Thoreau To Obama: Play More Golf

Delmar Harmood Banner, "Solitary (The Wanderer and the Poet"

Delmar Harmood Banner, “Solitary (The Wanderer and the Poet)”

Carl Rosin, a friend and a fine English teacher at Radnor High School outside Philadelphia, contributes this post-Labor Day post reminding us why it is vital to our national health to keep reading the Transcendentalists, especially Henry David Thoreau. Carl is especially concerned about how students are overscheduled and neglectful of their inner lives. You will appreciate the Thoreauvian exercise that Carl gives his own students.

By Carl Rosin, English teacher, Radnor High School

Labor Day is over, and students and teachers, U.S. presidents and members of Congress, millions of Europeans, and many others have wound down their recent vacations and returned to school/work. The American mythology is awash in powerful ideas about the work ethic and productivity and progress, which may be why we as a nation are ambivalent about the idea of downtime or vacation.

We shouldn’t be. We should love vacation, and demand that everyone gets one. As the Transcendentalists would point out, “time off” is a boost, not a drain.

It is natural to assume that more time working results in more work done. The more important you are, the more the organization needs you to be on call. Some people – like the president – are expected always to be “ready.” This makes sense: there’s almost incomprehensible power in the position. But George W. Bush took a remarkably high number of vacation days (well over 400 by the end of his second term) while Barack Obama’s most recent vacation prompted a page one New York Times story. That recent Times news analysis by Peter Baker and Julie Hirschfeld Davis observed,

Presidents learn to wall off their feelings and compartmentalize their lives. They deal in death one moment and seek mental and physical relief the next. To make coldhearted decisions in the best interest of the country and manage the burdens of perhaps the most stressful job on the planet, current and former White House officials said, a president must guard against becoming consumed by the emotions of the situations they confront.

That said, the public burns when presented with the image of a leader trying to do this detaching and unwinding. Partisanship lurks behind it, to be sure, but there’s something deeper, something on the level of myth, that these partisan attacks hook their claws into.

Philip Sopher recently wrote about an aspect of this in The Atlantic. He investigated alternatives to the five-day workweek that expanded the weekend, but noted that “the five-day workweek might already have so much cultural inertia that it can’t be changed. Most companies can’t just tell employees not to come in on Fridays, because they’d be at a disadvantage in a world that favors the five-day workweek.”

Google and Intuit are two of America’s flagship corporations that have experimented with 20% and 10% off-project time, respectively. Google’s famous Friday Projects came under threat in 2013, but Wired’s Ryan Tate suggests it is a healthy part of the culture at the extraordinarily successful company. Dan Pink’s extremely engaging business book Drivehighlights Intuit’s 10% Project (n.b.: promoted in Pink’s book by that company’s former VP of Innovation, my brother Roy Rosin) and Twitter’s “Hack Week”. Counterintuitively – to some – time off could be said to equal better time on.

“Yes, but,” intone the critics. Productivity matters and that demands time on the job. The U.S. is among the top five nations in productivity and cannot afford to lose ground, they say. We didn’t get there by taking more vacations and working less time, they say. That last is certainly true: as Tanya Mohn reports in Forbes, the U.S. is the only advanced economy with no mandatory paid vacation for its workers. The average American worker puts out 160 more hours of work per year now than in 1976; with globalization and the decline of labor unions, it seems likely that the increase will continue. The ethos of harder work, more work – which has swirled around controversy regarding corporate profit, wage stagnation, executive pay, burnout, and unhappiness – wields a megaphone in our society. Its opponents are trying to raise a chorus to oppose it.

Nowhere is the intensity of workload more prominent than in the lives of America’s competitive students. Studies, sports, clubs, volunteer work, family responsibilities, and jobs absorb their time – and the looming college admissions process also keeps them awake at night. Workers in school and business both could benefit from stepping back and heeding the admittedly idealistic philosophy of Henry David Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists. The results might be surprising.

Thoreau doesn’t comment on weekends or vacations specifically, but he has a lot to say about how our essential humanity is plowed under when we find ourselves driven like an ox-team by the exigencies of work. Indeed, he can come off as entirely dismissive about work. The deeper vein, however, is of the importance of maintaining one’s self, perspective, and principles. This takes care, which we all deserve.

