Rocks in/on/are the cairn.


If you’ve been to Walden Pond, you’re familiar with the custom of adding a stone to the pile near the original site of Thoreau’s little house.  I’ve done it several times, but I’d never brought a rock with me.  For this visit, we brought a stone from Baltimore and wrote a note for Mr. Thoreau on it, from Miss Charlotte.  I thought it was…a bit much.  Not only was I transporting a rock several hundred miles just to throw it into a pile near others by a pretty pond.  I had to remember to pack it, carry it to and from a train, to and from a hotel, and then on the hike to Walden Pond.  But, it being Charlotte’s first visit, I couldn’t resist.

When I got there, I felt less weird about my own actions and pretty baffled by some other folks’ bizarre gestures of self-aggrandisement. While Charlotte’s rock was small, free and thrown into the pile (which is, I think, the point), several people went and paid for custom flat stones with their names (or kids’ names) for the pile. Only they weren’t in the pile. They were placed on the ground in front of the pile, along with some unrelated handwritten letters to Thoreau (some charming, some downright inspired). These self-referential rocks said, “Hey, I was here! This is my name! I paid for this rock to have my name on it so that you could see it here!” Whereas most people throw their stones into the pile as a message or gesture for Mr. Thoreau (I chucked Charlotte’s way up so that I couldn’t even make it out among the other stones when it stopped moving), these people just left stone calling cards for everyone else.

I’m thinking of a larger article about my thoughts about/relationship to Walden Pond, and I don’t want to write about it too much yet.

But still. Come on. Are you fucking kidding me? What, did they have a run on megalomaniacal stones at L.L. Bean or something? I thought of blanking out names when I posed pictures. But, well, the people who left the stones obviously wanted everyone to know they were there. So.

Certainly they might even be memorial stones for dead people.  But that’s not a grave and not the place for such selfishness.  Seriously.

Me?  Shit, I have left orders that my ashes be scattered at Walden, secretly (it’s probably not legal).

Charlotte jumped into Walden Pond.

And I don’t have pictures to post right now.  They are still on the cameras.  She jumped RIGHT in.  She’s a fearless baby.  I will return home this weekend and be a better blogger.

Preparing to leave.


A rock from Baltimore, to put onto Mr. Thoreau’s cairn or, possibly, his grave.  Though, a part of me doesn’t want to visit Thoreau’s grave if we only have one day in Concord, and a short one with a one-year-old at that.  We might only have time to get coffee downtown and visit the pond.  I’m hoping to swim there with Charlotte if we remember our suits and if the weather cooperates.  Despite The Week of One Hundred Degrees in Baltimore this week, Boston’s weather for next week looks spectacular.

Also, it seems like I work for Field Notes lately.  Damn.  But these suckers are great for trip/project planning.  And the three-pack we split will also give Mama and Papa each a nice little travel journal that’s small enough to fill up.

Thoreau’s surveys.


Thoreau was a practical man  Aside from his work in pencil making, he was an accomplished surveyor.  When a friend of mine took a class on surveying a few years ago, I thought of Thoreau and an excuse to be outside in the winter and was pretty jealous. Sometimes I wonder if it’s too late to go back and try a trade/craft/skill like surveying or carpentry.

But, if Walden teaches us anything, it’s that I really could, so long as there were sacrifices I’d be willing to make. That’s a whole other story.

The Concord Free Library received some money from AT&T to scan and host actual hand-drawn maps from Thoreau, with his notes in pencil (his own?) and ink, in his very…difficult handwriting.

Here is the master list of the surveys you can view and download.  I’m not going to steal or borrow an image here.  You really should go and view them yourself.  Anything I can say about them would fall short of looking at them as they’re drawn/written — even in digitized format. This might be the next best thing to actually handling the charts themselves.

Viewing tips here.

New Thoreau Journal volume.

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Among the awesome Christmas presents I received this year, I had requested this new volume of selections from Thoreau’s journal. I own the only complete edition currently available (the huge ones from Dover), which were birthday presents from my wife and from my parents five years or so ago. I’m infinitely fond of them, but they are a bit…unwieldy. I have a few of the selections, including the Odell Shepard edition (excellent) and the Dover Thrift edition (which I bought after a thunderstorm in July 2003, at Walden Pond, the day before we moved away from Boston).  These make great gifts, great reading on a camping trip or train ride.  But they can be so short!  I’m hoping this new volume is as great as it sounds.  It’s on my nightstand right now, though I’m well into The Road to Oxiana right now.

Too much wisdom literature.

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A few years ago, my friend sent me a copy of Baltasar Gracián‘s The Art of Worldly Wisdom. It is, by the way, excellent reading. It calls to mind Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations, and I mean that in a very good way.  I was reading it a bit last night, and of course, I was struck by just how damned smart and relevant the maxims still are today.

