From “Déjà vu: A Northern Interlude”
[In The Tarball Chronicles, David Gessner ponders the larger question posited by the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: How much are we willing to sacrifice for the “good life”? In this excerpt, he harkens back to Thoreau’s concept of sacrifice as “Economy” embodies it in Walden.]As the fall deepens, the marsh turns a golden brown and the temperature drops. The birds sweep through, some just winging past and others staying for the winter. I head to the beach to watch for the gannets’ return.
Back at home I’ve placed a cocktail chair in the spot where I have decided to build a writing cabin. From that chair I watch the marsh and the migrating birds. It will be a flimsy sort of cabin, ramshackle and very much a shanty. It won’t be built to weather a hurricane, and it will no doubt encounter hurricanes in the coming years. Ten yards from its front door is the creek that connects it to the ocean and the rest of the world.
If the cabin will be inspired in part by the night I spent at Anthony’s fish camp, it will also be inspired, more bookishly, by Henry David Thoreau. As a kid I always loved being outdoors, but I first began seriously thinking about nature after reading Thoreau’s Walden as a teenager. The book was full of boring passages I couldn’t get through, but there were also great secrets. “The life that men praise and call successful is but one kind.” There was the promise of an alternate life, a life of noncomformity. And what did that life entail? Living in the woods in a small shack, off the grid as we would say today. Central to that life, of course, was the love, to the point of worship, of beautiful places.
No wonder I fought against Jim Gordon’s wind farm when he first tried to place it in the waters off Cape Cod. I didn’t want my sacred place to be desecrated. My eyes were not open yet to certain connections. The irony is that those connections had always been there, plain as day, right there in the book that I toted around like a Bible for all those years. Thoreau, after all, was our patron saint of frugality, suggesting 160 years ago that we might be happier doing with less than constantly seeking more. It was in his tiny cabin that Thoreau created the initial ledger sheet, the personal math that many of us have begun to think about again during these difficult times, the calculus of our own input and output. He did his figuring right there on the page for us. Here is how much I spent and here is what I gained.
Maybe, I think now, I had Thoreau’s cabin all wrong. Or only partly right. It is important to remember that one of the principle motivations of his trip to the woods was economic: he needed a place to live cheaply so he could have time and space to write.
Last fall I taught Walden to a group of both grads and undergrads, and to my surprise, rather than being bored to death, they seemed to really get it. One week the homework was to not use something—a car, the computer, an iPod—and instead of whining and acting deprived, they rushed back into the classroom the next week like excited young hippies, trying to explain to me, their old teacher, that having less actually felt better than wanting more. Their eyes gleamed with conversion, which convinced me, the jaded professor, to actually go back and reread something I’d assigned, rather than merely teaching it. What struck me most on this go-round with Walden was how deeply economic language and strict bookkeeping pervaded Thoreau’s work. It occurred to me that my own view of the cabin in the woods—as a place of solitude and wildness and romance—was a limited one. By Thoreau’s reasoning, human lives, like the lives of other animals, require a strict mathematical relationship with energy, its input and output, its gains and losses, its conservation and squandering. It turns out that our lives hinge on this calculation.
On Cape Cod I was quick to embrace, and mimic, Thoreau’s love of nature but slow to hear his sterner message of personal responsibility and energy use. I rationalized this by saying that I preferred Thoreau the celebrator to Thoreau the preacher. But as I, along with so many of us, have begun to wrestle with our own issues of excess and frugality, I find myself returning to the other, stricter Thoreau.
What I had missed on my earlier readings was the element of sacrifice. Thoreau’s relationship with energy was simple but profound: instead of just focusing on getting more, he limited his input and refined his output. He famously argued, for instance, that by walking he could beat a man riding by train from Concord to Fitchburg, since, to be strict about it, you would need to include the amount of time the rider worked to be able to purchase his ticket. Of course Thoreau was nothing if not strict. Not many of us can boast of spending $28.12½ on constructing our homes or of consuming $8.74 of food in a year.
What if instead of sacrificing other places—Sydney Mines and the Gulf and Alaska—and other species—killer whales and gannets and dolphins—we chose to sacrifice a little ourselves? Is that so ludicrous? Unfortunately, the word sacrifice has, like Sydney Mines, been hollowed out. It has become rote. Something politicians say. It has lost its heroic connotations and isn’t a word people really use that much, which is understandable. Our culture has emphatically chosen the opposite route of Thoreau, focusing on getting more to the extent that the idea of consciously doing with less seems laughable. But what if someone came to you and whispered, “Do with a little less and two things will happen. The world will be better and you will be happier.”
Well, let’s think this through. It’s likely that even if you bought this quiet message and tried to hold on to it, it would be swallowed up by the culture’s clamor, by advertising and television and constant demands on your time from e-mails and phone calls. Even if you were a very focused person it would be natural to lose focus. Gradually you would drift back toward society’s hungry message.
But it is possible to listen to that voice. It has been done before. Not just by Thoreau either. It’s likely your great-grandparents and grandparents practiced some version of the philosophy that was so novel to my students. Maybe even your parents. It is what mature people do, after all. They sacrifice for their children. Is it possible to take this to a global level and sacrifice for the children?
From “Déjà vu: A Northern Interlude” in The Tarball Chronicles: A Journey Beyond the Oiled Pelican and Into the Heart of the Gulf Oil Spill (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2011). Copyright © 2011 by David Gessner. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions (www.milkweed.org).