“Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends... sell your clothes and keep your discus.”
― Henry David Thoreau

If my ramblings force Octavious to read good Thoreau quotes, then I am achieving my divine purpose

I fear, Thucy, that Thoreau doesn't speak to me. What I have read thus far are either statements of the blindingly obvious or the occasional matter over which we disagree. Nothing there is new, and I see no signposts to a better life.

That's because you haven't read 1) about him and 2) his longer essays

And yeah the point of him is that he is plain-spoken. But that is his genius. We he says "live the life you have imagined," it sounds trite, repeated, almost meaningless at first. But the more you know about him, the more you see what a thoughtful and refreshing statement that is , and what great deep truths undergird it. As an example.

tbh, I can't imagine anyone who actually does what Thoreau recommends could write him off as being blindingly obvious. The vast majority of people *don't* live the life they've imagined; they're paralyzed by fear that something will go wrong or otherwise afraid of something else. Even if you agree and think he's not adding anything new, one would hope that living in a world where so few people get it would make you appreciative of the people who do, even if you don't believe the insights themselves are anything revolutionary.

@ Thucy

Nope, I've not read much. I read his walking essay, which was pleasent enough. He has a way of writing that lends itself to an English accent in the mind (although it currently fluctuates between Yorkshire and Cornish) and the little nuggets such as the origin of the word "saunter" are interesting. There are some American writers whose choice of language makes every page of their work have a strong foriegn feel (Catcher in the Rye is a good example). Thoreau, by way of contrast, could be a man you have just met in a village pub.

It is an essay that has a sentiment I share. I enjoy walks, I sometimes will set off with no destination in mind just to see where my feet take me. I pity those who do not have such opportunity or see any joy in it, and the habit of landowners to try and hem in large chunks of countryside and coast for themselves angers me.

But that is as far as it goes. There is a pleasent man from the past who shared many of my views and has an attractive way of writing. This is no more. The ground has not moved, the earth has not changed.

I think you may want to look into more of Thoreau the phiosopher as well as the simple writer.

The thing I love so much about Thoreau is that he has something to add at every level of analysis. All the way from the mundane details of the veins of leaves, up to how to live a happy life, further up to how mankind relates to Nature, and even all the way up to the mystery of reality itself. And somehow he manages to weave these together seamlessly into one whole. Which I suppose makes it easy to miss the profounder bits if you aren't looking hard enough.

Check this out, for starters:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thoreau/

Guess where I saw Thoreau mentioned the other day.

http://www.cracked.com/article_20933_9-famous-thinkers-who-were-total-hypocrites_p2.html

Also, I have to say, like PE, many of his statements, although perhaps echoed elsewhere, are anything but conventional. He is a forceful advocate for what we often know is right, but have managed to push out of our minds and action.

I'll never forget when I read this sentence halfway through college. It changed me forever. On students, he says:

"I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?"

And here again:

"This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once."

I mean, what books are you reading where these are commonly expressed sentiments? Thoreau seems almost to have invented counter-culture.

I smell clickbait

Ah yes the old "but Thoreau's mom brought him pies!" argument.

If you actually read Walden you would see that he makes no secret of how close he was to town, how often he went, and generally the fact that he was not attempting to cut himself off from society - at all. That's a huge misconception people have about the book.

In fact when he later went to Maine (a trip that produced his work "Ktaadn"), he concluded that a purely naturalistic life was not right for man, and that a balance must be struck between nature and civilization, for humans to exist in.

Yes he was a master of criticizing our society. But that does not mean he was naive as to wish it would be completely abolished.

And by the way, if you think Thoreau was 100% sanctimonious and hypocritical, I'll let him respond to that:

"It is my own way of living that I complain about as well as yours, and therefore I trust that my remarks will come home to you. I hope that I am not so poor a shot, like most clergymen, as to fire into a crowd of a thousand men without hitting somebody, though I do not aim at any one."

" the habit of landowners to try and hem in large chunks of countryside and coast for themselves angers me."

That's because, unlike some of us, you aren't a land owner. Those that don't have something, are troubled by those who do. Jealousy is an ugly bitch.

