Thoreau wanted us to simplify our lives, but then the pencil-maker did not live out his life in a wilderness by a pond. No, he chose to leave Walden to return to the complexity of civilization, making occasional excursions into “Nature.” He did, after all the “simplicity stuff,” live in a house on Main Street for the last twelve years of his life. “Main St.?” you ask in surprise. Yes, keeping it “simple” was tough even for the guy who proclaimed, “Simplify, simplify.”
Remember the widespread joke proclaimed some years ago as the ultimate in jokes? In a shortened version:
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson go camping. At 2:00 a.m. Holmes wakes up Watson and asks him to draw a conclusion about what he observes. The sleepy Watson, looking up and knowing he is in the presence of a great master of observation and deduction, speculates about the many stars he can see, about the possibility of planets and life elsewhere, and about the potential for intelligent life in the universe. Watson then concludes from what he observes that such intelligence must exist. Holmes then says, “No, you idiot, someone stole our tent.”
Keep it simple. Just like Watson, we have a tendency to observe and conclude in imitation of some whose point of view envelopes us. We observe through the filter of culture that also acts like the multi-lensed eye of an insect. For Thoreau, part of the eye let in the light of Transcendentalism as proclaimed by Emerson and his entourage. Other parts of the eye saw the world through lenses of personal experience, including during his last twelve years, visits to the wilderness of Maine. All those fly-eye lenses added to the complexity of Thoreau’s point of view and his mundane business of graphite, clay, and pencils.
It’s hard to “keep it simple,” especially when we know that at some point we have to accept life’s complexities. We live a paradoxical life: We might try to think simply like Sherlock Holmes, who could cut to the very essence of an observation with an astute deduction, but we cannot, with all our relationships to both people and places, disengage ourselves from complexity for more than just brief escapes into the wilderness. Just remember that Thoreau did not sleep under a tree. He built a cabin. It was a simple structure, but it was, nevertheless, a structure.
You don’t have to “complicate, complicate” like Dr. Watson. You don’t have to see more than the essence, but you will never completely simplify your life. Keep it as simple as you wish and can, but accept the complexity as a necessary part of living on Main Street.