Penury, Philosophy, and Monkeys

This morning I woke up before 9 a.m., which would be an enormous achievement were it not for the fact that I went to sleep before 10 p.m. yesterday, being dog-tired after being imprudent (or "unvernünftig," as Mama puts it) by staying up far too late the night before that. Quite honestly I was not happy to wake up even then, and I felt tired and had weird thoughts, and my piano session did not go too well. The day is even more peculiar because Mama has gone off to Kevelaer for three days, and Papa will be back home very late because the measurements at the laboratory where he works will go deep into the night or even early morning.

One of my dreams was that I was in a grocery store, and that I needed to buy food or I would starve, but I had barely any money. I looked in my wallet, and there were two or three 50 cent coins and a 20 cent coin or two. Then I looked at the store shelves, and tried to decide what was absolutely necessary and what would be most nourishing. There were water bottles, so I got one of those, and then I decided to get a bag of assorted buns, as the poppy seeds and other things on top might provide extra nutrients. When I went to pay, a 10 and a 5 Euro bill magically appeared in my wallet, so I paid with the 10 Euro bill; but there was still little change left, as the water bottle was overpriced, and I kept aside the 5 Euro bill for future needs.

Anyway, this banal dream did leave me depressed; it reminded me of real internal debates when I was travelling two weeks ago. Besides the travelling, I now only spend money on food (no candy, except for Christmas and Easter and birthdays), toiletries, and transit tickets (though I tend to walk instead). As long as I have a nice place to live and sleep, food that is not off-putting, and the internet, there is nothing more I need; and I could get along with the same clothes for at least another five years. Still, when I was travelling I did learn what it was to have to buy small quantities of food that have to go as far, nutrition-wise, as possible — I chose water, peanuts, figs, and hazelnuts, kumquats for the vitamins, and chocolate for its beneficent psychological effect — and what it was to worry that I was not getting enough of the right kind of nourishment. Two years ago it was impossible for me to buy only the essential groceries, though the tooth of financial care has not been unknown to me since I bought the family groceries at the tender age of eleven, but now I am grimly reductionist. But there is a balance, and I hope I am generous in buying plentiful amounts of the good and most appealing varieties of cheap food; I think that food cravings (when we first moved here, I often wanted Waldmeister Götterspeise; the kind we get resembles melted green plastic, but there you have it) should be respected, too, and only whims should be suppressed. To paraphrase a certain mathematician (in a manner that hopefully does not constitute lèse-majesté), the stomach has a reason that reason cannot know.

But I have been quite cheerful in between, as befits one who has no true sorrows. I'm attempting to read Henry David Thoreau's Walden for my Lighthouse at Alexandria blog. Whenever I feel intellectually overtasked (or bored (c: ), I immerse myself in a far less intellectually tasking online novel (I am presently reading through a delightful row of Victorian girls' books, of a most morally improving type). I wonder if it is not rather artificial to read books purposely for my blog; on the other hand I don't read books I'm not truly interested in. Besides, it's pretty obvious that I'm not otherwise in the habit of reading an entire book every day (except Friday and Saturday), in a fixed order of genres, so there is no deception.

Walden fits in well with my earlier subject of food, because Thoreau devotes much of his chapter "Economy" to the question, "What are the essential needs of humans?" First of all, however, he addresses the plight of the farmers in New England. He believes that it is a tragic, unnecessary waste of the soul and the mind to commit one's self to a lifetime of hard physical labour, unless this is really what one wants to do. "The mass of men," he famously observes, "lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation." He criticizes the practice of unthinkingly following the traditions, and unthinkingly doing as one's elders advise, and believes that it is wrong to think that farmers' children do not have great potential. (Later on he asks, "Is it possible to combine the hardiness of these savages [i.e. "New Hollanders"] with the intellectualness of the civilised man?", so his touching faith in human nature evidently has its limits.)

