H.D. Thoreau - The First Hipster

A large tree, in Malibu Creek State Park.

I've been reading Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. He's the guy who moved to a small cottage in the woods outside of Concord, Massachusetts. He lived here, next to Walden Pond, for two years, in what he calls an experiment in living "deliberately", without the distractions and unnecessary luxuries of modern society, such as grand homes and meals, working weeks, constant company and government intervention.

He was a self-professed transcendentalist, and I've pieced together that this means he attempted to find his spiritual sustenance in his natural surroundings, rather than looking at institutions like government, organised religion or academic colleges for support.

He is clearly a gifted writer. He flits easily from extended metaphors to historical allusions to puns to poems. He gets distracted easily, and can in one paragraph move from a description of the taste of woodchucks, to his argument that queens and kings should have giant palaces of only one room, because too few people are really hospitable today, and this would afford a great opportunity for telling a guest to really make themselves at home as soon as they walk through the door. He is also obviously an extremely effective analyst: he examines in close and impressive detail everything in his woods, from the sound of the train once in the morning and evening each, to the way the ice forms on the pond, with air trapped between the layers. For almost every examination he makes, he extends his analysis to ask what the value of this revelation might be to people living today.

He was also just about the world's first hipster.

He's ironic, naive, spoiled and often hypocritical. He talks about how people can survive in cold winters with only their skin, and wonders why we spend time worrying about fancy houses and fancy clothes. I bet his old clothes, which he seems so proud are no longer fashionable, were bought at the same goodwill chain where everyone in LA gets their leather jackets now. He went to Harvard university (quite a good school), and then complains about how he didn't learn anything there, even though he spends large portions of the book making arcane references to topics only an extremely well-educated person could. I can just imagine him being the guy who walked around campus without wearing his shoes.

He only eats organic food, which he catches or grows himself. He makes people uncomfortable if they stay for dinner, by offering them disgusting-sounding food like potato cooked in ashes, and he makes his own furniture out of wood he finds. He claims money is too much of a distraction, and talks about how people should give up all the superfluous trappings of modern life to rather write poetry. He borrows money from his family-friend Ralph Waldo Emerson to do so. He constantly refers to how in the old days Native American would do things like live in simple tents and speak in simple terms. He expresses this in iambic pentameter.

Most annoyingly, he's smug, self-congratulatory, and accusative of the modern folk who have got it all wrong. He upbraids the people of his town who don't understand the obviousness of opting out. Its as if he is claiming a patronizing sense of enlightenment, which he wishes, but doubts we will ever achieve. He mocks our interest in the news, in progress, in business and in profit. Basically, he is every undergraduate student studying philosophy, literature and anthropology, claiming an awareness of the world, without ever having been out in it. Ask a businessman  if you can really have a happy, satisfied family, supported only by the bounty of the forest. Ask a businessman if every one of us can, or only the guys whose dads are other businessmen.

I guess every generation needs its hipsters. They're the people who remind us that we're easily trapped following convention, without even giving much thought for escape. The fact that hipsters are self-satisfied, and offer naive, arrogant solutions, doesn't mean that they are wrong about the problem. We do get stuck. And sometimes it takes someone annoying enough to only buy fair-trade coffee which has been locally sourced by bicycles to get you to sit under a tree. That's what happened to me. And that's how I ended up in the woods of Malibu last Sunday afternoon.

Lurv

Ben

A Malibuvian