GC: And now the 4th of July is coming! It's a holiday that always gets me down! Why celebrate a war? In May we had "Memorial Day"--but it's not about "memorializing" or commemorating. It's about celebrating "heroes"--anyone who fights for our government and the Corporate State--with no questions asked! And in June, another celebration of war--the Allies landing on Normandy Beach on "D-Day." But, never any talk about the causes--about our human nature, our stupid gullibility!
HDT: I went to Walden on the 4th of July, 1845. Most people forget--I went there on "Independence Day"--to find my own.
GC: I didn't know! The date, I mean. Maybe I forgot". Most people have forgotten you". Or, they think you were some kind of proto-hippy--a recluse, "into" Nature; a misanthrope. They don't even know" or have forgotten" about the years you spent after Walden. What those years meant" what they mean today".
HDT: "I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
GC: So you wrote" in "Walden"--that classic of our literature. And that's why I guess I came today--"to see if I could not learn."
HDT: "The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer."
GC: And that's from "Life without Principle"--one of the greatest essays every penned, alongside "Civil Disobedience"--even better known. You died in your family home, at 44, little noticed in your own country--some kind of eccentric, if men thought of you at all. But "Civil Disobedience" sparked Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King to change their lives" and change our world.
HDT: "With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal and need fear no change."
GC: You read the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita--the ancient Hindu classics--
HDT: They had recently been translated".
GC: You knew the Analects of Confucius; Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare--
HDT: And Emerson. Don't forget my older friend and mentor.
GC: In some ways you surpassed him--
HDT: We weren't shooting at clay pigeons! We weren't in a shooting match--a contest!
GC: That's so". He came at Truth in his way, too. From a different angle. As you wrote: "As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery". Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives."
HDT: That's all I had to teach in a nutshell: "Consider the way in which we spend our lives." I wrote 2 million words in my journals, did some backwoods traveling, roughed it, lectured to those who would hear me. And concluded: I must "live at home, like a traveler."
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