i'm a person or possibly philosopher who doesn't really want to have heroes, and i usually really haven't. you know, i loved nietzsche, kierkegaard, or chuang tzu at different times, but i also saw the drawbacks: like that kierkegaard is interminable and unbelievably repetitive and that nietzsche is...fucking crazy. so it is with some trepidation that i say that henry david thoreau is my hero, especially because for someone soaking in derrida or quine, thoreau cannot but be regarded as a backwater, if a philosopher at all. but i've been reading everything this summer, and i can't help it: he just kills me.

joni and i did concord and walden this week. walden was lovely, actually: sprawled by boston, but the woods are growing back in, and the house-site is not overrun, and i liked the tattooed guy selling stuff in the little gift shop. there's a little public beach filled with moms and kids. there's a walden research center up on the hill, collecting everything written about thoreau. i don't know if that's a good idea or not, but it's a beautiful building (donated by...don henley? what would mojo nixon say?) we got up on the hill at sleepy hollow cemetery and saw the family plots of the emersons, thoreaus, hawthornes, and alcotts. we toured the old manse, where emerson grew up and where nathaniel and sophia hawthorne - the world's worst renters - scratched little notes on the windows with sophia's diamond ring. the first shot of the american revolution was fired in the back yard.

i love emerson, too, but i'm kind of seeing the differences. if i could put it in a nutshell: emerson is still somewhere in the notion that nature is a product of consciousness, which it makes sense to call 'transcendentalism.' thoreau is in no doubt that consciousness is a product of nature; he's the opposite of transcendentalist, an immanentalist if you will permit me. they both write beautifully, of course, but emerson delivers the single ringing sentence; thoreau lets observations accumulate into something. emerson is reticent on the political implications of his individualism; thoreau really is an inyourface religious skeptic and anarchist. and no doubt a very eccentric and prickly - though also beloved - personality.

i've come to see his time at walden as one of the utopian experiments of the time - like fruitlands down the road, or brook farm , etc. only the community that thoreau was building was pointedly not aimed primarily at joining together human beings, but joining a human being with a world: at once a wider and a narrower vision of community.

there's been a rejiggering of thoreau lately, represented for example in the new book the thoreau you don't know by robert sullivan. it is a terrible book, and really remarkably does not actually display a wide acquaintance with thoreau's writings, among many other problems. but the basic idea is right: thoreau is funny, radical, funky, actually fun. and his "environmentalism" is a lot more difficult than it seems, because it starts with the presumption that human life is completely inseparable from nature: that human destruction of nature is nature destroying itself, etc.

if you go to walden, you see how close it is to concord, and real isolation was definitely not hdt's point. he didnt live off the land or resolve on utter solitude. but he was seeking some kind of rite of passage, and an economy that expressed only fundamentals. joni was reading me walden while we drove and it struck me how great a book it is: as good a book as has ever been written: rich in direct or elusive ideas, emerging in a real way from real experience.