Bleh

Henry David Thoreau is one of my favorite writers/philosophers/narcissists to ever exist. The whole idea of transcendentalism (Thoreau’s forte) is that you are trying to express something that is beyond human understanding... How arrogant does someone have to be to think that that’s a feat that they can overcome? They just toss it on the to-do list along with doing the laundry and picking up a mother’s day card: transcend all human knowledge and understanding. If it always seems like it’s one step ahead of you, that’s because it is! Just like tomorrow! Someone reading this may slyly remark, “Hey! We advance, don’t we?” Well that reader can kindly shut the fuck up because they know that’s not what I’m talking about. And I hardly call the ability to “tweet” about “Brett Favre’s” “penis” from a mountain top advancement. Transcendent ideas are such, that you almost feel it, you have that bastard on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t quite spit it out. No matter how much you stare at your laptop screen, no matter how much pot you smoke or how much you scratch your balls you just don’t nail it. In a similar fashion to the way I am writing this (I’m pretty raw down there and I’m not getting anywhere). The big idea, that ultimate truth, that writers like Thoreau and Emerson tried to get on paper is like the hot piece of ass that you follow around, drooling. You know its there, it’s right in front of you, you just can’t reach out and grab it. You just ponder over what it would be like, had you violated the behavioral pattern you were conditioned for since birth and actually gave it a little pinch. Thoreau didn’t have real answers. He never reached out and grabbed a cheek. He just had this feeling that there is something inherently wrong with the way our species chooses to exist. And there is!

Thoreau was a hopeless romantic and a radical individualist, seeking personal wholeness, self-expression, and liberty and justice for all. In other words, he couldn’t have been more set up to become disillusioned! There’s a reason the terms “pessimist” and “realist” tend to go hand and hand! That’s because the lives we all choose to lead make those adjectives synonymous. Everyone seems to be hustling around to see all of their pressing matters attended to. Thoreau asked the question (and I sit, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for an answer), “What the fuck is the point?” I don’t know why I put quotation marks there. I don’t think he ever said that, so bluntly and without any semblance of eloquence, at least on record. The arenas of business and politics frustrated Thoreau to no end because they are subjects that seem to interest our species above all others, and just so happen to be the most worthless as well. We are all drones. I don’t understand why this doesn’t upset more people. Why do we have to “earn” a living? You’d think the only prerequisite to “life” would be being alive but its not. For reasons unexplained, we have to waste prime hours of sunlight (9 to 5), five days a week until we are too decrepit to serve the system that enslaves us any longer. Then! We get to “live it up” for a few years before it’s our turn to go. Fuck that. Perhaps, what Thoreau knew better than anyone else, is that we are all going to die. This “means to an end” thing we’ve got going is just distracting us from that fact. It lobotomizes us in a way. People get to focus on climbing the corporate ladder, unaware that one day soon, they will fall off and plummet into the dark abyss. I know none of us were there when this system was set up, but that doesn’t mean we have to buy into it now. That’s what Thoreau’s favorite address, “Life Without Principal” is about. He’s saying that yes, we are physically living, but we have no purpose. We should be doing things that matter to us. We should be doing things that make us happy. There’s an obvious and humorous irony that skips along with the fact that I have to write this essay for school. Oh well… someday we’ll all escape.