I was also struck by how I was reading them: as interesting bits of information.  Not wisdom — interesting paragraphs.  I thought that, perhaps, it was the text.  Maybe it’s not as awesome as I thought.  But I’ve noticed in recent months and years that I seem to gloss over even my favorites like Thoreau, the Buddha, Emerson, Nietzsche, et al. Am I getting dense?  I don’t think so — though that is certainly a possibility, and there are certainly people who would say so.  (Ahem.)  I suspect that this is a result of studying philosophy for my entire adult life.

On the one hand, I think I might be somewhat numb to wisdom literature!  I’ve read so many wise things that other people have written and acted on so little of it that it’s all just a bunch of clever words most of the time.  When Aurelius reminds us that stupid people act stupidly and that we waste time and energy being upset about it, I still get upset when selfish people act that way.  How else do selfish people act?  Selfishly!

On the other hand, my philosophical undertakings have largely been academic ones.  By that I mean that I also read and have read immense amounts of bullshit.  We don’t act on philosophy; we write about it! And then we read about it and then write about that.  And then read that and write about what’s been written about, etc.  I think a part of me suspects that all wisdom and philosophy that we can read or learn from other people is just bullshit.

Am I claiming that a piece of philosophy that no one acts on is bullshit?  Yes.  Read some of my graduate papers that pissed off some of my professors (I was, after all, attacking their profession).  I’ve felt that way for a long time, and that’s a large part of the reason I decided not to pursue a career in academic philosophy. Why, then, did I pursue a doctorate?  I don’t know.  You imagine that you might be a different case, that you can keep your integrity and still gitterdunn.  Maybe I thought I would feel differently or that I might be wrong.  Maybe I was just too stupid and stubborn to stop.  That’s certainly the case now, where I’m finishing my PhD just to finish it and justify my time, energy and debt. (And, for the record, I got offered a spot teaching my own class at the exact school I always dreamed of teaching at just after my dissertation prospectus defense.  So, ahem, for the record, I didn’t simply wimp out of the search for a job.  I might have hurt the feelings of someone I care about who was looking out for me, too. I don’t know if I ever mentioned this.)

What’s my point?  I don’t know.  Maybe that the bullshit that gets forced on people in the academic discipline of philosophy poisons us against actually acting in a wiser fashion because the bullshit gets mixed in with the “real” wisdom (assuming that some of philosophy is actually wisdom literature, which I think is true).  I have known tons and tons of philosophers, and only a scant few of them acted like wiser people for their study of philosophy.  More likely, we just turn into snarky smartasses.  I wish I could count myself among the people who have studied philosophy and thereby act wiser for it.  Maybe it’s not philosophy.  Maybe it’s me.  Maybe it’s a flaw in the “type” of person who chooses to study philosophy for a living, since so few of us do anything about philosophy.  But something’s amiss.

Philosophy and leisure.

Aristotle claims that a certain amount of leisure is necessary for philosophical contemplation — key to the good life.  Some amount of leisure is necessary for real human happiness.

In Walden, Thoreau says that a philosopher should be able to clothe and feed his-or herself better than ordinary people.  And we know how big he was on leisure time for walking and writing, though perhaps he might not call it “leisure” like those “really” industious folks among us might.  (What?)

I would contend that, if you are mentally…robust (and bored) enough for philosophizing, you are smart enough to do the things you have to do (like poop, eat, cook, travel, etc.) better than other people.  Whether you do is another matter, and I never knew a whole lot of philosophers who were also very competent people. I pride myself on my own expediency in personal matters and efficiency in practical ones.  This is, of course, because I am very lazy and value my leisure, no?

If you get good grades but can’t do anything practical better than anybody else, you might just be mis-using your own intelligence.  Pretend that the laundry or cooking breakfast is school.  You’ll learn to apply your brain to things that don’t get you grades but that get you something better, like a tasty egg sandwich and enough time to read spy novels to boot.

Or, you might just not be very smart at all.  I resent people who claim, “I am booksmart,” when it turns out that they are fucking idiots and/or morons and/or dumbasses.  If all you can do is school, despite really and actually and honestly trying to do other things well and intelligently, you are probably not as smart as you think you are.  I have known a good number of scholarly folks of this kind who turned out not to be any kind of smart.  They excelled academically only through excessive studying and concerted effort.

Not that I am down on academic excellence in itself and certainly not down on effort.  Anyone who knows me knows how weak-willed I can be when it comes to work I don’t see a point in doing.  But I want to start throwing bitches off of buildings when such over-glorified memorization and regurgitation masquerades itself as actual intelligence.  I had a metaphysics professor at BC who I admired very much.  And he contended in his book that intelligence begins with reflection.  I joked with him that, under his definition, the whole fucking world is stupid.

He just laughed.