Tired of the merry-go-round or the fast-paced treadmill of life? Are you under a false impression when you argue that your complex life would be better if you could simplify? Would sitting motionless before the Wheel of Dharma in Lhasa be preferable to the incessant motion of your life? To paraphrase Thoreau, is your life “frittered away by detail”? (61) *
Somehow the cells of poriferans communicate. They work in unison for the good of the organism without a network of nerves and central processor, that is, without a brain, without even so much as a knot of nerves. Simple as the animals seem to be, individual sponges can live for many years, and some can grow larger than a human. As a group, sponges have faced threats to their existence for hundreds of millions of years, but have survived five major and some minor extinction events that have annihilated more complex animals, the ones that do have brains. And they have adapted to a number of aqueous environments—all that without a brain. Maybe there’s something to be said for just sitting there as sponges do. Their lives are not, we might argue, “frittered away by detail.” Maybe we can learn not from the Himalayan monk, but rather from the humble sponge. “If you seek simplicity, my child, be the sponge.”
There are sides to the issue raised by Henry David Thoreau’s life at Walden Pond and famous lines “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” and “Simplify, simplify.” (61, 62) One side argues for simplifying by reducing activities in a busy lifestyle and by refusing to focus on the acquisition of goods; the other side argues against simplicity and for complexity as the way of fulfilling the human potential. Both sides have their advocates, and the advocates have varying definitions of simplicity and complexity. Both sides have their stock of clichés and humorous takes on Thoreau’s advice. The writers of the TV series Cheers had the character Diane quote that famous Thoreau line “Simplify, simplify” and Coach, the uneducated bartender, ask why Thoreau had to say the word simplify more than once.
The definition of a simple life isn’t set in stone, of course. Nor is the definition of a complex one. Both the occupied and the unoccupied among us can survive or succumb. Few of us would wish for the ultimate simple life of a sponge though I’m guessing that you believe you know someone who mimics sponge-like simplicity.
We cannot fully emulate the kind of simplicity we ascribe to sponges because we are endowed with minds, and minds are restless even in the midst of deep concentration and sleep. And even in physical paralysis, we can busy ourselves in travel by book, the frigate of the mind, to paraphrase another nineteenth-century author, Emily Dickinson. ** But with regard to simplicity and complexity, most would probably assume there is a difference between, say, a person meditating in the Himalayas before the Wheel of Dharma and a person working in an overheated office with enveloping chatter and machine noise.
What, we should ask ourselves, are we to do to simplify? We have to survive in a complex society, and that entails acquiring shelter and food; those, in turn, require our wending our way through rents or mortgages, taxes and upkeep, grocers and diets, to which we can add traffic, social pressures, and moral dilemmas. Do we simplify by living the life of a hermit or take our families to some little house on the prairie (hoping, of course, that diseases, storms, bad guys, and droughts somehow bypass us)? Do we just cut out a few activities, such as those involving phones, computers, and TV comedy series in favor of “quality time” spent in self-awareness? We are nothing like simple sponges even when we try to emulate them.
Do sponges have a lesson to teach? No, they don’t. Does Thoreau? Maybe, but marginally. Remember that Thoreau didn’t spend his entire life in the woods. He made pencils and interacted with his society. And he wrote, "I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man.” If you read Walden, you’ll find numerous descriptions of his having to attend to the details of living in the “wild.” Cabins don’t build and maintain themselves; food doesn’t arrive in Nutrisystem(™) mailings.
Isn’t it fun to be more than one thing? To be, unlike sponges, motile? In a recent posting, I referred to Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses.” In that poem Tennyson writes about the restless drive of the Homeric hero and contrasts it with a nonmotile existence of a stay-at-home king. If you recall, after ten years of war and ten more years of wandering the Mediterranean, Ulysses returns to wife, son, home, and hearth. But the poet puts him there for only a brief stay like Thoreau’s two years at Walden. Tennyson has the Homeric hero say:
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life!
Tennyson’s words remind me of three lines from another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote in “The Windhover”:
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
In hard work, the farmer overturns the soil with his plow, revealing in the sunlight the shining moist layer hidden below the surface. And embers, seeming to be the end of the fire, like Ulysses embarking on yet another adventure even at the end of this life, rekindle as they tumble, becoming gold-vermillion.
Each of us will always ask whether or not we are “too involved” in life and whether or not we prefer a more sponge-like existence. The reality is that we balance both kinds of life. Regardless of his advice to simplify, Thoreau didn’t spend a life “unburnish’d” and devoid of details. In Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson appeared to live a simple life, but she traveled on “Coursers” of poetry and frigates of books. All of us are complex in our ostensible simplicity and subtly simple in our very apparent complexity. In the midst of a complex life, some will ironically and for various reasons “make an effort” to live simply; others, will look for occasional simplicity in complexity or accept human complexity as the simplest form of life an organism with a brain can expect. And just like the embers, all of us can, even when the end seems near, “gash gold-vermillion.”
Tennyson has Ulysses say:
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods…
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
*Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, in Walden and Civil Disobedience: Authoritative Texts Background, Reviews, and Essays in Criticism. Ed. By Owen Thomas. New York. W.W. Norton & Company. 1966.
