. I wasn't fettered with a constant uneasiness about the worth of my life since I had decided to judge my life not by how many cravings I satisfied but by how much progress I made in the direction of my ideas. The only metaphor I had at the time to describe myself was from Walden: the pond's ice breaking up in the spring with great whoops of release as the rotten ice melted under the zephyred assault of spring. I ended my experiment with well-tempered mettle, and refurnished my room and all my cravings.
I went into teaching partly to continue the results of that experiment. I wanted to be of some service to people, in this case adolescents in need of ideas and guidance, and share the peace I'd found in clear thinking and direct action. I had also chosen teaching because I never would be tempted to get rich at it and would always do it, if I always did it, for the delight and necessity of the work. It seemed the perfect mix of profession and ideal, one that would please the curmudgeon of Concord.
And yet...The other day my wife and I went to a stereo liquidation sale, the sort of sale that seems just one step above buying out of the backs of vans late at night. I hadn't intended to buy anything except cassette tapes, yet I ended up paying out $600 for a stereo system worth over a thousand. I didn't need the stereo since I already had one, but I wanted it and saw no reason not to give in to the impulse. Yet even while my wife was making out the check and I marveled at the new gadgets, a voice like a flute edging out over a late-evening pond sounded deep within me. Had I changed, I thought, had I become one of those materialists that Thoreau had fought against in his life? Had I become nothing other than what everyone else was, a captive of advertising, a hapless consumer? Even now as I listen to the wonderfully full music coming out of the machine, the voice still nettles me.
This, then, is my apologia to Thoreau. Henry, you railed, and rightly so, against the creeping and corrosive entrepreneurism of your society because you saw how it atrophied the higher instincts, reduced everything to a cash nexus. Your formulation of worth is just as valid today as then: the cost of anything is the amount of life it took to get it. Yet you always talked about the price of life; because you never owned much you could not understand the enjoyment of owning. Yes, you were right to condemn the farmers mortgaged up to their ears, because their ownership could only bring them sorrow and frustration. You were right to excoriate the money-lenders in the temple because their commercialism did not enlighten life but weighed it down.
And yet...Listen to the continent music that comes rolling from these speakers. Go to the delightful concerts my car take me to. Peruse in envy the hoards of books my civilization makes available to me. Look at the poetry I can create from dance, even though I must earn endless amounts of money to take classes to do it. Am I, then, one of the whited sepulchers, one of those young men pushing his farm and possessions down the road while the birds fly in freedom? Will I not get through the eye of your needle? Or is it different for me, Henry? Can you listen to this Beethoven, something you never heard in your life, and tell me my money is ill-spent, that I wasted life to get this? I don't think so.
My materialism is not what you condemned because it's the continuation by other means of the search that began in scintillating naïveté that sophomore year. I buy books and music and the means to store and use them because I, too, and looking for that simplicity which is synonymous with beauty which is synonymous with reality in all its fullness.
Thankfully, though, the voice is still there, a counter-ballast to the Vanity Fair of my life, still forcing me to correct my course and justify my ways to myself. Because of him I'll always be living out of my back pack, trying to keep what is useful and meticulously real.