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36. Vocation
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recto runningfoot 141 3 6 . V o c at i o n At various stages in his life, Thoreau earned his living as a schoolteacher , lecturer, handyman (for Emerson), factory manager (for his family’s pencil business), industrial designer (of the family pencils), tutor, and surveyor. “All men want . . . something to do, or rather something to be,” he writes in Walden (19). But except for writing, which never provided him with anything like an adequate income, all regular occupations provoked in him a smothering anxiety. As early as 1841, when he was not yet twenty-four, Thoreau was already treating conventional work as a kind of death: “Most who enter on any profession are doomed men. The world might as well sing a dirge over them forthwith” (J, 27 March 1841). “As long as possible live free and uncommitted” (60), Walden advises: or, in other words, don’t sign any employment contracts. “I have thoroughly tried schoolkeeping ,” Thoreau writes, punning on his own name while at the same time acknowledging—a rare thing—that he has had any previous occupations, “and I lost my time into the bargain” (50). “I have tried trade,” he continues; “but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil” (51). Thoreau had caught his contempt for ordinary vocations from Emerson, whose 1837 essay “The American Scholar” described their destructiveness: “The tradesman . . . is ridden by the routine of his craft. . . . The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statue-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship.” As he entered his mid-twenties, still without what his neighbors would have V 142 verso runningfoot recognized as a regular job, Thoreau began to suggest something new: that a man’s choice of occupation could result not only from an active interest in something but also from a revulsion prompted by mundane work. In a letter to Harrison Blake, written from Walden, Thoreau turns this revulsion into a challenge: I know many men who, in common things, are not to be deceived; who trust no moonshine; who count their money correctly, and know how to invest it; who are said to be prudent and knowing ; who yet will stand at a desk the greater part of their lives, as cashiers in banks, and glimmer and rust and finally go out there. If they know anything, what under the sun do they do that for? Even in his often critical eulogy, Emerson acknowledged that Thoreau had been “never idle or self-indulgent.” At his cabin, Thoreau was, in fact, tirelessly writing: a draft of the Week, the long essay on Thomas Carlyle, “Civil Disobedience,” roughly half of Walden, the Ktaadn sections of what would become The Maine Woods. But he had anticipated the distinction expressed by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine in Sunday in the Park with George: “Work is what you do for others[;] . . . art is what you do for yourself.” By the fall of 1854, in “Life Without Principle,” his most abrasive essay, Thoreau would turn this attitude into an existential test: Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed . . . but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit. In modern terms, if winning the lottery would make you quit your job the next day, you’re in the wrong line of work. Having begun Walden as a response to his neighbors’ “impertinent ” inquiries about his “mode of life” (5), Thoreau uses the occasion to convey his own industry. “I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits,” he assures his listeners. “My purpose in going to Walden Pond was . . . to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles” (16–17). The meticulous bookkeeping that follows, 142 v [34.239.185.22] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:10 GMT) recto runningfoot 143 with expenses detailed to the quarter cent, shore up this practical persona. But Concord businessmen would have found less to admire in the more poetic accounts of what Thoreau’s “business” actually involved: So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it. . . . [O]r waiting at...