Thoreau?” As long as I had gone that far, I thought I might as well go the rest of the way. “How would I know what it means?” I said. “I don’t know what anything means. What it suggests to me is that the civilization he was contemptuous of–that civilization of men who lived lives of quiet desperation–was stronger than he was, and maybe righter. It outvoted him. It swallowed him, in fact, and used the nourishment he provided to alter a few cells in its corporate body. It grew richer by him, but it was bigger than he was. Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by
...more
