I rarely pay cover price for a book but I recently shelled out thirty bucks for a hardcover book from Princeton University Press that I knew I would read and keep: Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living by John Kaag and Jonathan Van Belle. It was an insightful read and one I highly recommend as a field guide to interpreting the meaning of work.
“There is a difference—an absolute gulf—between ‘just making a living’ and getting a life or truly living. This is the abiding message of Walden. The frenetic busyness of modern life should never be confused with the essential business of living,” write the authors. In other words, we ought to work to live rather than live to work.
“Thoreau had a choice to make, one that we all have: either he could make more money to pay for an increasing number of wants and needs, or he could match his wants and needs to the money at his disposal. Thoreau, very famously, decided on the latter…Even and especially in his unambitious life, Thoreau was a master at the business of living,” the authors conclude.
And Peter France, author of Hermits: The Insights of Solitude, echoes the same sentiment: “Thoreau saw that the luxuries and comforts of modern living had become its necessities and that people were making slaves of themselves in order to pay for them. His solution, which goes back to Socrates, was to see how many things he could live without.”
Contrary to popular belief, Thoreau was far from a layabout who simply built his cabin at Walden Pond to escape life back in Concord. He was a man of many talents who taught school, surveyed land, manufactured pencils, studied nature, and chronicled it all by writing more than TWO MILLION words in 14 journals over the course of 24 years.
So, I shall end this post by allowing Thoreau to speak to us directly: “This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet.”