Loafing, Working, What Is a Life?

 Henry David Thoreau wrote the most radical book in American politics, Walden. I read him when I was a teenager. I cannot say that he changed my life, but he was a voice in my head. Fainter as I got older, true; always critical. Then I re-read him in prison. There were ideas I could still trace back to Thoreau. I found much profit in re-reading him.

 Which is why I read the review Making a Living Is More Than Work: Thoreau’s loafing and the purpose of life.

Walden is filled with figures like Therien who are trying, often failing, to solve the problem of work: John Farmer, whose thoughts are mystically summoned to a sphere beyond his exhausting labor; John Field, the Irish “bogger” scorned by Thoreau for choosing to do brutally hard work and live in a hovel so he and his family can have tea, butter, and meat; the Indian who weaves a basket no one wants to buy; and, in a fable Thoreau relates near the end of Walden, an artist in the city of Kouroo who dedicates his life to carving the perfect wooden staff. Centuries pass as he works to achieve his goal, but, as Thoreau writes, “as he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him.” Paradoxically, then, “no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain.” All of these figures embody parables with subtle and conflicted lessons, and as a result they are indispensable for understanding perhaps the most interesting and challenging American writer on the subject of work.

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Kaag and van Belle acknowledge that Thoreau invites us to consider the “cost” of our work, but they fail to appreciate that as far as he is concerned, any money-making work points our souls in the wrong direction, and so we have good reason to limit it as much as possible. The authors ask, “Supposing we recast our working life as sacred, we may wonder: What are the sacred ends, if any, of these sacraments of service? Why is work sacred?” True, as the authors argue, Thoreau found mystical meaning in working his bean field. At some moments, he found, “it was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans.” Yet he claims he undertook bean farming because he thought it would be easy. “It was on the whole a rare amusement,” he writes, “which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation.” He brags that he planted late and never bothered to manure his field and still did “better than any farmer in Concord did that year.” He worked only in the mornings, he says, and spent his afternoons in town, listening to gossip.

The light yoke of his labor allowed Thoreau to “follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment,” he writes in Walden. Kaag and van Belle fail to make this essential distinction between the necessary labor that sustains “vital heat” and the pursuit of one’s genius. Indeed, they do not refer to genius in this sense at all.

Rather, they throw everything a person does into the category of “the business of living,” then often equate that business with work. Such business, on their account, includes lending money to someone in need, caring for a sick parent, communing with animals, reading classical poets, gardening, picking huckleberries, and thieving. These activities have work-like elements, to be sure, but if virtually everything we do is work, then the concept loses its analytical power. Why, then, talk about work at all?

The overly broad definition of labor results from an impoverished moral imagination—common in American culture—that can value an activity only by calling it work. This was the sort of willful spiritual poverty Thoreau was trying to challenge. Kaag and van Belle write that “Thoreau clocked his workday at Walden Pond” with little care, following the sun, not the machines that, he wrote, “minced” and “fretted” the day “by the ticking of a clock.” But why call it a workday? The authors overlook Thoreau’s loud boast about his refusal of work, which he makes just a few sentences after complaining about clock time: “There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment in any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery.” This is a larger conception of what a day is for.

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....We say we love what we do, that we find it fulfilling—as indeed it might be—yet our employers benefit from all the extra effort we make in the name of being good “organizational citizens.” Kaag and van Belle claim that the Great Resignation of 2021 represented “America’s Thoreauvian Turn.” They are right that we need Thoreau now, as we think through the intersecting problems of economy, democracy, climate, and racial justice. But we need better than the Thoreau they offer.

As I read Henry at Work, I kept returning to Walden to double-check the authors’ interpretation. I would find the passage in question, then keep reading, page after page. Like the pond itself, Walden is clear, bracing, and seemingly bottomless. If you want to know about Thoreau and work, go to the source.

I hope whoever reads this does go to read Walden. Perhaps, they will also start to take stock of their spirit. While re-reading Thoreau, I was reading the Desert Fathers - another radical group.

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