2004-01-07
Thoreau's Essence...
A conversation on Thoreau ensued in class today, and we were having quite a lot of fun trying to analyze this great man. I made a statement that Thoreau liked being eccentric, and others pointed out the fact that also could have been very angry (something they picked up from reading some of his works, including Civil Disobedience). Unanimously, we agreed that Thoreau was not satisfied completely with life, and while people often deem him as a man who found "true happiness", I am starting to think that this happiness only developed out of necessity, or else his sould would have withered. I do not doubt that Henry liked the life he lead in his adult life, but I am also certain that somewhere in the depth of his desires he wanted a normal life. Perhaps he wanted a wife, and some children, and to live out the Jeffersonian dream of a small educated farmer.
--Perhaps
I can almost certainly say that he had a sort of "dryness" to him, but that dryness was something which he might not have been aware of. His eccentricity was forged half of the time, and the other half is came about naturally. I don't doubt that he enjoyed and valued life's simplicities, or that he even derived some degree of pleasure from such things. I will doubt if anyone claims that he had lost all hope of ever being in love, because while Thoreau may have supposedly achieved "true happiness" that does not mean that he completely drained himself of human emotion and tendencies.
I truly mean it when I say that I understand Thoreau, and while I am not a person to follow a particular type of religion, I will say that if the belief in reincarnation is indeed something factual, then with all honesty I can say that I contain a certain essence of Thoreau. I most certainly am not this late writer incarnate, but I do understand him, and his internal struggles. Not many people understand why people such as he would commit the actions that they do, but I believe that one has to experience such things to understand them.