Hamlet's BlackBerry (19 page)

Beyond these practical considerations, the fact that Walden was so close to Concord was a key element of the venture, crucial to its meaning and value. He'd recently spent the better part of a year living on Staten Island, where he had been unhappy. He'd “learned that his heart really was in Concord,” writes his biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr., and the rest of his life would be firmly grounded there. This was home, in other words, and in
Walden
and his other writing projects he was consciously exploring the meaning of that home, as well as “home” in a more general sense: What is a home, really? What kind of home makes us happy?

Walden
isn't just a philosophical tract, it's a detailed account of one man's life at home, from the nitty-gritty economic details—he provides elaborate charts of household expenses and revenues—to the spiritual and emotional experiences that living there yielded. This wasn't merely a shelter, it was a place to “live deep,” as all the best homes are. Thoreau had times of intense happiness, even ecstasy, in his home, and they're central to the book's message.

His nearness to society also made the project relevant to others. If he
had
fled to a truly remote place, his life there would have borne no resemblance to the lives of most other people, and they'd be unable to emulate it. “It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life,” he wrote, “though in the midst of an outward civilization.” That is, he consciously didn't flee the busy world of society but instead set up camp just on its periphery. “Thus,” Richardson points out, “it was clear to him at the very outset that what he was doing could be done anywhere, by anyone. It did not require a retreat from society…. He himself thought of it as a step forward, a
liberation, a new beginning, or as he put it in the second chapter of
Walden
, an awakening to what is real and important in life.” An awakening that others could have in their own homes, if they wanted it.

But can we apply
Walden
to our time? Thoreau may have been close to town, but he wasn't holed up with the rest of the planet, as we are with our screens. Given that digital technology has so altered the landscape of modern life, and particularly life at home, is it a stretch to think Thoreau could have anything useful to say to us?

Not at all. Though it's true that he lived in a very different information environment from today's, he and his friends and neighbors really
were
living close to the rest of the planet in a new way. Previously, information could travel only as quickly as the swiftest mode of physical transportation, which was trains. With the arrival of the telegraph in the 1840s, messages could suddenly dart from place to place instantaneously. Oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges were no longer barriers. All it took was a wire. The notion that one could now theoretically keep up with anything and everything happening on Earth, and around the clock, was both thrilling and unsettling. An East Coast American of Thoreau's generation wasn't just increasingly connected to the wide world, he was increasingly immersed in it, and he needed to manage that immersion. What to read? What to care about?

This was a subtle but significant shift in the nature of inward life, and everyone was grappling with it. “A slender wire has become the highway of thought,” observed the
New York Times
in an editorial published on September 14, 1852.

With a little updating of the language, this could be a description of the moment-by-moment randomness now offered by any digital screen. There was simply a great deal more information bearing down on everyone, and even the home was no safe haven. In
The Victorian Internet
, a history of the telegraph, Tom Standage quotes W. E. Dodge, a prominent telegraph-era businessman from New York, describing the plight of a family man battling information overload:

In other words, the telegraph was the latest agent of the “quiet desperation” that Thoreau saw all around him and felt in himself. Devices meant to relieve burdens were imposing new ones, pulling people away from life's most meaningful experiences, including the family dinner table. “But lo! men have become the tools of their tools,” he wrote, and though he wasn't specifically referring to the telegraph, elsewhere in
Walden
he made it clear that the slender wire could make tools out of people. New technologies, he said, are often just
“pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things…. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Yet at other times, he wrote about the telegraph in a hopeful, lyrical way, suggesting he saw the wonder of the technology and perhaps its potential to do good. “As I went under the new telegraph wire, I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead,” he noted in his journal. “It was as the sound of a far-off glorious life.”

Naturalist that he was, it's often assumed that Thoreau loathed technology. In fact he was a sophisticated user, and occasionally a designer, of technologies. He never made much money from writing and supported himself by working in two different tool-intensive fields: as a surveyor and in the pencil-manufacturing business owned by his family. At one point he took on the ambitious project of reengineering the Thoreau pencil so it might fare better in a competitive marketplace. He worked hard on it, conducting extensive research into why certain European-made pencils were so superior to their American counterparts. Based on what he learned, he changed the materials, design, and manufacturing process of his company's pencils, essentially developing a brand-new product. His efforts were a great success, producing “the very best lead pencils manufactured in America” at the time, according to Henry Petroski's
The Pencil
, a history of the tool.

Thoughtful student of technology that he was, Thoreau saw that as the latest connective devices extended their reach into the lives of individuals, they were exacting huge costs. They're the same costs we're paying today—extreme busyness and a consequent loss of depth. The more wired people became, the more likely they were to fill up their minds with junk and trivia. What if we built this fabulous global telegraph network, he wondered, and then used it only to keep up on gossip about
celebrities
? “We
are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile a minute does not carry the most important messages.”

