Walden Thoughts (Instead of Class)

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves…I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains...” -- Conclusion, Walden

One of the things I love most about Walden in particular (and Thoreau's work in general) is that each new reading brings revelatory understandings and connections; it is never the same work that I pull from the bookshelf. When I first read Walden in my mid-teens, the sections about the flaws in standardized education versus true learning were what caught my eye. When I read Walden in my mid-twenties, I was absorbed by Thoreau's deliberate savoring of the moment and the messy social constructs that constitute human experience. When reading Walden this last time, it was the forward thinking manifesto hidden in the conclusion that held my attention.

With very few exceptions, it seems to me that complacency is something most people struggle with. We either become mired in the safe and expected, or we struggle with a lack of reliability and security; we become our routines or we struggle against them. For me . Seven years ago, I decided to quit my job and leave school (packing up all my belongings, finding a new home for my cat and turning off my phone), instead taking a risk and accepting an opportunity to move to Northern Ireland. My erstwhile father had suddenly and unexpectedly passed away the year before at the age of 48, so thoughts of unrealized opportunities and ignored potential were strong in my thoughts. I remember telling my mother that I was leaving

I sometimes find myself standing in front of the mirror in the mornings, brushing my hair and meeting my own eyes in the glass...on days like that I am thinking about myself and my life; where I've been and where I'm going...the things I've done and what I have to show for those experiences...and it often occurs to me that I have somehow

16 March // Transcendentalists, Learning & Unschooling

Not to advertise this fact too loudly...but I have a pretty big crush on the Transcendentalists.

It's been going on since I was in my early teens; I remember reading Thoreau's Walden and Emerson's Nature for the first time as part of a homeschooling summer reading group, underneath the apple trees in my backyard. Before I had really experienced life and could even fully understand what they were talking about, I was deeply drawn to their way of perceiving the world and how they chose to interact with it. Passages like these (all from Emerson's Nature) permanently captured my imagination:

"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches." (Emerson, Nature)

"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line." (Thoreau, Walden)

"To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood." (Emerson, Nature)

"The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?" (Thoreau, Walden)

For a homeschooler raised in Appalachia, this was the essence of my educational life. We had tried strict homeschooling with our small group for the first few years, but gradually everyone seemingly fell into unschooling; a discipline which stresses supporting and encouraging children in their natural ability to educate themselves. Parents moved away from the pedanticism and pedagogies of institutionalized education, instead allowing their children free reign to experience the natural and sensual world. Unschoolers believe that the inherent interests and curiosities of children naturally lead to a quest for the knowledge necessary to perpetuate those skills and desires.

To give an example: since all knowledge is connected (not naturally separated into neat disciplines and categorizations), eating a particularly delicious apple pie could lead an Unschooling child to study historic recipes and cooking traditions stretching back to ancient Persia...or to research the organic structure of ingredients and chemical reactions that occur in baking...or to fractional mathematics involved in doubling and reducing recipes...or to the agricultural roots of tree propagation and pollination...or to consume particularly beautiful works of literature and art regarding a sensual appreciation of foodstuffs...all these are possibilities. Perhaps a precipitating interest could lead to a more abiding passion, where a child learn they love culinary arts or organic chemistry. However, all these wonderful options stem from a precipitating interaction with a natural experience that is child-like and pure.

This freedom of educational thought and experience in the natural world is the direct descendant of the Transcendentalists, who were the first to stand up to the experiential limitations of historic educational institutions. It's a lesson I've internalized to the point that it is incredibly hard for me as a college student to go back to the standard divisions and discipline of education. To this day I find disconnected and dry lectures limp, disciplinary distinctions ridiculous and deadlines/busywork/limitations suffocatingly restrictive. There have been times in recent years where I have skipped lectures because the bloodless and uninspiring group dissection of a reading would take the color out of it forever for me. (Most recently a dispassionate group discussion session with three people who hated Mrs. Dalloway, one of my favorite novels ever.) Over the years I have taken a lot of flack for this, but it's become something so intrinsic to me that I don't know if I could change to this other way of operating, let alone if I would even want to.

Walt Whitman has a lovely poem that I think captures the essence of this feeling:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

14 March // Melville's Benito Cereno

It's interesting that this last decade has seen another revival of interest in Melville's lesser-known works. As someone who has a tendency to lump his entire oeuvre into over-saturated Dead White Male Author territory, it is surprising for me to find unexpected relevance in Melville's forgotten pieces. Especially since I number among that guilty party: the whole Moby Dick/Old Man and the Sea/Jaws finite man versus infinite nature thing doesn't really do it for me, so my eyes kind of glaze over at the mere mention of Melville.

(This is slowly changing for me. I think Bartleby the Scrivener is awesome, in that it pretty much perfectly captures to ennui and malaise of corporate America. Speaking of which, Crispin Glover's turn as Bartleby in the 2001 cinematic re-imagining was pretty awesome. And creepy.)



(Also: "I would prefer not to" is totally and weirdly a Bukowski penchant...a la 1987's Barfly...)



Anyway. Back to Melville.

I recently came across this quote from biographer Andrew Delbanco, about the pertinence of Melville (specifically Benito Cereno) in a post-9/11 America:

In our own time of terror and torture, Benito Cereno has emerged as the most salient of Melville's works: a tale of desperate men in the grip of a vengeful fury that those whom they hate cannot begin to understand.

That correlation is one that is very interesting to me, given the racially/culturally-charged political issues that have dominated American life in the last decade. (A topic I think I'll be writing a long response on later.)

In the meantime...I found this really neat new media writing reworking Benito Cereno. It's basically the entire story via Twitter, as told in snippets of 140 characters or less. It's called "The Good Captain" and was created by artist Jay Bushman. Click on the image for a link to the project (@ http://jaybushman.com/the-good-captain).