Pond Scum:?Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia

Perhaps the strangest, saddest thing about “Walden” is that it is a book about how to live that says next to nothing about how to live with other people. Socrates, too, examined his life—in the middle of the agora. Montaigne obsessed over himself down to the corns on his toes, but he did so with camaraderie and mirth. Whitman, Thoreau’s contemporary and fellow-transcendentalist, joined him in singing a song of himself, striving to be untamed, encouraging us to resist much and obey little. But he was generous (“Give alms to everyone that asks”), empathetic (“Whoever degrades another degrades me”), and comfortable with multitudes, his and otherwise. He would have responded to a shipwreck as he did to the Civil War, tending the wounded and sitting with the grieving and the dying.

Poor Thoreau. He, too, was the victim of a kind of shipwreck—for reasons of his own psychology, a castaway from the rest of humanity. Ultimately, it is impossible not to feel sorry for the author of “Walden,” who dedicated himself to establishing the bare necessities of life without ever realizing that the necessary is a low, dull bar; whose account of how to live reads less like an existential reckoning than like a poor man’s budget, with its calculations of how much to eat and sleep crowding out questions of why we are here and how we should treat one another; who lived alongside a pond, chronicled a trip down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and wrote about Cape Cod, all without recognizing that it is on watering holes and rivers and coastlines that human societies are built.

Granted, it is sometimes difficult to deal with society. Few things will thwart your plans to live deliberately faster than those messy, confounding surprises known as other people. Likewise, few things will thwart your absolute autonomy faster than governance, and not only when the government is unjust; every law is a parameter, a constraint on what we might otherwise do. Teen-agers, too, strain and squirm against any checks on their liberty. But the mature position, and the one at the heart of the American democracy, seeks a balance between the individual and the society. Thoreau lived out that complicated balance; the pity is that he forsook it, together with all fellow-feeling, in “Walden.” And yet we made a classic of the book, and a moral paragon of its author—a man whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of us.

綠藻渣——亨利·大衛(wèi)·梭羅的道德短視

《瓦爾登湖》是本介紹怎樣生活的書缤言，而對如何與他人生活筆墨甚少做瞪〖芗桑或許這一點(diǎn)才最為奇怪嚼沿、最為悲哀。蘇格拉底也檢視了自己的生活——在古希臘廣場中央盆色。蒙田則迷戀自己的全身各處煤禽，包括腳指上的雞眼键兜。但他懷有的是同伴之義和喜悅之情。與梭羅同時代的惠特曼也加入到了超驗(yàn)主義者的行列：歌唱自己映挂，奮力掙脫拘束泽篮，還鼓勵我們多些反抗、少些服從袖肥。但他很慷慨（“如有所需咪辱，皆須救濟(jì)”）、擅移情（“損他人者即損我者”）椎组，與群眾（相關(guān)或不相關(guān)的）也相處得舒適油狂。如有發(fā)生海難，他定會伸出援手寸癌，一如當(dāng)初南北戰(zhàn)爭之時专筷，他細(xì)心照顧傷者，陪坐在悲傷和將死戰(zhàn)士旁蒸苇。

可憐的梭羅磷蛹。他也是一次海難的受難者——原因在于他內(nèi)心拋棄了其他群眾。結(jié)果是溪烤，我們不可能不為《瓦爾登湖》的作者感到惋惜味咳。他致力于計算出剛夠維持生存的要素庇勃，卻從未意識到這一要求太簡單而無聊；他關(guān)于如何生活的敘述讀起來不像是存在主義的哲思而更像是一個窮光蛋的預(yù)算槽驶，計算著吃多少责嚷、睡多久，然后擠出點(diǎn)關(guān)于我們的存在以及我們?nèi)绾闻c他人相處的問題掂铐；他住在湖邊罕拂，記述了康科德和梅里馬克河之游，寫了寫科德角全陨，卻全然沒有意識到人類社會正是建在水源處爆班、河畔和海岸線上。

誠然辱姨，與社會打交道有時會很困難柿菩。鮮有事物能夠比凌亂混雜的驚喜（其他群眾）更能打斷你的悠閑生活計劃。同樣炮叶，鮮有事物能夠比政府管治更能妨礙你的完全自治碗旅，且這并不只在政府不公正之時才存在；法律是一種約束镜悉，制約我們可能的不正確行為祟辟。青少年也會對任何制約他們自由的事物都感到緊張、坐立不安侣肄。但成熟的做法（美國民主的核心）是尋找個人和社會之間的平衡旧困。梭羅實(shí)現(xiàn)了這種復(fù)雜的平衡。但遺憾的是他拋棄了它稼锅，拋棄了一切同情吼具，獨(dú)自沉浸在《瓦爾登湖》的世界里。然而我們?nèi)园堰@本書奉為經(jīng)典矩距，奉其作者為道德模范——而這個男人心底的渴望和典型的做法卻是拒絕了我們其他人拗盒。