The first chapter of Walden, “Economy,” reminds us that we humans can be more than automatons:

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requires — who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Thoreau’s literary essay cleverly constructs this rhetorical appeal to reframe intense work as an offense to manliness, nature, and American values. He is surely aware that he is jousting against propagandists who use the Protestant work ethic to shame those who want time off and who impugn the manliness of any who refuse to take on the extra load of long hours. As one who regularly gloated about all-nighters and seventy, eighty, ninety hour workweeks, I can admit to having bought into that propaganda.

Thoreau famously decried how “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and how terrible it is to be one’s own “slave-driver.” Our anxieties and conformity drive us to disrespect our own principles in favor of appearances, property, and currying favor of others. Deeper in “Economy” Thoreau says the antidote is sleep – something that we know is in short supply for many of our fellow citizens, especially the poor who work several jobs, the caregivers, the ambitious, and students:

After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour…. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.

What is a better metaphor for vacation than the reinvigorating sleep that science tells us we must have if we want to remain strong and healthy? The benefits, Thoreau notes, are moral and intellectual, not simply physical. “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake,” he writes, “not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.”

The omnipresent critics say: impractical. Thoreau, in his next chapter, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” anticipates this.

If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

The quest to keep expanding degrades the quality of the expanders and the expansion. We are slaves to “progress.” I can’t help but be reminded of the consumerist dystopia satirized in Pixar’s Wall-E. We watch smugly…but to one who is inside a hamster-wheel, it’s hard to see the escape so clearly.

One assignment my co-teacher Paul Wright and I give to the very accomplished high school juniors in our interdisciplinary Viewpoints on Modern America class tends to get their attention. When we read Walden, the students are told that they have to spend thirty minutes a day for five days outside doing nothing. No reading, no talking, no texting, no video games, no hanging out with friends. Solitude out-of-doors. After each thirty minute session, the student journals briefly about what he or she noticed or thought, or even what other thoughts that observation or thought led to. We teachers check off these journals, but we don’t read them.

One or more of the journals will serve as foundational material for a reflective essay the students start to write during the days that follow. That essay assignment, designed by my colleague Trevor Payne several years ago, asks the students to start with the description stemming from an observation in nature and to move through the process of understanding what they were seeing, eventually developing an abstract piece of reasoning inspired by it. Something analogical, perhaps.

For example, a student may sit on the grass in a backyard watching the leaves fall (the assignment happens in early October). This may lead one student to consider the literal physical force of gravity and abstract it to the idea of the mighty falling, while another may consider the browning and reddening and yellowing of leaves as one natural articulation of the archetype of death and rebirth. Students have followed hundreds of different paths in their writing: how gardening revises nature, the illusions created by early morning fog, the fear that shadow and darkness spur in us. Whatever direction their essays take, this is the students’ opportunity to practice an Emersonian process that is derived from Immanual Kant.

Along the path from observing to understanding to reasoning lie opportunities for reflection. This takes time and care. In a world where quizzes and homework and reading pile up – and I am responsible for assigning some of these, I know – it is unusual to have to stop and step back: to paradoxically do something by doing nothing. The “something” is thinking, and it is the key to the fulfillment of our promise as human beings.

My rabbi Peter Rigler speaks eloquently about the power of the Sabbath, and not only for Jews. He says is is not something to be endured but to look forward to. He quotes Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who describes that day as creating “a cathedral in time”: an opportunity to break free from the mesmerizing dominance of the workweek and technology and busyness, to focus on the spirit. Our spirits need to be “fed” like our bellies do, but we too often overlook their needs because they neither bubble on the surface nor result in status.

Vacation in the most resonant sense, then, is not merely a removal from the must-do into the want-to-do. It is a seeking of stillness and the essence of individuality. When we look inside ourselves, is there anything to see? There will be, the Transcendentalists say, when we cultivate the way of the non-conformist. Perhaps the first few internal glances will reveal a depressingly sparse landscape, but any cultivator knows that seeds don’t sprout in a day.

William Deresiewicz, whose provocative new book attacks some icons of higher education in a way that Thoreau might have appreciated (Prof. Bates wrote about it recently), is much more deserving of praise for his 2009 speech, “Solitude and Leadership.” Delivered to students at West Point, Deresiewicz’s speech notes that it may seem counterintuitive for leaders to need solitude, but too many would-be leaders fail to include solitude in their personal regimens. It is in solitude that one builds the self who can lead others when the time is ripe.

I hope you got a real vacation this year, and that you’ll get one next year. I hope that you were able to use it not only to do exciting touristy things but also to ponder and be with yourself in reflection. More power to you, if you did.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

2 Comments

  1. WordPress › Error

    There has been a critical error on this website.

    Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.