Look at the universe: are you overwhelmed or amazed?

This radical discrepancy between the scale of our own lives and the scale of the rest of existence can leave us feeling two different ways. One of them, akin to the feeling of losing something, is that the universe is dauntingly large and we are terrifying insignificant. The other, akin to the feeling of finding, is that the universe is dauntingly large and yet here we are, unimaginably unlikely and therefore precious beyond measure. As with so  many other contrasting feelings, most of us will experience both of these eventually. It is easy to feel small and powerless; easy, too, to feel  amazed and fortunate to be here.

On the whole, though, I take the  side of amazement.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 234

Grieving for the future

Grief confuses us by  spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies; it’s the future. That’s what I realized while talking with my friend —that everything  that happened in my life from that point on would be something else my father would not see.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 74

Grief is boring

Like anything that goes in for too long, grief is (I don’t know why people don’t talk about this aspect of it more often) unbelievably boring. I don’t mean in its earliest days, when the sorrow is too acute and the overall rearrangement of life too recent to allow for anything like tedium. Eventually, though, as you grow accustomed to its constant companionship, the monotony sets in. I can’t recall exactly how long after my father’s death this happened to me, because mourning also played havoc with  my sense of time, but I think several months must have passed when the grief that had sloshed around turbulently inside me ebbed into a stagnant pool. It made life extremely dull and it made me seem extremely dull and, above all, it became, itself, unbelievably wearying.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 61

Henry David Thoreau, Laura Ingalls Wilder

In reality, Walden Pond in 1845 was scarcely more off the grid, relative to contemporaneous society, than Prospect Park is today. . . . This is the situation Thoreau summed up by saying, "For the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. it is as much Asia or Africa as New England. . . . "

. . . Only someone who had never experienced true remoteness could mistake Walden for the wilderness or compare life on the bustling pond to that on the mid-nineteenth-century prairies. Indeed, an excellent corrective to "Walden" is the work of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who grew up on those prairies, and in a genuine little house in the big woods. Wilder lived what Thoreau merely played at, and her books are not only more joyful and interesting than "Walden" but also, when reread, a thousand times more harrowing. 

Kathryn Schulz, "Pond Scum: Henry David Thoreau's Moral Myopia," New Yorker, Oct. 19, 2015, p. 40, at 44

Thoreau's distortions

Only by elastic measures can "Walden" be regarded as nonfiction.

. . .

Begin with false premises and you risk reaching false conclusions. Begin with falsified premises and you forfeit your authority. Apologists for Thoreau often claim that he merely distorted some trivial facts in the service of a deeper truth. But how deep can a truth be—indeed, how true can it be—if it is not built from facts?

Kathryn Schulz, "Pond Scum: Henry David Thoreau's Moral Myopia," New Yorker, Oct. 19, 2015, p. 40, 44

Fie on coffee haters!

I cannot idolize anyone who opposes coffee (especially if the objection is that it erodes great civilizations; had the man not heard of the Enlightenment?), but Thoreau never met an appetite too innocuous to denounce.

Kathryn Schulz, "Pond Scum: Henry David Thoreau's Moral Myopia," New Yorker, Oct. 19, 2015, p. 40, 41

Thoreau the jerk

In that [simplified and inspirational] image, Thoreau is our national conscience: the voice in the American wilderness, urging us to be true to ourselves and to live in harmony with nature.

This vision cannot survive any serious reading of "Walden." The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world. From that inward fixation flowed a social and political vision that is deeply unsettling.

Kathryn Schulz, "Pond Scum: Henry David Thoreau's Moral Myopia," New Yorker, Oct. 19, 2015, p. 40