Why the painfully uncharitable interpretation of what Octavious said, Draugnar?

Just an honest observation. Apartment dwellers and tenants of other sorts are the only ones ever seem to have a problem with property owners. I am a property owner with my personal 2/3rds an acre. My parents have about 20 acres. We like out land and we sacrifice other things so we might own it.

owning land is a good thing, finite resource

Finite? Maybe. But if Lex Luthor got his way, there would have been a whole shit ton of new land (Superman Returns).

"Finite? Maybe. But if Lex Luthor got his way, there would have been a whole shit ton of new land (Superman Returns)."

This ^ serves as a good example of why some people are annoyed by landowners.

In no way is that an honest observation beyond the extent to which you genuinely mean it

I thought Landowner was a multi.

"I find that the rising generation in this town do not know what an oak or a pine is, having seen only inferior specimen. Shall we hire a man to lecture on botany - on oaks for instance, our noblest plants - while we permit others to cut down the few best specimens of these trees that are left? It is like teaching children Latin and Greek while we burn the books printed in those languages. It is my own way of living that I complain of as well as yours, and therefore I trust that my remarks will come home to you. I hope that I am not so poor a shot, like most clergymen, as to fire into a crowd of a thousand men without hitting somebody, though I do not aim at any one.

Thus, we behave like oxen in a flower garden. The true fruit of Nature can only be plucked with a fluttering heart and a delicate hand, not bribed by any earthly reward. No hired man can help us to gather that crop. Among the Indians the earth and its productions generally were common and free to all the tribe, like the air and the water, but among us who have supplanted the Indians, the public retain only a small yard or common in the middle of the village, with perhaps a graveyard beside it, and the right of way, by sufferance, by a particular narrow route, which is annually becoming narrower, from one such yard to another. I doubt if you can ride out five miles in any direction without coming to where some individual is tolling in the road, and he expects the time when it will all revert to him or his heirs. This is the way we civilized men have arranged it.

I am not overflowing with respect and gratitude to the fathers who thus laid out our New England villages, whatever precedents they were influenced by, for I think that a 'prentice hand liberated from Old English prejudices could have done much better in this New World. If they were in earnest seeking thus far away "freedom to worship God," as some assure us, why did they not secure a little more of it, when it was so cheap and they were about it? At the same that they built meetinghouses, why did they not preserve from desecration and destruction far grander temples not made with hands?"

....

"So, if there is any central and commanding hilltop, it should be reserved for the public use. Think of a mountaintop in the township, even to the Indians a sacred place, only accessible through private grounds. A temple, as it were, which you cannot enter without trespassing - nay, the temple itself private property and standing in a man's cow-yard, for such is commonly the case. New Hampshire courts have lately been deciding, as it it was for them to decide, whether the top of Mount Washington belonged to A__ or B__, and it being decided in favor of B__, I hear that he went up one winter with the proper officers and took formal possession. That area should be left unappropriated for modesty and reverence's sake - if only to suggest that the traveller who climbs thither in a degree rises above himself, as well as his native valley, and leaves some of his grovelling habits behind."

You already know who it is.

"Jealousy is an ugly bitch."

-Marie Antoinette

Took me a while of wondering why Thucy sounded so boring before I realized it was just a Thoreau quote of obi proportions

I fear that Thoreau's lament that the New World was becoming all too much like the Old, with its enclosures, has come true, in the form of Americans like Draugnar.

the only one who gives a rats ass what Thoreau said is you Thucy, start living in todays world, and stop your fantasy

"start living in todays world, and stop your fantasy"

-Vladimir Putin

What fantasy? It's my life. I impact the world just as it impacts me. I'm as real as anything else.

Anyway, here is a partial list of people gave and give a rat's ass what Thoreau said:

-John Muir
-Theodore Roosevelt
-Franklin Roosevelt
-John F. Kennedy
-Martin Luther King
-Gandhi
-Rachel Carson
-Anne LaBastille
-Louisa May Alcott
-Tolstoy
-John Cage
-Charles Ives
-John Updike
-Terrence Malick

I could go on but, whatever.