All that is reasonable enough, but he does not state it in a wholly congenial way. For instance, I was considerably offended by his remarks that old people never give any worthwhile advice. That passage is a tour de force of foot-in-mouth:

What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

And so on and so forth, for six more inflammatory sentences. Perhaps this is a Wildean attempt to sap the foundation of society with much skill and care, lay a rhetorical explosive, and then watch the thing detonate, for the twofold satisfaction of seeing moth-eaten traditions blow to smithereens and of seeing people run around like chickens with their heads cut off; but in Thoreau I can't detect any such humour and mischief, either because I am obtuse or because they aren't there. Besides, I think that Wilde prefers to daintily drop a cylinder of dynamite here and there, instead of bundling them up for one big bang in which the individual merits of the component cylinders tend to be lost to view — wasted, as it were.

Then Thoreau writes that men can only become true philosophers if they cast away the excess trappings of life. Why the beggared classes of the cities and countryside of America have failed to bring forth a spate of Socrateses, Confuciuses and St. Augustines of Hippo, if such is the case, he fails to explain. I would argue that there have been so few great philosophers, that it is unfair to berate the America of Thoreau's time for not churning them out. (Also, I think that posterity is contented with the Transcendentalists.) It would be equally unreasonable to huff and puff in indignation at the sad state of a society that does not produce a musical genius on the level of Mozart.

After that, Thoreau discusses the four material necessities of life: Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel. Which reminds me a good deal of school, as I or my siblings discussed these necessities, in class, using exactly those terms. He then theorizes about the "vital heat" of man, and how we must keep it using clothing and fuel, whereas "None of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shelter." — I certainly hope that he thought of animals as something better than temperature-sensitive eating machines. — Then, with surprising picturesqueness given the topic, he rambles on his early jobs and their unremunerated nature. A touch of self-dramatization emerges to lightly empurple the prose.

I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.

In other words, he appears to have been employed as a gardener. Upon mature deliberation, he would thusly characterize the pursuit of these and other employments:

I went on thus for a long time, I may say it without boasting, faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.

So he went to Walden Pond, built his house, and the rest, as they say, is history. But he does not write of that in detail. Instead he indulges in a quite amusing discussion of Clothing. It's an old idea, but the thought that clothing confers status, and that if everyone were naked the class system would most likely implode, is an entertaining one. Besides, I am immature enough that I internally tittered whenever I saw the word "pantaloons," just because it sounds funny. At any rate, he writes, reasonably enough, that clothing conforms itself to our personalities a little the longer we wear it, and that it does not make much sense always to change our habits. He also writes that we should not buy new clothing if we are not ourselves in some way new, so that our exterior will suit (pun not intended) our interior. I agree with this wholeheartedly.

Sidenote: And I extend this mentality to manner, too. I've been criticized for putting my head down too much and not making enough eye contact in company with other people. But I need to do this to shut out my surroundings and regain my tranquillity, and if I were to act out a self-assurance I don't yet have, it would fit me as badly as, let's say, a flaming red "power suit." I figure that any sensible person will see that I am simply shy and not take offence where none is intended — I am quite willing to listen to them, for instance.

At any rate, then Thoreau drips disdain on fashion. It interferes with his love of anachronistic clothing, for whenever he asks for it, his seamstress replies, "They do not make them so now." The effect these profound words has is to make him parse and ponder them, focusing especially on that enigmatic, tyrannical "they." — I suppose these cogitations are intended to be whimsically humorous; instead, they make me suspect that one quality that Thoreau may have had in common with Socrates is the obnoxiousness that must question and nitpick on everything that people say. — Then, rising from specifics to generalities, he observes that the way of fashion is that, "The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same." As (somewhat) true (though wholly snobby) today as it was when it was written, I suppose, though America has acquired its own thriving menagerie of head monkeys in the meantime.

Deploying metaphors with the lurid imagination and crude medical conceptualization of a medieval jailer, he then lets the hot convection currents of his sartorial resentment drive the magma of his subconscious aggression up through the oceanic crust of his ratio [Geology reference], in a disquieting proposal. To rid men of their silly preoccupations (e.g. fashion), here is his suggestion:

They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labour.

He continues, comfortingly (I think), "Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy." Anyway, he gives his imagination a rest then, and wisely remarks that fashions always appear ridiculous after they are out of date. He ends by registering dismay that the aim of clothing factories is "not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched." I am most grievously disillusioned. Now he intends to enlighten me upon the subject of Shelter.

Quotations from:
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau (Everyman's Library, 1992)

P.S.: I apologize most deeply for the length of this post.