The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. .... A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.--
For sure, the games and amusements available to us today and the obsession with self via social media is ever-present in our world. For millions, too much.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.--Ch. 18, Walden
[he] knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. .... Thoreau was sincerity itself ... -- from friend Ralph Waldo Emerson's Introduction to Thoreau's Excursions (1863).
I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.-- "Walking" (1861)
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.--Ch. 2, Walden
We're intent on decluttering our lives while we drown in mountains of plastic which some noble individuals are trying to clean up. Climate change, continued institutionalised racism, world banking greed and corruption, ... what could Thoreau possibly say to this mess? It doesn't really matter. Mother Nature doesn't really need us.
