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,...
Sometimes he took more drastic steps. He’d bend over and peer through his legs, marveling at the inverted world. (Thoreau was big on inverting; he even flipped his name, changing it from David Henry to Henry David.) Turn the world upside down, and you see it anew.
I find a relatively secluded spot along the pond and, checking first to make sure no one is watching, try this maneuver myself. I bend over and peer between my legs. Sky and earth flip. Blood rushes to my head. I feel dizzy. I stand up straight, and sky and earth return to their proper positions. Maybe I’m not doing this properly.
No, I’m missing the point. Thoreau’s stellar vision wasn’t merely technique, a fun-pack of optical tricks. It was a function of character. He considered the perception of beauty “a moral test.” Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. It is in his heart. We can’t improve our vision without improving ourselves. The dynamic works both ways. Not only does who we are determine what we see but what we see determines who we are. As the Vedas say, “What you see, you become.”
Leslie Wilson was right. Sure, it’s a fine pond, tree-lined and with water that glistens in the solstice light. But it is just a pond. Not necessarily the most peaceful, either. As I walk along the shoreline, I hear the rumble of a passing train, just as Thoreau did in his time. His life coincided with the rapid growth of the railroad. From his cabin, he could hear the whistle of the locomotive “sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard.”
Thoreau was conflicted about this newfangled technology. On the one hand, the raw power of the locomotive awed him. Yet he feared the railroad disrupted familiar rhythms. Farmers who once gauged time by the sun now set their clocks to the 2:00 p.m. train from Boston. Walden Woods was stripped of trees, fuel for the wood-fired engines. “We do not ride on the railroad,” Thoreau concludes. “It rides upon us.”
I arrive at the Walden Pond Visitors Center, and find a to-scale replica of Thoreau’s cabin. It’s nicer than I imagined. A proper A-frame, with a woodstove, a desk, a trapdoor that leads to a root cellar, chairs (for visitors), a small but comfortable bed, and a large window with southern exposure. Not Versailles, but no dump, either.
A park ranger named Nick is leading a tour. It’s clearly not his first, but a genuine enthusiasm for Thoreau animates what might otherwise be a canned spiel. I’ve noticed this about Thoreauvians. There’s something about Henry (Thoreauvians always call him Henry) that discourages the sort of reflexive cynicism that typically accompanies excessive familiarity.
Nick wraps up his prepared remarks, then solicits questions. They come rapid-fire.
“How much did the cabin cost to build?”
“Twenty-eight dollars, twelve and a half cents. The nails were the most expensive.”
“What did he do all day?”
“He read and he wrote.”
“Why did he do it?” asks one teenager, incredulous, as if Thoreau had embezzled millions or joined a dangerous cult instead of living in the woods for a couple of years.
“It was an experiment in simplicity,” says Nick the Ranger. “Plus, he was twenty-eight years old. He needed to get away from Mom and Dad.” The teenager, judging by his nodding head, clearly likes this answer.
Thoreau did live simply, growing some of his own food. He lived off the grid before there was a grid. The point, though, wasn’t simplicity for its own sake. Thoreau, student of the East, was undergoing a kind of purification. Cleansing his lens of perception.
French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote of the need to make ourselves “susceptible to knowing.” Thoreau, adrift at Walden, made himself susceptible to seeing. He knew we see best when unencumbered, when nothing comes between us and the light. Thoreau compared himself to a mathematician who, confronting a difficult problem, disembarrasses it of the extraneous and cuts to the heart of the equation.
Thoreau was superficial. I mean that in the best possible sense. The superficial gets a bum rap. It’s often used synonymously with “shallow,” but they are different. Shallow is a lack of depth. Superficial is depth diffused. Our portion of the infinite spread thin, but very wide.
“Why have we slandered the outward?” wondered Thoreau. “The perception of surfaces will have the effect of a miracle to the sane sense.” This explains why Thoreau didn’t stare. He glanced. His eyes alighted on various objects, first here, then there, like a bumblebee in search of pollen. A “sauntering of the eye,” he called it.
Humans glance for the same reason other animals sniff: it’s how we probe our surroundings. Glancing also reveals unexpected wonders. The words “surface” and “surprise” share a linguistic root.
Glancing is our natural state. Our eyes are rarely still, even when we think they are. They make rapid jumps, called saccades, pausing briefly in between. Our eyes typically move at least three times per second: roughly 100,000 times per day.
The glance is helpful. It comes in handy when cooking a three-course meal, or flying an airplane. A number of years ago, I earned my private pilot’s license. I’ve forgotten much from those days, but one technique stuck with me: the instrument scan.
“Don’t stare!” my instructor barked. “Scan!”
Altimeter. Airspeed indicator. Artificial horizon. Rest the eyes on each for a second or two, then move on. Keep your eyes, and your attention, moving. Pilots get into trouble when they fixate on one instrument. Stare at the altimeter and your heading drifts. Focus on heading and your airspeed strays. Scan, scan, scan. It’s a valuable lesson. We see more by scanning than staring.
I resume my walk along Walden Pond’s sandy shoreline. Signs warn of steep drop-offs and hazardous swimming conditions. Walden isn’t the perfect pond, but something need not be perfect, or even functional, to be beautiful. Thoreau regularly saw beauty in nature’s imperfections. Gazing at Walden on a calm September afternoon, he notices the water is perfectly smooth save for a few motes speckling the surface. While others might see blemishes, Thoreau saw something “pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass.” In Walden, he describes encountering a horse carcass rotting near his cabin, and finding it not repulsive but oddly reassuring. Beautiful, even. Nature’s wisdom at work.
I’ve been thinking about Thoreau’s admonition to find my own Walden. I didn’t care for the real Walden. Too many mosquitoes and tourists. Not enough air-conditioning, or coffee. Yes, my own Walden. But where?
The next day, I put that question to Jeff Cramer, curator of collections at the Walden Woods Project. A fit man, with shaved head and neatly trimmed beard, Jeff was a late convert to Thoreau. He was working at the Boston Public Library in a comfortable job when he picked up and moved to Concord.
Jeff has earned his Thoreauvian cred. I trust him. I like him, too, especially when he reveals his favorite Thoreau quote (this from a man who edited The Quotable Thoreau). “If I am not I, who will be?”
I want to be I, really I do, but a better, less melancholy I. A Thoreauvian I, with Thoreauvian eyes. I want to learn how to see and where. For me, a place person, the two are inseparable. How is where. Where is how.
“Let’s see,” says Jeff. “You could cross over the North Bridge and cut through the woods on the left and…”
“Woods? As in trees and bugs?”
“Well, yes.”
“Any other suggestions?”
“You could go to the South River Bridge and rent a canoe.”
“Canoe, as in boat?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Any other suggestions?”
“Sleepy Hollow is very peaceful.”
“You mean the cemetery?”
“Yes.”
“What else have you got?”
“Let’s see. You could go to Starbucks.”