Taking Posthumous Advice

The other night I was reading a book by a man with lifelong interests in science and literature. He mentioned Henry David Thoreau's incandescent opening chapter of Walden, with its powerful statement on man's relationship with nature. This led to my having to go find Walden, pull it off the shelf, and dip into the first chapter, which is titled "Economy." I remembered having a strong reaction of my own to Thoreau's opening pages the first time I read the book almost 30 years ago.

I should say "the first time I read the book all the way through," because I'm pretty sure I had tried to read it before, probably while I was in college, without getting very far. It was another example of a book whose time hadn't yet come for me. I'm not sure what prompted me to pick it up again that particular autumn, when I was struggling not so much to find the meaning of life as to find an employer who required the skills of an English M.A. It was a rather discouraging juncture, which was probably what put me in the mood for philosophy.

Something Thoreau said stopped me in my tracks, so applicable did it seem, almost as if he had reached out across time to say something I needed to hear. The experience was similar to the one I had in seeing Joseph Campbell for the first time on public television (which hadn't happened yet when I was reading Thoreau). It's safe to say I wasn't used to those types of peak experiences, and the force of it was almost as if Thoreau had clapped me on the shoulder.

In after years, I went back to locate this statement that had affected me so strongly, and--guess what? I couldn't find it! So much of what Thoreau says in the first chapter is memorable, and I kept reading one beautifully observed statement after another without recognizing the one. What! How could this be? I was left to consider the possibility that in all the living I had done post-Thoreau my experience might have expanded to encompass a few more of his observations. The one that had struck me so forcibly in the beginning was now one of many.

When I was leafing through the book the other night, I decided to try once again to locate the statement I'd once taken as a motto. Reading at leisure, late at night, by lamplight, I suddenly recognized it and remembered why it had moved me so much when I was in my 20s, out of tune with my surroundings and wondering when life would start falling into place. "But man's capacities have never been measured," wrote Thoreau, "nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, 'be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou has left undone?' "

I now see that the last part of Thoreau's quote is from the Vishnu Purana, a Hindu scripture, so that in effect Thoreau was speaking along with the Hindu sages of long ago, speaking with them in unison. No wonder the statement had seemed like a revelation. These words greatly encouraged me then and helped me believe that, no matter how disappointing the present was, there was so much more life ahead, and some of it was bound to be better.

Thoreau had been dead for 125 years when his words moved me; Joseph Campbell died right around the time I was reading Walden, perhaps the very week, and the following year I heard him say "Follow your bliss" on PBS. Dead white males, both, and father figures. Mentors come in all sizes and shapes, living and dead, and I say, never ignore a good piece of advice.