In which I say something about busyness and wildness.

The other day, I stumbled back on Tim Krieder's essay on "The 'Busy' Trap" in the New York Times. Krieder writes:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. . . . I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

This is, in at least some way, Baudrillard, right?

I am not joking: people are not looking to amuse themselves, they seek a fatal diversion. Not matter how boring, the important thing is to increase boredom; such an increase is salvation, it is ecstasy. It can be the ecstatic amplification of just about anything. . . . This is the only solution to the problem of 'voluntary servitude', and moreover, this is the only form of liberation: the amplification of negative conditions. ("Toward a Principle of Evil")

I read Krieder's essay when it was published back in June, but it was interesting to see it again today in light of the fact that I'm preparing to read Walden (or at least significant parts of it) with my classes in January, so I've been spending some time with Henry over the last week or so.

Henry writes (famously, of course):

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

I think most people get that idea, at least at some level if not at the level that Thoreau means it, as long as they have some idea of what the "finer fruits" of life might be.

And we might note that it's not hard to see the etymology of business--I had an interesting conversation with a student a couple of weeks ago about his plan to major in business: What, I asked, did he intend to make himself busy with?

But let me move back a page or so, to where Henry says:

Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in.

Of course, there's a reference here to Romulus and Remus, to the founding of an age--and, we might say, to the steering of the course of Western (arguably, world) history by an individual or two (fictional or not). It's a reference, perhaps, to Emerson's exhortation to rediscover the aboriginal self, to influence an age by abandoning society's values and returning to the judgement of the intuition:

A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man . . .and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. ("Self-Reliance")

But this move is problematic, as anyone who makes it past the famous second chapter of Walden will recognize--everyone who's passed high school English probably remembers this sentence from "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For":

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

What's unfortunate, of course, in the teaching of Thoreau's work, is that (at least in my experience) most people fall into the very trap that Henry wants to avoid: they assume that Henry's experience is an affirmation of Emerson's philosophy, and that life is, indeed, sublime. But it's not that easy, is it? This rejection of society's so-called busyness? This attempted rediscovery of the uncivilized self? This wildness?

As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. ("Higher Laws")

Now perhaps life is, in fact, ultimately sublime. But to reach that conclusion based on Henry's experiment requires an understanding of that term that encompasses a wildness, a savageness, that most of us are uncomfortable with.

Which brings us back, perhaps, to Krieder, to Baudrillard, to this idea of the banality of industrialized society, to the filling of days with constructed demands, to what Thoreau calls "factitious cares," to what Krieder calls "histrionic exhaustion," to what Baudrillard calls "fatal diversion." What, I think it's fair to ask, are the alternatives?

Here's one philosopher's answer.