Crispin Sartwell
The following op-ed piece by philosophy professor and writer Crispin Sartwell appeared in the New York Times on May 2, 2012.
I’m a Thoreauvian philosopher. I realize that sounds pretentious, but I do live more or less alone in the woods, in an old one-room schoolhouse amid orchards, trying to “front” nature. I’ve actually had several Waldens here in central Pennsylvania, though as it happens, none of them have ever been too far from a Walmart. And since I’m constantly in there, I probably shouldn’t pretend I hate it.
One day, somewhere near the peanut butter, I ran into my occasional acquaintance Greg.
“Hey, man!” I said. “Nice day.”
“Is it? I can’t deal with it, nice or not,” Greg offered in return, tossing piles of two-for-one items into the cart, as one does when one has three daughters at home. “It’s the change. I’m not ready.” It turned out he was referring to the simultaneous menopause of his wife and puberty of his middle girl. Nothing he could say or do, he claimed, didn’t cause the people he loved to scream in his face, burst into tears and run to their rooms.
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Now, the degree of intimacy Greg and I mustered near the peanut butter might appear excessive, though it was encouraged by the fact that we are both guys and share, though not with Thoreau, the experience of raising daughters.
It was also made possible by the excellent social vibe of a Walmart in small-town America. I’m liable to see Greg again sometime around Christmas. I’ll tell him I’m having prostate issues, or that I’m under indictment, or whatever it may be that day.
We are at a cultural moment when living in close proximity and having many close friends and a ceaseless embracing community are thought to be unalloyed goods. “Bowling alone” is our shorthand for personal despair and social disintegration.
However, as I dare say you—like Jean-Paul Sartre1—have noticed, people can be annoying. We need distance from, as much as we need association with, one another. Thoreau tried for both: he would walk from Walden Pond to Concord, hang out with his dear friends the Emersons and the Alcotts, and then retreat to his hovel to be fairly happily alone.
If on such occasions Thoreau was thinking in his reflective way that human beings are animals and that what we do is natural, then he did not consider his stroll into Concord a departure from nature but an exploration of a bit of it. And this is the way I feel about Walmart, which—big-box island in a blacktop sea—is a perfectly natural object, as much an environment as my woods.
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Walmart is no Concord. And if Greg will pardon my saying so, he is no Emerson or Alcott, though possibly he is a better golfer than either. Then again, he is also not my dear friend. He’s just a guy I’m happy to run across in Walmart. He’s generous enough to give me sudden access to his life, without placing me under an obligation to do anything more than giggle and cluck. Ours is a perfectly good, serviceable relationship, shaped as it is by long aisles of distracting merchandise and extensive shopping lists.
Like Thoreau, I am an anarchist berry picker. Like Thoreau, I lack both easy charm and extreme social desperation, the very features of personality that fit human beings for society. Like Thoreau, I am trying to reduce my expenses to something close to my income.
Unlike Thoreau, I have cable. Yet Thoreau and I commune, more or less the same way that Greg and I do, across space and time. And that’s how I can assure you that, if Thoreau were around today, he’d be pushing a cart through a Walmart three miles from Walden Pond with a bag of socks, a gallon of milk and a Blu-ray player, nodding pleasantly at people he sort of recognizes.
(2012)