Blog #4: Whenever I write about living alone in the woods, I try to be as Thoreau as possible.

Emerson bothers me. In my humble opinion, his writings often jumped from deep, insightful advice to self-centered arrogance. I do agree that before anything else, you have to look after yourself, but Emerson takes it to an extreme. The whole reason we live in civilizations as a community is because we care about others; we enjoy hearing from other people and responding to what they have to say, whether it is with empathy, sympathy, or just a good laugh. I didn't agree with Emerson on several points, but I probably disagree with this one the most:

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it...

You can't argue that there is no universally acceptable measure of good and evil. Yes, there are gray areas in some cases, but a lot of times it is black and white. I wonder if Emerson would be okay with a psychopath coming into his home and burning all of his works in progress, because in the psychopath's head it was the right thing to do. I wouldn't want to live in a world where nobody shared a common set of beliefs when it came to what is right and what is wrong. I also probably wouldn't want to be friends with somebody who was happy but only concerned about their own perceived concept of good and evil. What good is it being happy if everybody else thinks you're an asshole?

Enough about Emerson. Let's move on to Henry David Thoreau, or as I like to call him, HDT. One day this guy thought it was a good idea to go out into the woods and live in a one-room cabin owned by Emerson. Apparently HDT was sick of all the distractions of modern living in the middle of the 19th century, and rightfully so...I mean, just take a look at some of the inventions that occurred in the 1840s: the steam hammer, the typewriter, the saxophone, and artificial fertilizers. These were the big things of that time. Clearly he was sick of everybody complaining about how "in my day, we had to write our thoughts down with a PEN", constantly honking on brass tubes and smelling like shit all the time.

 "Lisa, I swear to God if you don't stop playing, I'm running away for a year."

HDT's time spent out in the woods is nothing new to me, though. It's probably not new to any of us; if you've ever went for a run to clear your mind, or just escaped to be alone and think about stuff for a while, you got a taste of what Thoreau was aiming for. I love having time to myself, when I can just forget about life for a while. I've actually even thought about disappearing for a long time with nothing, in true Thoreau fashion, but right now as a soon-to-be-graduated college student, I have more than enough responsibility to keep me living within the limits of civilization.

I really appreciated Thoreau's writing. I remember reading most of it in high school because my Literature teacher recommended it to me after reading a paper I wrote about my life which included angst-y rants similar to Thoreau, so it wasn't too much of a surprise when I read it here. He's not afraid to leave everything behind to get a better grip on this extremely limited existence we call life, which is very admirable in my eyes. Sometimes I worry that I'm not really "living", that I'm just running through the motions and missing out on opportunities that I should be taking advantage of. I wonder if I really am driving life into a corner, or if I'm just swinging in the dark and one day I'll end up cornering myself.

Could I really just give everything up and live in solitude despite all the technology we have today? Probably. I've spent a considerable amount of my spare time hiking, camping, and exploring strange woods during college, almost all of the time doing so with nothing but my driver's license as a form of ID (mostly because I usually randomly swim during hikes). It's nice to be separated from everything for a little bit. Eventually though, I think if I was alone and with nothing, there would be something else to throw me into a routine and it would get old and dull. This makes me wonder, is it simply human nature to get so used to something that the attraction wears down and you want to move on to something else? Maybe that's why technology is so appealing...it changes just fast enough to keep our interest.