That is, he saw that instant communication had the potential to exacerbate the very problem he had gone to Walden to solve, the superficial, short-attention-span approach to life that afflicted his friends and neighbors and often himself. They were all living from one emergency to the next, he writes at one point, consumed by their work, always checking the latest news. “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?…We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still.” Saint Vitus' dance is a nervous disorder whose symptoms include sudden, jerky movements of the limbs and face. The name comes from a mysterious social phenomenon first observed in Aachen, Germany (the city of the little mirrors), in the fourteenth century, when large numbers of people simultaneously broke out into wild fits of frenzied dancing, foaming at the mouth in some cases. Now the weird dance was in the mind.

Once the consciousness was hooked on busyness and external stimuli, Thoreau saw, it was hard to break the habit. Never mind the telegraph, even the post office could become an addiction, as he observed in a speech:

This is the problem of
our
time, too, of course. And it's what he went to
Walden
to solve. The mission: to see if, by building a home at a slight distance from society—disconnected, yet still connected in many ways—and living there thoughtfully, he could go back inward, regaining the depth and joy that was being leached out of everyday life.

Among all those who were struggling with this challenge in the mid–nineteenth century, Thoreau was unusually well situated to find an answer. Concord was the center of American Transcendentalism, a philosophical movement that provided a rich vein of pertinent ideas. Transcendentalists believed that true enlightenment does not come from other people or outward sources such as organized religion, scientific observation, and books; rather, it comes from within. The profoundest truths about existence are available to each of us through intuition and reflection.

It was a philosophy that spoke directly to a time when trains and telegraph lines, as well as industrialization and other forces of modernity, were pulling people in exactly the opposite direction—outward. The crowd seemed terribly important and powerful in those days, just as it does now, and it was hard to resist its influence. It was as if you had no choice but to submit, fall in line. The Transcendentalists believed that resistance was crucial. Emerson, the movement's leading figure, wrote in his great essay “Self-Reliance” that to be truly happy and productive, you have to tune out the crowd and listen to “the voices which we hear in solitude.” In another piece, Emerson described a Transcendentalist as a person who essentially wakes up one day and realizes, “My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world.” And then does something about it.

Guided by this philosophy, the Walden project was really an exercise in practical reengineering. In this case, the device that needed redesigning wasn't a pencil but life itself. Thoreau's method was to strip away the layers of complexity that outer life imposes, to “Simplify, simplify,” as he wrote, and, in so doing, recover that lost depth. As Thoreau scholar Bradley P. Dean puts it, “By simplifying our outward lives, we are freer and better able to expand and enrich our inward lives.”

The heart of the effort, serving as both headquarters and object lesson, was Thoreau's tiny house and the life he constructed there. It was seriously spartan, reflecting the simplicity creed. But there was another kind of simplicity that mattered even more than the material kind: simplicity of the mind. Though the house was right in the midst of civilization, close to town, in sight of the railroad, and within easy reach of visitors, he defined it as a
zone
of inwardness, and that's what it became.

In effect he put up invisible philosophical walls that said: No news, busyness or stimulation, including the human kind, enters here without my permission. There were visitors, absolutely, and he welcomed them. “I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker…to any full-blooded man that comes in my way.” But they came intermittently, and generally for good reason. In town, people would drop by on any excuse, but here “fewer came to see me on trivial business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town.” However, distance wasn't the only factor. This space had been zoned for a purpose, and people knew it, or they found out. When they overstayed their welcome, he let them know: “I went about my business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness.” Thus, the crowd was never overwhelming. There was space and time to be alone, and with others—a healthy human mix. “I had
three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

Walden
recounts an experiment in building a good home by adopting a new idea of what home is all about and living by it. “So easy is it,” he writes, “though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old.” It was a successful experiment: Thoreau had the spiritual awakening he'd hoped for, and it's reflected on every page.

Reading him has produced a similar effect on generations of people around the world, and occasionally on history. Among the countless people influenced by Thoreau was Gandhi, who cited him as a major inspiration of his own philosophy and the Indian independence movement.

And because it was an experiment conducted in easy reach of society, in what Robert Richardson calls “a backyard laboratory,” it can be replicated in any home.
Walden
shows that, even in the midst of a frenetic world, one can create a zone where simplicity and inwardness reign—a sanctuary from the crowd. The need is far more pressing now. Thoreau reports that many of his visitors were mystified by his project, didn't see the point. Today, a zoned-off sanctuary for the heart and mind couldn't make more sense. It's why we go to spas and yoga classes,
leaving
home to obtain what used to be home's special gift.