At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again."At present," he writes. As if the future might hold an escape from this so-called "civilized life" that he will later call a life "of quiet desperation."
There is so much about which I disagree with Thoreau. But it's hard for me to argue with his critique of materialism, which in his day was certainly becoming rampant and in ours has become perhaps exponentially more so. He describes himself as a "sojourner," indicating from the very beginning of Walden that he is in this "civilized life" but not of it, that his life away from society and its love of stuff and money (and the work that must be done to earn the money to pay for that stuff) is really his home.
All this is to say, perhaps, that I've started teaching Walden yet again in my classes this week, so I should give you fair warning. Those of you who know me well know that every time I read Walden, my critique of contemporary materialism becomes a bit...intensified, shall we say?. So consider yourself warned.
In other news, I'm listening to CCR's Willie and the Poor Boys on vinyl at the moment, and I don't know that I've ever spent a better twenty bucks on music. (I know, I know, I just was complaining about materialism, and here I am spending twenty bucks on an LP. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.) I've listened to it a bazillion times in iTunes, but it's quite a different experience on vinyl.
I've also been working on the last of this year's recommendation letters to go along with former students' college applications. And there are several that I put off writing, not deliberately, and not because I had nothing to say, but perhaps because I had too much. The length of the last two letters has been twice what I normally write, and both of them have been pretty difficult for me to bring to a conclusion. In both cases, for students whom I taught for three years, students whom I will miss a great deal when they graduate this year.
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