Text Study: Walden

My first text study was a chapter out of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, titled “The Bean Field.” In this chapter, he reflects on the two and a half acres of land he planted by his cabin and all the time and work he put into them. It’s pretty clear, just by this chapter, that he shares some of my values regarding taking time with things and doing them the slower, more involved way. Hours and hours of his summer days were spent weeding and taking care of his field with nothing but a hoe, and he makes a point of this: “As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.” Hard and thorough work is obviously something he gets a lot out of, giving meaning and giving connection to what’s beyond the physical product, in his case, nature. Later, he complains about how husbandry “was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely.” All this jives very well with the high value I place on spending time and effort to do something, and to do it well, even if it means the quantity of your product is not as high as it might otherwise be.

Thoreau also puts a lot of importance on self reliance, which is something else we have in common. For as long as I've been aware of it, I've had an appreciation for the DIY ethic; I like being able to do and make things myself, rather than buying mass produced things which have followed a long chain that I know nothing about. This is a value of mine that I think often gets undercut because even if I wanted to do something myself, there's a pretty good chance that whatever my product is will be a piece of crap, and i'd rather have something of quality.

Something I think me and Thoreau might not agree on is the importance of material objects. He seems to be the anti-materialist type, and I am someone who cares a lot about and finds a lot of comfort in physical objects that I surround myself with. That is, nice things, which gets back to quality.