Thoreau and Material Comfort

Audubon, Arctomys Monax (Marmot, Woodchuck, Groundhog),
from The Vuviparous Quadrupeds...

I know we are continuing to have trouble with Thoreau and the many complexitities of his position.  I would like to draw your attention this this recent exchange in the Boston Review  between Stanford's Gavin Jones and Stephen Kennawer.  At issue is Thoreau's self-betrayal, íf that's what it was--the lapses in self-disciopline during his famous experiment.  As Jones writes, among other things: " Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is the classic assault on Americans who have gotten tangled up in means because they have confused the true nature of their ends. “It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live,” he writes at the beginning of Walden, with characteristic pun. To be mean is to be cruel and ungenerous. To have means is to have the necessities to live. But Thoreau wants to generate meaning from means, to gain vision—the true end—from the division of labor that alienates us from our genuine necessities. He sees that his contemporaries have become trapped in an idea that the means and not meaning is the ends. “The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot,” he writes. Wealth has migrated from enough to too much, we have become slaves to our clothes. Thoreau strives in his experiment at Walden to embarrass riches by stripping down and exposing the self, yet his attempt to be comfortable, to balance perfectly his means and his ends, inevitably fails. He sneaks off to his mother for the occasional meal, he breaks his vegetarianism with an occasional woodchuck, and after two years he leaves Walden a failed experiment."

I don't know who Stephen Kennawer is, but his somewhat irritable response is interesting, given our discussions in class:  "I must admit that I had difficulty understanding exactly what Gavin Jones is getting at: there is so much writing going on I couldn't always find the thought. But about Thoreau, he seems clear, so I can be equally clear. There is no canard in American letters more hackneyed than the snarky observation that Thoreau often dined in Concord while living at Walden and thereby failed utterly to succeed in his experiment in self-sufficient living.  I only wish the purveyors of this canard would sit down and read the book. Thoreau could not be more explicit that he ran an experiment, not in simplified living per se, but in doing what he really wanted to do. He is recommending that his readers do the same, which in no case will mean repeating his own experiment. He did not attempt, and never says he attempted, to live entirely on his own, to forgo visits to town, or to prove that a frugal man can subsist on the profit of a bean field. He says he wanted to simplify his life, and undoubtedly he did; but he states in language that cannot be misunderstood that those who are content should continue on their path, and those who want to complicate their lives should do that.He never says he is a pure vegetarian; and he tried out the taste of woodchuck in the same spirit of experimentation that actuated his attempt to grow beans. He left Walden because he had gotten out of his experiment all that he had hoped to get, and felt he had other experiments to run. His way of life is never presented as exemplary of anything other than one man's marching to the beat of his own drum. His advice to Gavin Jones is by no means to take a cabin in the woods and simplify his life, but to continue to write labored analyses of literary works for as long as that makes him happy; but if some day he finds himself living a life of quiet desperation, he should follow his own dream, which will obviously not be Thoreau's."

For the full article and comment in context, see http://www.bostonreview.net/BR38.1/gavin_jones_gilded_age_literature_wealth_ethics.php.