We Must Learn to Reawaken

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

It must be the circles in which I walk, but increasingly I find masculine-by-preference usage almost sweetly archaic, like reading Elizabethan texts. My hesitation rises when I recall I probably live in a bubble and that across the land this is still normative. While on the subject of usage, I was a little surprised to find “tasked” used in this manner in something written toward the end of the first half of the Nineteenth century.

My only argument with the text itself has to do with his almost cavalier dismissal of “mechanical aids.” Thoreau does speak from a deeper perspective, of those moments when self and other are forgotten, when, of course, so are our practices. And that’s why I quote him here. it is a pointing to something deeper. But, also, I’ve known few people who have made their way to the depths who have not followed a particular path, and fewer still among those, who have kept going to even greater depths without those “aids.”

That caution held up, what a lovely pointer on the way. Thoreau really is, warts and all, an authentic guide for we Westerners. By the bye, if you want to find a guide for reading Walden, I recommend a small book by a Unitarian Universalist minister, Barry Andrews, Thoreau as Spiritual Guide: A Companion to Walden for Personal Reflection and Group Discussion.