Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture

“I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by attending to trivial things,” is a quote from Thoreau's that is discussed in Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture by Caleb Smith.

"Hannah Arendt, argue that Thoreau’s obsession with clearing his own conscience made him unfit for the collective, compromising work that real political change demands. Some claim that Thoreau promoted an ideal of self-reliance while refusing to acknowledge his dependence on other people’s labor, or that he misrepresented the Walden Woods as pristine nature while ignoring the indigenous, enslaved, and marginalized people who inhabited the land before and after he did. Thoreau can be caricatured as a narcissist, obsessed with his own reflection in the pond." (p.4)

"Thoreau did not ignore slavery or the violence of empire; he went to jail protesting his government’s participation in them."

"Thoreau could not entirely break his culture’s habit of recasting large-scale social and political problems as personal failings, best corrected by stringent moral rehabilitation."

“In our age of machines and money,” the creole mystic Adrien Rouquette wrote in French from his hermitage in the Louisiana woods in 1852, two years before the appearance of Walden, “people know nothing, anymore, of godly things.”12 Rouquette adapted Roman Catholic devotional practices to an ascetic, missionary life among the Choctaw people near Lake Pontchartrain, outside NewOrleans. Like Thoreau, whose book Rouquette came to admire, this self-styled primitive conducted an experiment on himself, trying to revive his depleted powers of attention. He saw himself as a voluntary exile, like one of the ancient desert fathers. The truth was that his diagnosis of modernity, along with his call for an attention revival, was becoming commonplace."

"Disciplines of attention were their therapies and rehabilitation programs. In the nineteenth century’s attention revival, there were heavy-handed moralists who preached attention in the service of social control." (p.7)

Some responses in Yale Review

Laura Dassow Walls has one:

Amid this intensifying feedback loop of external and self-imposed discipline, Thoreau’s perverse gift was to “saunter.” Neither an exercise of will over oneself nor a moral remedy for the world’s hurt, sauntering is something else altogether: a response to a call from someone beloved, issued from beyond the horizon of the self. To saunter is not to engage the push-and-pull of a coercive economy versus compensatory spiritual practices but to step outside this dialectic altogether, to release its hold on us and entertain other possibilities. Those in the grip of the attention complex might dismiss Thoreau’s open-ended, nothing-in-particular truancy as self-centered “navel-gazing.” I have noticed that when Thoreau and his ilk use language to attend to a world outside of the consumer economy, their work is usually labeled, often unkindly, “nature writing.”