When I was a freshman in college I discovered Henry David Thoreau, the patron saint of simplicity. His cabin by the pond became my philosophical mecca. When I was a sophomore I experimented for a year; I owned nothing (beyond my books, my bicycle, a desk, and a chair) that I could not carry on my back. I wanted to see how I would change under the onslaught of simplicity.
At first I suffered from what can only be called "consumer pangs." I wanted to buy because I'd told myself I couldn't. But things changed quickly. I soon found an interesting peace inside me, like silence after a great static. I found it easier to judge what was of value in my life because I judged 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 is from Walden: the pond's ice breaking up in the spring with great whoops of release. I ended my experiment well-tempered, and refurnished my room and all my cravings.
And yet... The other day I went to a stereo liquidation sale. I hadn't intended to buy anything except cassette tapes, yet I ended up paying out $600 for a stereo system worth $1000. I didn't need the stereo system since I already had one, but I wanted it and saw no reason not to give in to the impulse. Yet even while I was writing the check, a voice like a flute edging out over a late-evening pond sounded deep within me. Had I changed, it said, had I become of those captives Thoreau had fought against in his life? Even now, as I listen to the wonderfully full music coming out of the machine, the voice still nettle me.
This, then, is my apologia to Thoreau. Henry, you railed, and rightly so, against capitalism because you saw how it reduced the higher instincts to a cash nexus. Your definition 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 joy of owning. Listen to the music that comes rolling from these speakers. 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, am looking for that simplicity which his 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 around me, still forcing me to correct my course and justify my ways to myself. Because of him I'll always try to live out of my back pack, try to keep in view what is useful and meticulously real.
Reading As Radicalism
Winter