Simple Living Isn’t Always

Incharacter.org’s article about Henry David Thoreau points out the differences between Thoreau’s America and our own. They note first of all the frustration some first-time Walden readers experience. As writer Bill McKibben puts it, they see “our apostle of solitary, individual self-reliance, out in his cabin with his hoe and his beans, the most determinedly asocial man of his time — nonetheless was immersed in his community to a degree few people today can comprehend.” After all, the Thoreau mythology is that he was the quintessential individualist, the man who (as Robin Williams’s Dead Poets’ Society reminded us) “went to the woods” to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Instead of a godlike recluse, readers discover a Thoreau who walked home and shared a meal with his family every week or so. McKibben goes on to explain one of the reasons for this apparent paradox:

[Thoreau’s] was simply a visiting age — as most of human history has been a visiting age, and every human culture a visiting culture.

Until ours. I doubt if many people reading these words have had a spontaneous visit from a neighbor in the past week — less than a fifth of Americans report visiting regularly with friends and neighbors, and the percentage is declining steadily. The number of close friends that an American claims has dropped steadily for the last fifty years too; three-quarters of us don’t know our next-door neighbors. Even the people who share our houses are becoming strangers: The Wall Street Journal reported recently that “major builders and top architects are walling off space. They’re touting one-person ‘internet alcoves,’ locked-door ‘away rooms,’ and his-and-her offices on opposite ends of the house.” The new floor plans, says the director of research for the National Association of Home Builders, are “good for the dysfunctional family.” Or, as another executive put it, these are the perfect homes for “families that don’t want anything to do with one another.” Compared to these guys, Thoreau with his three-chair cabin was practically Martha Stewart.[emphasis mine]

I’m more grateful than ever to know my neighbors. I usually have an extended conversation with one of my next-door neighbors a couple times a week. They share produce from their garden with us, and we’ve shared a meal or two. And we see most of the other people in our cul-de-sac at least once a week, and have some conversation too. I’ve even had a conversation over the back fence. Not only that, but during my runs through the neighborhood, most of the people wave or speak.

But McKibben is right. It is more possible than ever to walk through life with your head down. Until we moved to our present home, we had very few drop-in friends. We connected only occasionally and very deliberately.

In addition, the nature of my work (until recently) fostered aloneness. My only companions were the glow of the computer screen and the music in my iTunes, poor substitutes for flesh-and-blood companionship. We weren’t created for that kind of solitude, and even our patron saint of individualism knew the scriptural truth “it is not good for man to be alone.”

Thankfully, a movement seems to be gaining strength to awaken and reconnect our communities. And we’re benefiting. Now, in addition to the neighbors, we have a circle of friends who genuinely care about us, and they seem to enjoy our company as much as we enjoy theirs. It’s a great feeling. So great that I want this for my extended family, and for friends I know who are living the crowded but lonely life.