Just started reading "Walden" by Thoreau

…and Wow am I underwhelmed. First of all, Henry David is only thirty when he writes it, and he says "I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors." Old age brings only loss, not wisdom, he belabors this point. Sounds like typical youth to me…

But the real stinker is this one: "I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, so as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver yourself!"

Uh, okay, I get your point, but really? Seriously? Do you sometimes whip yourself to death, physically? Trying to end slavery is frivolous?

And then comes the famous "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…" what is implied, of course, is that Thoreau DOES NOT, being wise and having seen the light. "But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear." Thoreau, and just maybe the lucky reader are those special people with 'alert and healthy natures.'

To be plain, I think Thoreau is simply wrong. The mass of men do not lead lives of quiet desperation, that is a callow conceit.

Anyway, I should probably keep reading.