Exploring the Individual

This collection of essays is a fine introduction to Thoreau. For the always amazing Dover Thrift price of one dollar, it contains five of his most important essays, including Civil Disobedience, Thoreau’s influential work of political protest. In the essays Thoreau examines man as a thinking creature and as a public creature. He is a remarkably sane voice for idealism and individualism.

Civil Disobedience

Civil Disobedience is a work that every American should read. It is a manifesto of man’s role in a democracy, especially a democracy which must balance the sometimes oppositional forces of freedom and equality. Thoreau famously calls for each citizen to use his own conscience as a guide and claims that as a human with an autonomous soul we have, not the responsibility to make this world a good place to live in, but we do have the responsibility not to do bad. Opposing the Mexican-American war and slavery, Thoreau refuses to pay his poll tax and spends a night in jail.

Thoreau is often accused of being vainglorious for this act. He spends only one night in a jail cell, that by his own description, is nicer than many peoples homes. But his message is clear, he will not support a government that he knows will use his support for evil ends; in such a society, an honest man belongs in prison. This essay details the method of non-violent protest and was read by both Ghandi and Martin Luther King, jr. It is beautifully written and contains in 20 pages the depths of a poltical treatise ten times its size.

Slavery in Massachusetts

Slavery in Mass. is a speech once again extolling the virtues of counting yourself a human being before counting yourself a citizen. It is a vehement condemnation of slavery at a time when such belief was not the popular opinion. He condemns the papers and government, citing once again his belief in Higher Law and a True Justice, “The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make law free. They are the lovers of law and order, who observe the law when the government breaks it.” This speech is partly in reply to the just past Kansas-Nebraska Act, the effort to keep the number of free and slave-holding states in equilibrium, an effort that led directly to the civil war.

Plea for Captian John Brown

This is probably the most controversial essay that Thoreau wrote. It is a defense of John Brown, a violent abolitionist responsible for the armed raid on Harpers Ferry intending to incite a slave uprising. Thoreau is criticized for supporting violent protest. The essay is devoted to describing John Brown as a noble creature and his efforts as noble acts.

As for supporting violence, it is clear that Thoreau thought there was sometimes a place for it. He openly agrees with Brown that “man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slave-holder, in order to rescue the slave.” In all the essay is honest and compelling for its personal fervor.

Walking

Walking is an amazing loosely constructed essay about wildness. This is my favorite in the collection. “Walking” is an ode to life through the art of walking. It is delightfully sprited and explores the paradox of man being a dually civilized and uncivilizable creature. Thoreau enjoins people to go forth into wildness with the vigor of knight crusading to the Holy Land. He urges man to keep himself true to his nature by cultivating only a small part of himself and leaving the rest wild.

Wildness as Thoreau sees it is hard to define. It is not “wilderness” as books and music can be wild if they embody that spirit. “All good things are wild and free,” he says, “The wildness of the savages but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.” The beauty of this essay is astonishing and I think Thoreau has captured something rarely written of man. For the learned, Knowledge is often seen as the highest we can attain to, but Thoreau, I think, is closer to the truth when he claims that, instead, we are looking for “Sympathy with Intelligence.”

Life Without Principle

This final essay is another of the ones that get Thoreau accused of overstatement at best, hypocrisy and bluster at worst. He claims that he would rather be cold and hungry than work the way that most people do. Perhaps understandlbly, he gets accused of not knowing cold and hunger. Yet one must remember that he was writing at the beginning of the industrial revolution in America, a time before child labor laws even, when people work long hours in sweat shop conditions. Thoreau was seeing clearly the effects of people when money replaces living.

He urges people to do work for the love of it, because it is part of our nature to contribute to and manipulate our world, but to keep in mind that getting a living has the end goal of living itself...he offers his opinion of how to make “getting a living not only honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious.” He wishes for the nation, “a high and earnest purpose in the inhabitants.” This essay is wonderful and full of pithy quotes; finshing it once makes one want to read it again immediately.

In all, this is a great collection of short essays, each one worth far more than the price of the whole book. Dover Thrrift is typeset in a readable font with wonderfully little commentary and introduction. I highly recommend it for inspiring and intelligent reading.