Thoreau, Cynics, Kant

More Thoreau in Happiness today, along with the Cynics and Kant. Wouldn't that be an interesting walking party?

Thoreau, wishing "to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness," wrote "Walking":

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks... We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return... I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.

Nice work if you can afford it, though most of our peers would rather die than spend so much time on shanks' mare. For Henry it was the very condition of living. His "new economics" measured every cost by the currency of life, a currency you'd think to be harder to devalue than a dollar. A strictly sedentary and interior life does exact quite a cost, whether we're aware of it or not, in terms of health and happiness.

A long forest walk produces nothing "saleable," says Gros, but isn't Gros's book saleable? Isn't Thoreau's? Sadly the bourgeoisie does not much buy or read such books. How much life they're missing. "Living is something no one else can do for us," though of course the vicarious experience of other lives may add depth and value to our own. The missed-opportunity cost of those who don't read, finally indistinguishable (as Twain said) from those who can't, is immeasurable.

"Ah! To be able to get drunk on the air we breathe" and salt away "vivid feelings and sunny memories" for winter. Simplicity of that sort costs nothing in nominal terms, repaying an interest that never stops accruing.

The real, for Thoreau, is truly priceless. It can't be commodified, packaged, and re-sold like virtual reality. (What would he say about our preoccupation with that?) So he went to Walden, looking for the hard rock-bottom "which we can call Reality... no mistake." No phony happiness Experience Machine for him.

More hymns to aurora, and pity for "those who have lost their subscription ticket to morningtime in this world." But Henry is generous, "morning is when i am awake and there is a dawn in me." But the air just is sweeter when the rooster crows. That was true even before the internal combustion engine invaded our lives.

Thoreau's response to whether he'd made his peace with God is often quoted - "I didn't know we'd quarreled" - but less remarked is his decisively grounded humanst commitment when presented with the specter of the afterlife: "one world at a time." 

It's cold-walking season here, or (as we get more than our share of unseasonable warmth in late autumn and early winter) anyway colder. Thoreau pointed out that we're all equipped with handy portable furnaces. I used to recoil from winter, but with Henry's encouragement now I lean in and speak no more of that self-inflicted malady called seasonal affective disorder. So easy to turn SAD to well-being, so few though actually do it. Sad.

Earth and landscape are themselves at once energizing and comforting, making the walker at home. Safe.

Socrates not a great walker, Plato? Once again, I suspect you've foisted your own view onto the mute canvas of your mentor. Nature has plenty to say to us all, though her message does not conduce to your dialogue format. She speaks more directly. To walk and to converse, peripatein, is wonderful but is necessarily mediated by symbolic language. Nature speaks in a tongue we've always knows, but don't always choose to hear (as our Lyceum speaker was saying during Q-&-A the other day).

The old Cynics tried to get closer to nature, thinking "Truth is the elements" whose "primitive energy" mocks the verbal sophistication of more refined reflection. If you can really be free wherever you can walk, you can be at home almost everywhere - if they'll have you.

Kant didn't share much with Nietzsche, philosophically, but both were obsessive about their walks and their meals. The latter, in particular, suffered a delicate gastrointestinal constitution and held his beer-loving countrymen in contempt for what he considered their self-indulgent weakness. He could not allow himself to appreciate and enjoy the "aesthetic moment" a well-crafted ale might afford, nor the camaraderie and human connection. "Nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya," except that. It wouldn't have killed him. Might even have made him stronger.
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It was on this day in 1851 that Moby-Dick was published in New York, as one long, 635-page book. About a month earlier, a censored version of the novel had been published in three separate volumes in London. It was called The Whale.

Moby-Dick begins with the famous lines:

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”

And Herman Melville wrote in Moby-Dick: “Meditation and water are wedded for ever.” WA

Was Ishmael happy? Happily obsessed? What's your happy obsession?