The Socrates Express
- Автор: Вейнер Эрик
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
- Жанр: География, путевые заметки
Электронная книга - «The Socrates Express». Краткое содержание книги:
We contemplate for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a different perspective, to unearth hidden beauty and find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope.
Eric Weiner, *New York Times* bestselling author of *The Geography of Bliss* , combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pilgrimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from philosophers around the world, from Marcus Aurelius to Arthur Schopenhauer, Confucius to Montaigne. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport) he traversed thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi,...
Leslie disappears to a nearby safe, where she retrieves a piece of paper sheathed in plastic. It is the original manuscript of Thoreau’s essay “Walking.” The handwriting is expansive, with a wildness to it. Thoreau loved that word. “In wildness, there is preservation of the world,” he said. It’s often misquoted as “wilderness,” but that’s not what he meant. Wilderness exists out there. Wildness resides inside us. Wildness is strong and willful.
I examine the manuscript more closely, and notice the revisions. How Thoreau, for instance, changed “early in the afternoon” to “early in the summer afternoon.” A small change, but for Thoreau, the small mattered. It mattered not because he was fastidious, though he was that, but because in the details he found, if not God, certainly a mother lode of beauty.
I broach the subject of “Pond Scum” with Leslie, deploying diplomatic skills usually reserved for mentioning tax audits or genital warts. Yes, she’s read it. Everyone in Concord has. The article was unfair, but not inaccurate, she says. Thoreau was “not an easy guy to warm up to,” she tells me, in classic New England understatement.
Henry David Thoreau, hero of Walden, beloved icon of American lore, apostle of environmentalism, giant of letters, was something of a jerk. Everyone who knew him said so. Thoreau possessed “a certain iron-pokerishness, an uncompromising stiffness in his mental character,” said Nathaniel Hawthorne. Others were less kind. “Thoreau was literally the most childlike, unconscious and unblushing egotist it has ever been my fortune to encounter in the ranks of manhood,” said Henry James Sr., father of Henry James the novelist and William James the philosopher.
The harshest criticism centered on Thoreau’s alleged hypocrisy. There he was pretending to live alone in the woods, self-sufficient, while sneaking off to his mom’s for pie and laundry service.
It’s true. Thoreau wasn’t nearly as isolated at Walden as many believe. He regularly made the half-hour walk into town, not only for Mom’s home cooking but to visit the local post office or coffee shop. So was Walden a ruse? Have ninth graders nationwide been hoodwinked?
I don’t think so. Thoreau never claimed to have severed all ties with society. He doesn’t conceal his forays into town, or the visitors he received at his cabin. (Walden contains a chapter called “Visitors.”) As one Thoreauvian tells me, Walden isn’t a book about a man living in the woods. It’s a book about a man living.
As for Thoreau’s purported crankiness, guilty as charged. But that does not diminish the value of his wisdom. If crankiness disqualified a thinker, all of philosophy would be contained in a pamphlet.
I tell Leslie about my practical approach to philosophy, and ask what “how-to” question she thinks Thoreau addresses. I’m expecting the usual “How to live alone” or “How to live simply.”
“How to see,” she says, without hesitation.
“How to see?”
Yes, she says. All the rest—the simple living, the solitude, the naturalism—were in service of something larger: vision. Thoreau teaches us how to see.
I did not see this coming. I will investigate, I assure her.
“Good,” she says. “Have you read Thoreau?”
Oh yes, I say. Not only Walden, of course, but also his essays and even his obscure first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
“Not bad,” she says, as if praising a toddler who’s mastered Curious George. “But if you want to understand Thoreau, you need to read his journals.”
I promise her I will. Only later do I discover what I’ve gotten myself into.
Everyone who met Thoreau commented on his appearance. Some remarked on his nose, prominent and Roman, “a sort of interrogation mark to the universe”; others his mouth, “uncouth and somewhat rustic”; or his hands, “strong and skillful.” Others remarked on Thoreau’s eerily acute senses, like his keen ear (“He could hear the most faint and distant sounds”) and acute sense of smell (“No hound could scent better”).
But Thoreau’s eyes made the biggest impression. No two people saw them alike. “Strong serious blue eyes,” said one Concord resident. “Piercing eyes, like an owl’s,” recalls another. “Enormous eyes… [that] frightened me dreadfully at first,” recalls a third.
Thoreau’s vision was legendary. At a glance, he could estimate the height of a tree or the weight of a calf. He’d reach into a bushel of pencils and, by sight alone, grab exactly a dozen. He had a knack for finding buried Indian arrowheads. “There is one,” he’d say, kicking it up with his foot.
When it comes to the senses, philosophers are, as usual, divided. One school, known as the Rationalists, mistrusts the senses. Only our intellect, and the innate knowledge it contains, can lead us out of the cave and into the light. The Rationalist Descartes famously said Cogito, ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.” Another school, the Empiricists, believe our senses can indeed be trusted, and it is only through them that we come to know the world.
Thoreau refused to get twisted in such epistemological knots. Trustworthy or not, our senses are all we’ve got, he argued, so why not use them as best as we can? His was an outside-in philosophy.
Thoreau is considered a Transcendentalist, a member of a philosophical movement that can be summed up in four words: faith in things unseen. Thoreau, though, possessed an even stronger faith in things seen. He was less interested in the nature of reality than the reality of nature. Was there more to the world than meets the eye? Probably, but what does meet the eye is plenty miraculous, so let’s start there. Thoreau valued vision even more than knowledge. Knowledge is always tentative, imperfect. Today’s certainty is tomorrow’s nonsense. “Who can say what is? He can only say how he sees.”
How exactly do we see? Most of us subscribe to the photographic model of seeing. We believe our eyes capture images from the world like a camera, then relay these images to our brain. Our eyes “photograph,” say, the coffee mug in front of us.
It’s a nice model. It is also wrong. Seeing is less like photography and more like language. We don’t see the world so much as converse with it. What is that? Looks like a coffee mug, you say? Let me check my database and get back to you. Yep, it’s a mug. We don’t see the mug in front of us. We tell ourselves it is there. The coffee mug sends electromagnetic waves, nothing more, to our eye and brain. From that raw data, we create information, then meaning—in this case, that the object in front of us is called a “coffee mug.”
Sometimes we create meaning too quickly. Maybe what looks like a coffee mug is something else entirely. Quick to define objects and people, we risk blinding ourselves to their uniqueness. Thoreau guarded against this tendency. “Let me not be in haste to detect the universal law,” he tells himself. “Let me see more clearly a particular instance of it.” Postpone defining what you see and you will see more.
Thoreau slowed the process to a crawl. He elongated the gap between hypothesis and conclusion, between seeing and seen. Time and again, he reminds himself to linger. “We must look for a long time before we can see,” he said.
Seeing is subjective. The scientist’s detached “view from nowhere” was not a vista that interested Thoreau. For something to be truly seen, it must be seen from somewhere by someone. “Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective,” he wrote.