**There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry--
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll--
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.
Somehow the cells of poriferans communicate. They work in unison for the good of the organism without a network of nerves and central processor, that is, without a brain, without even so much as a knot of nerves. Simple as the animals seem to be, individual sponges can live for many years, and some can grow larger than a human. As a group, sponges have faced threats to their existence for hundreds of millions of years, but have survived five major and some minor extinction events that have annihilated more complex animals, the ones that do have brains. And they have adapted to a number of aqueous environments—all that without a brain. Maybe there’s something to be said for just sitting there as sponges do. Their lives are not, we might argue, “frittered away by detail.” Maybe we can learn not from the Himalayan monk, but rather from the humble sponge. “If you seek simplicity, my child, be the sponge.”
There are sides to the issue raised by Henry David Thoreau’s life at Walden Pond and famous lines “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” and “Simplify, simplify.” (61, 62) One side argues for simplifying by reducing activities in a busy lifestyle and by refusing to focus on the acquisition of goods; the other side argues against simplicity and for complexity as the way of fulfilling the human potential. Both sides have their advocates, and the advocates have varying definitions of simplicity and complexity. Both sides have their stock of clichés and humorous takes on Thoreau’s advice. The writers of the TV series Cheers had the character Diane quote that famous Thoreau line “Simplify, simplify” and Coach, the uneducated bartender, ask why Thoreau had to say the word simplify more than once.
The definition of a simple life isn’t set in stone, of course. Nor is the definition of a complex one. Both the occupied and the unoccupied among us can survive or succumb. Few of us would wish for the ultimate simple life of a sponge though I’m guessing that you believe you know someone who mimics sponge-like simplicity.
We cannot fully emulate the kind of simplicity we ascribe to sponges because we are endowed with minds, and minds are restless even in the midst of deep concentration and sleep. And even in physical paralysis, we can busy ourselves in travel by book, the frigate of the mind, to paraphrase another nineteenth-century author, Emily Dickinson. ** But with regard to simplicity and complexity, most would probably assume there is a difference between, say, a person meditating in the Himalayas before the Wheel of Dharma and a person working in an overheated office with enveloping chatter and machine noise.
What, we should ask ourselves, are we to do to simplify? We have to survive in a complex society, and that entails acquiring shelter and food; those, in turn, require our wending our way through rents or mortgages, taxes and upkeep, grocers and diets, to which we can add traffic, social pressures, and moral dilemmas. Do we simplify by living the life of a hermit or take our families to some little house on the prairie (hoping, of course, that diseases, storms, bad guys, and droughts somehow bypass us)? Do we just cut out a few activities, such as those involving phones, computers, and TV comedy series in favor of “quality time” spent in self-awareness? We are nothing like simple sponges even when we try to emulate them.
Do sponges have a lesson to teach? No, they don’t. Does Thoreau? Maybe, but marginally. Remember that Thoreau didn’t spend his entire life in the woods. He made pencils and interacted with his society. And he wrote, "I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man.” If you read Walden, you’ll find numerous descriptions of his having to attend to the details of living in the “wild.” Cabins don’t build and maintain themselves; food doesn’t arrive in Nutrisystem(™) mailings.
Isn’t it fun to be more than one thing? To be, unlike sponges, motile? In a recent posting, I referred to Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses.” In that poem Tennyson writes about the restless drive of the Homeric hero and contrasts it with a nonmotile existence of a stay-at-home king. If you recall, after ten years of war and ten more years of wandering the Mediterranean, Ulysses returns to wife, son, home, and hearth. But the poet puts him there for only a brief stay like Thoreau’s two years at Walden. Tennyson has the Homeric hero say:
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life!
Tennyson’s words remind me of three lines from another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote in “The Windhover”:
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
In hard work, the farmer overturns the soil with his plow, revealing in the sunlight the shining moist layer hidden below the surface. And embers, seeming to be the end of the fire, like Ulysses embarking on yet another adventure even at the end of this life, rekindle as they tumble, becoming gold-vermillion.
Each of us will always ask whether or not we are “too involved” in life and whether or not we prefer a more sponge-like existence. The reality is that we balance both kinds of life. Regardless of his advice to simplify, Thoreau didn’t spend a life “unburnish’d” and devoid of details. In Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson appeared to live a simple life, but she traveled on “Coursers” of poetry and frigates of books. All of us are complex in our ostensible simplicity and subtly simple in our very apparent complexity. In the midst of a complex life, some will ironically and for various reasons “make an effort” to live simply; others, will look for occasional simplicity in complexity or accept human complexity as the simplest form of life an organism with a brain can expect. And just like the embers, all of us can, even when the end seems near, “gash gold-vermillion.”
Tennyson has Ulysses say:
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods…
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
*Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, in Walden and Civil Disobedience: Authoritative Texts Background, Reviews, and Essays in Criticism. Ed. By Owen Thomas. New York. W.W. Norton & Company. 1966.
**There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry--
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll--
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.
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