My Fair Share

A blog cannot be all things. Nor can a life.

In my attempt to capture what it is about life that I wish to capture in the following series of pages, I looked to classic literature, and I looked specifically for a cliche. A cliche that would be recognisable to many, and which would through its many interpretations, capture the many faces of a life. I settled on Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, and have added perhaps its most famous quote as the tagline for this site’s front page. But why Walden?

The American Transcendentalism Web says:

Walden is a work of many gaps and contradictions, a work that seems to keep the reader off balance. Thoreau was just as interested in the process of forming ideas as he was in their final form; as Martin Bickman says, he wishes to record “volatile truths”: “Behind the structure of Walden and enacted within it, then, are two competing drives, one an immediate openness to flux, a responsiveness to a continually changing world, and the other a desire to rescue and preserve from that world something of permanent shape and beauty.”

Precisely because of its gaps and contradictions, for in our pursuit of a life lived full, I believe we each are confronted by exactly these. Moreover, our competing drives can be the very source of the anxiety and uncertainty that motivates our pursuit of something else: a deliberate life.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. 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.

Even a cursory search of the web will reveal a great many references to these quotes. It is not my aim to repeat these. It is not my aim to repeat Thoreau’s experiment. It is my aim simply to wander deliberately through some of the more essential facts of my own life, see if I could not learn what they have to teach, and capture their many gaps and contradictions; to publish their meanness to the world, and to give a true account of them.