I came to the country because I wished to live deliberately, and thoughtfully, and with self-awareness. I wanted to hear, and bear, the worst that could be said of me. I wished to live before it was time for me to die. I did not wish to live a substitute life, a hollow life, living is so precious, I no longer wished to squander one single day. I wanted to confront the essential facts – the truth – of my life. I wished a life with no secrets so that I might live a life without fear. I wanted to embrace the natural world, and the world of animals. I wanted to write out of life, not just imagination. I wanted to be saved from a life lived in the grip of worry, money and ambition.  I wanted to live deeply and fully, to make a good mark on the world and skirt on the edge of life, and reduce it to its purest and most meaningful terms. I came to find the artist buried inside of me.  I came to see if I could, at long last, find the love I have sought my entire life.

– Jon Katz

“I  went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is do dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all of the marrow of life, to cut a broad swatch and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

Our world is so different from Thoreau’s, he is falling out of favor, as is I suppose, inevitable. More and more, say critics and professors, Thoreau is seen as a scold, a hypocrite, and a killjoy.  Their students struggle to relate to him and his world. “Oh, I wouldn’t waste my time reading Thoreau,” a friend told me recently, “Emerson was the better thinker.”

I can understand that, his tone is out of kilter with our times, he was the very opposite of fast and hip and jaded and pointed. He would not have lasted an hour on Snapchat or Facebook, or grasped the awful circus that is politics in our time.

But if fear and ambition are ruining your life, he is a potent tonic for it. Fear, ambition and shame – and loneliness-  were ruining my life, I was about to give up on it. I  took to heart the men and women who went out into the woods to be alone and connect to the earth and think closely about how they wished to live.

People like Thoreau, Merton, Goodall.

I believe it is impossible to really know one’s self or even to understand that it means to think unless I could be alone. In our world, it is becoming almost impossible to be alone.

My passage to the country, like Thoreau’s to his pond, saved my life and shaped the rest of it. I loved reading Walden, I relate so much to Thoreau, the impatient, yearning curmudgeon. He wanted to much to live a life of meaning. I fully accept that the young will find their own Thoreau’s, they don’t need to embrace mine.

Our world moves so quickly, I see Thoreau all the time in the woods, he is ghost there, to deliberate for our world.

Like Thoreau, there was some artifice to my story.

Like Thoreau, I was never very fear from friends, food, company. But drama was not the point for me any more than it was for  him. Neither of us was in danger, and voluntary loneliness is very different from the real thing. By now, everybody knows that Emerson and Thoreau’s own mother brought him food to Walden Pond regularly, he didn’t have to eat squirrels and snakes and berries all the time, he was never completely dependent on his own wits any more than I was.

He would walk easily to town.

Cynicism is a faith in our time, we all know too much too soon and too often to keep all of our hopes intact.

But he wrote so many things that came right out of my soul, and still nourish it. Thoreau wrote in Walden it’s not what you look at that matters, but what you see. My writing and photography teach me the same thing. He reminded me to never look back unless I wished to go in that direction.

I never do, and I don’t. He reminded me that most men live hollow lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them. It is my intent to sing my song to the end.

It isn’t what I look at, but what I see.