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.

绿藻渣——亨利·大卫·梭罗的道德短视

《瓦尔登湖》是本介绍怎样生活的书，而对如何与他人生活笔墨甚少。或许这一点才最为奇怪、最为悲哀。苏格拉底也检视了自己的生活——在古希腊广场中央。蒙田则迷恋自己的全身各处，包括脚指上的鸡眼。但他怀有的是同伴之义和喜悦之情。与梭罗同时代的惠特曼也加入到了超验主义者的行列：歌唱自己，奋力挣脱拘束，还鼓励我们多些反抗、少些服从。但他很慷慨（“如有所需，皆须救济”）、擅移情（“损他人者即损我者”），与群众（相关或不相关的）也相处得舒适。如有发生海难，他定会伸出援手，一如当初南北战争之时，他细心照顾伤者，陪坐在悲伤和将死战士旁。

可怜的梭罗。他也是一次海难的受难者——原因在于他内心抛弃了其他群众。结果是，我们不可能不为《瓦尔登湖》的作者感到惋惜。他致力于计算出刚够维持生存的要素，却从未意识到这一要求太简单而无聊；他关于如何生活的叙述读起来不像是存在主义的哲思而更像是一个穷光蛋的预算，计算着吃多少、睡多久，然后挤出点关于我们的存在以及我们如何与他人相处的问题；他住在湖边，记述了康科德和梅里马克河之游，写了写科德角，却全然没有意识到人类社会正是建在水源处、河畔和海岸线上。

诚然，与社会打交道有时会很困难。鲜有事物能够比凌乱混杂的惊喜（其他群众）更能打断你的悠闲生活计划。同样，鲜有事物能够比政府管治更能妨碍你的完全自治，且这并不只在政府不公正之时才存在；法律是一种约束，制约我们可能的不正确行为。青少年也会对任何制约他们自由的事物都感到紧张、坐立不安。但成熟的做法（美国民主的核心）是寻找个人和社会之间的平衡。梭罗实现了这种复杂的平衡。但遗憾的是他抛弃了它，抛弃了一切同情，独自沉浸在《瓦尔登湖》的世界里。然而我们仍把这本书奉为经典，奉其作者为道德模范——而这个男人心底的渴望和典型的做法却是拒绝了我们其他人。