There were not a lot of comments on my last blog about minimal living, but the emails were flying fast and furious for the last couple days. If you’re interested in minimal living (and if you’re a writer, artist, musician or other such unemployable soul, you should be) a book you should read, or read again if you only read it because you were forced to in high school, is Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
It’s been of great inspiration to me, and I have always had a copy nearby. It was not a small influence on my decision to live in the woods for the better part of a year, to live cheaply, (ie modestly) and experience the seasons while sorting out my thoughts in The Nature of Trees.
Contrary to popular belief, Thoreau was not a hermit. He did not live in total isolation in the wilderness. Rather, his cabin was located just off the beaten path, “a mile from any neighbor”, near the town of Concord, Massachusetts.
The purpose of his two-year experiment was to remove himself from the day-to-day interactions with society in order to understand both society and himself. In Walden, Thoreau questioned many of the beliefs and principles his contemporaries in town took for granted. He prescribed for himself two years of minimal living.
First published in 1854, Walden has lost none of its relevance to modern life. If anything, it has gained relevance as the society he lived in then has only progressed and accelerated its pace towards today.
In the book, Thoreau questions living above one’s means; accepting commonly accepted ideas at face value without thought or contemplation. Among many other things, he discusses the merits and experiences of growing one’s own food and building one’s own house. He also challenges the reader to question his or her own lifestyle, their labours, and what they truly work for.
His observation, from the first pages of the book is that:
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
“Most men,” wrote Thoreau, “even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that.
See my previous post for more on minimal living.
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