How deeply do we live? How fundamentally do we live? Lying on the other side of the great stream of the Atlantic Ocean, America once held out the promise of a land on which to base a new ethos, or mode of dwelling on earth. No such luck. The oceans that separate also unite, and Thoreau’s nation as a whole now swims in the streams of opinions, delusions, and the old ways. Thoreau is the American exception who must search for the ground of life under the alluvion that engulfs even his own country.
—Robert Pogue Harrison
We live in a world that traffics in rumors. From prophet to disciple, neighbor to neighbor, nation to nation, the word circulates in whispers or in sermons, binding the living to the dead and the dead to the yet unborn in chains of persuasion.
Society depends upon our natural disposition to assume what we are told: that the gods are of such and such a nature, that the “good” lies in this or that direction, that we are on the earth to meet a set of obligations. We feast or starve at the table of laws, being believers. Sometimes we even believe in “freedom.”
Freedom too is a rumor, as long as one merely believes in it. The pilgrims who set off for America sought in their separation from the European homeland a margin of freedom from the old tyrannies and prejudices of tradition. They arrived on a forested continent, a “well-wooded land,” and undertook an experiment in independence. To what did it lead?
To more parishes of the predicted and predictable.
Concretely speaking, to an even more insidious enslavement to nationhood, property, economy, industry, spectacle, and the monstrous institution of rumor called the press.
By the time Henry David Thoreau took up residence “in the woods, a mile from any neighbor,” the collective experiment of American freedom was over. The neighbors were already in their slumber. It was merely “by accident,” he says, that Thoreau went to live at Walden on “Independence Day” in the year 1845.