I have always held a lower-than-average opinion of Henry David Thoreau, so when I discovered that a nameless Wikipedia contributor had giving him credit for inspiring and influencing the political thoughts and actions of Tolstoy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi, I decided to reevaluate him.
At first glance, Thoreau appears to be the only person in history to successfully beat Martin Harris in the World’s Ugliest Beard contest. Being an intellectual and philosophical man, he would resent my shallow judgments almost as much as I resent his work being called intellectual. Standing in the worthy shadow of Emerson, Thoreau graced our planet with Walden Pond, a book as deep as a dry puddle on the flat pavement.
Apparently unemployable, Thoreau scavenged off the mercies of Emerson by living in Emerson’s dilapidated spare house on Walden Pond. From here Thoreau teaches the human race some important lessons:
#1 To decrease the complexities of life, try Simplifying! things
#2 When Thoreau gets hungry, really hungry, he wants to eats stuff, even animals
#3 Words should be read with as much care as the writer gives when writing
Personally, I started with #3 by reading his book with the level of care he used while writing it, which led me to accomplish #1 because I Simplified! my personal library by donating the book to a local thrift store. (The publisher further Simplified! the process by including Civil Disobedience in the same volume, Simplifying! my disposal process.)
But placing my heartless Venom aside, our culture's extravagance has created an economic mess. If instead simplification was the mantra of our generation we might have avoided the hunger that poor Thoreau had to face.
His words whisper from the past like the annoying brat in school that always claimed "I told you so." I imagine this trait earned Thoreau a few black eyes in his schooling days, which probably explains the real reason he went off to live by himself.