Transcending Walden; or, Why "Carpe Diem" Will Either Redeem or Destroy You (Part I)

It shouldn't surprise us that New England is the intellectual "bread-basket" of North America. The skies are pierced by the gothic spires and ivory bell-towers of America's most ancient universities. Small, leaf-strewn liberal-arts colleges dot the rolling green hills and fill the air with punchy alma maters.

Besides, New England has been home to many greats whose lives and thoughts have come to define our national identity and, to some extent perhaps, modern Western civilization as a whole. One thinks immediately of Emerson and Thoreau, of course, the juggernaut Transcendentalist divines of Concord. (That we do think of these men first is, I think, no accident. But more on that academic conspiracy some other time.)

From Thoreau we gain some particularly gripping, enduring attitudes. His year-long, nature-worshipping foray into the wilds captured in Walden, now a fairly standard text in courses on nineteenth-century American literature, is arguably the source of our modern notion of Carpe diem! (a phrase borrowed by the  classics-obsessed nineteenth century from Horace). "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," explained Thoreau. 

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. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

It is clear, both here and elsewhere in his account of his year of self-exile (that was, quite unlike he imagined or intended, punctuated often by visits from friends and devotees), that Thoreau was trying to get to the bottom of a timeless set of questions: What is life? What is the good life? What is life for? Whom is life for?

One might "hastily conclude" that Thoreau was not particularly enamored of the Christian answers to these questions. And one would be absolutely right. But I think there is more to his frustration than his indignant rebellion against the New England Congregational culture that surrounded him. I would bet that Thoreau did not see anyone really "enjoying" life as he thought they ought to. The particulars of such an approach to life need not be explored. The general lack of joy, which he seems to attribute to Christian attitudes, he takes as a challenge, a challenge to seek out how best to savor and relish living. If God is not the solution to lifelong and daily delight, Thoreau seems to say, then there must be another way. That is certainly the pragmatic method.

Immersed as I am in all things thesis,* I can't help but draw a parallel to another, though much less noticeable, presence in the long, tortuous history of New England intellectualism--Jonathan Edwards. I say that he is less prominent because, in the popular imagination at least, he is. The average high-school history teacher would probably not add Edwards to a list of important New England thinkers. And maybe that is not the best or most precise category in which to place him. (In some ways, my thesis seeks to answer that.) Yet in any case we tend to forget that long before Thoreau there was another New England divine who wanted to know how best to live.

"Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live." That is the sixth entry on Edwards's list of resolutions, penned more than a hundred years before Thoreau ever laid a brick on the shore of Walden Pond. Edwards, as early in his life as his teenage years, was profoundly passionate about "sucking the marrow out of life." 

There are sixty-nine other resolutions, in fact, all of which center on one great theme--satisfaction. The difference between Edwards and, say, Thoreau, as it is between the Christian and the humanist (for the lack of a better word), is that Edwards's satisfaction is found in God where Thoreau's is in everything else. This does not mean Edwards does not enjoy simple pleasures--lemonade in the summer, a brisk walk in the fall, time with a book by the fire on a December evening. No, in this regard Edwards, or the Christian generally, is not unique. He is human as Thoreau is human.

The difference is that Thoreau's humanness, or earthliness, suffices for him. He is satisfied in his existence. To savor life is to pursue joy in existence for it's own sake. Thoreau "numbers his days" in much the same way as Edwards does. Yet not for the same reasons or with the same aims. Edwards wants "a heart of wisdom" and looks forward to the day when he will die and enter heaven. Thoreau wants to live a life without regret and fears the day when he will die and turn to dust. The earthly humanist (or Transcendentalist in this case) acts out of the urgency born of the terror of decease. The faithful Christian acts out of the urgency born of the individual purpose and vocation the Lord has granted him to pursue while he "dwells below."

And so it matters why we seize the day.

It matters, after all, why we get up in the morning. Even dogs sleep and wake. What makes us any different if we get out of bed because we're simply no longer tired? See, both the Puritans and the Transcendentalists desired transcendence. Both yearned for a way of life that went beyond the physical to the metaphysical, to the spiritual, but without verging on total reliance upon upon subjective perception. Both were searching for a middle way to live triumphantly and with fulfillment but without lapsing into sensualism or, worse yet, emotionalism. Thoreau and Edwards lived for something beyond themselves, something objective: Thoreau for a Being largely of his own concoction, and Edwards for the God of the Bible.

Indeed it matters for whom we seize the day.

Transcendentalism--which Edgar Allen Poe hilariously called "Frogpondianism" after Boston's fantastical but really very shallow duck pond--is dead. Its vague notions of a mystical, Vedic "Divine Being," though they've metamorphosed, nevertheless persist in (post)modern American spirituality. Ideas stick. And they have histories. New England is the way it is today because of the way it was yesterday. Edwards's sort of Puritanism never had a foothold in much of New England after all. Thoreau's mish-mash mysticism, on the other hand, took hold of the New Englander's imagination with far greater adhesion. Historians can only explain why this is the case to a point, after which we have to admit a degree of impenetrable mystery in the workings of this Divine Being who orders the world.

It matters to you who that Being is. Because who He is has a direct effect on who you are. And who I am. And where and how we can seize the day.

(For good tips on seizing the day for Christ, see Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper. Read it here for free.)


*And please realize that "thesising," as we call it, means my brain is mush and that I'm blogging hastily. So if there are holes here, in logic or in facts, forgive me--and then leave me a comment to let me know that something's fallen through the cracks. Danke.