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- Despite the book’s title, Thoreau’s Religion does not concern itself too much with theological details, such as how Thoreau combined the Christian Gospels with Stoicism or the Vedas, all of which informed his transcendental vision. Balthrop-Lewis is most compelling when she treats Thoreau’s religion as a devotional regimen rather than a doctrine—as a self-imposed habit, not a creed. She insists that Thoreau was a Christian believer, but she emphasizes his way of life as a Christian practice.
- Thoreau’s path was an ascetic one, designed especially to retrain his attention, opening his sensorium up to objects and others. Even writing was not as lonesome as it might appear. For Thoreau, “writing is a practice that contributes to broader forms of sociality by cultivating habits of attention in the author.”
- Modern capitalism manipulated people of Thoreau’s class, he believed, by tricking them into craving things they didn’t need. He shut out the market’s distractions so that he could return to savoring the uncommodified parts of life. He was not seeking mortification for its own sake; he wanted greater intensities of perception and deeper communion with the people he loved.
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- Note: cf. quieting thinking in order to perceive more vividly
- Thoreau’s Religion sets aside the image of the walled-in hermit; it emphasizes Thoreau’s intimacies and connections. His idea in going to Walden was not to extricate himself from social ties. It was to reorient his world, so that the woods, rather than the town, centered his spiritual map. Walden made urban life, with its harried business, look provincial and benighted compared with the motley cosmopolitanism of the outskirts
- Even Rebecca Solnit, the author of “Men Explain Things to Me,” a definitive essay about presumptuous guys, repeatedly returns to Thoreau in just such terms. Solnit finds in Thoreau a writer for whom “nature and culture, landscape and politics, the city and the country are inextricably interfused.” These readers see Thoreau’s embeddedness in local communities—human and nonhuman—as the wellspring of his work’s still-surprising power, not a source of shame.
- This doesn’t mean Thoreau exempted himself from the modern economy. He knew that there was no exemption. According to Balthrop-Lewis, he was trying to live simply so that everyone could get their share of the world’s common goods. By placing some limits on what he allowed himself to consume—for instance, no coffee, since it came from slave plantations—he believed that he could access richer kinds of joy and pleasure. Balthrop-Lewis calls this “delight in true goods,” the grateful appreciation of “God’s gifts of life and nature.”
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- Balthrop-Lewis rejects any oversimple opposition between spirituality and activism. She argues that, paradoxically, “the ascetic practitioner participates in the society from which he withdraws by withdrawing from it.” Her interpretation reconnects Walden to Thoreau’s political writings, with special emphasis on economic problems like exploitation and the unequal distribution of resources.
“Thoreau’s asceticism,” she insists, “was also political, by which I mean it was aimed not only at his individual formation but also at the radical transformation of the world in which he lived, specifically of emerging industrial capitalism.” This is true.
- A word for one kind of heightened attention is vigilance. It might find expression in a vigil, a careful tending to the vulnerable or the lost. But vigilance can also devolve into the violence of the vigilante. It happens to Gordon: humiliated and enraged, he turns militant in the lonesome hills, and by the novel’s end he has fulfilled his old friend Alex’s cruel, half-joking prophecy. The student who loved Thoreau becomes an ecoterrorist.
- The ethos of delight in true goods made Thoreau a radical. It also made him a scold. “Thoreau does sometimes come off as dour,” Balthrop-Lewis acknowledges.
- Note: The trick to avoiding this (I think) is to make it as first-personal as possible --- don’t write about what PEOPLE should do, or YOU should do, or WE should do, but what I should do.