William Powers, from Hamlet’s BlackBerry (2010)

from Hamlet’s BlackBerry

William Powers

The following passage is excerpted from “The Walden Zone,” a chapter in Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age (2010), by contemporary journalist William Powers.

At a time of rapidly growing connectedness, Thoreau disconnected. He was the great escape artist, and escape would seem to be his message. If you want to take back your life, Get out! Or, as he puts it in Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived… . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

The essential problem hasn’t changed, nor has the goal. Who doesn’t want to live the fullest, deepest life they possibly can? For the overconnected soul wishing to apply Thoreau’s message, however, the sticking point is his method. As a practical matter, not many people have the freedom to escape society—jobs, family, and other obligations—and hole up in the woods. In any case, very few of us want the pure solitude that Thoreau seems to be advocating when he writes, “I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

It’s the rare person whose ideal of home is a cabin for one in a neighborhood without neighbors. Part of what’s always been special and invigorating about the typical home is that it makes solitude available within the context of the larger social environment. It’s an intermittent respite, a space into which one retreats briefly at regular intervals, to emerge later refreshed.

Today there’s another factor that makes Thoreau’s approach seem not just unappealing but downright pointless. Even if we wanted to run away physically from society, in a digital world there’s no place to go. With ubiquitous mobile connectivity, you can’t use geography to escape what he called society, because it’s everywhere. If you have a screen of any kind with you—and who doesn’t these days?—you haven’t left society at all.

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But to dismiss Thoreau for these reasons is to miss the whole point of Walden and its relevance to our time. In fact, he wasn’t trying to escape civilization, and what he created at Walden Pond was not even close to pure solitude. As for ubiquitous technology, it’s true that the world was a lot less connected in the middle of the nineteenth century than it is today. However, Thoreau lived through a major technological shift, the arrival of instant communication, that foreshadowed the current one. The woods weren’t wireless in his era, but for the first time in history they were getting wired, and the wires were carrying information around the world at unimaginable speeds. Thoreau saw the enormous human implications of this change, and he structured the Walden experiment so that it spoke not just to his own time but to the technological future he saw coming.

In a world where it’s increasingly hard to escape the crowd, can you still build a refuge, a place to go inward and reclaim all the things that a too-busy life takes away? Thoreau says you can, and he offers a practical construct for making it happen… .

But can we apply Walden to our time? Thoreau may have been close to town, but he wasn’t holed up with the rest of the planet, as we are with our screens. Given that digital technology has so altered the landscape of modern life, and particularly life at home, is it a stretch to think Thoreau could have anything useful to say to us?

Not at all. Though it’s true that he lived in a very different information environment from today’s, he and his friends and neighbors really were living close to the rest of the planet in a new way. Previously, information could travel only as quickly as the swiftest mode of physical transportation, which was trains. With the arrival of the telegraph in the 1840s, messages could suddenly dart from place to place instantaneously. Oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges were no longer barriers. All it took was a wire. The notion that one could now theoretically keep up with anything and everything happening on Earth, and around the clock, was both thrilling and unsettling. An East Coast American of Thoreau’s generation wasn’t just increasingly connected to the wide world, he was increasingly immersed in it, and he needed to manage that immersion. What to read? What to care about?

This was a subtle but significant shift in the nature of inward life, and everyone was grappling with it. “A slender wire has become the highway of thought,” observed the New York Times in an editorial published on September 14, 1852.

Messages follow each other in quick succession. Joy spreads on the track of sorrow. The arrival of a ship, news of a revolution, or a battle, the price of pork, the state of foreign and domestic markets, missives of love, the progress of courts, the success or discomfiture of disease, the result of elections, and an innumerable host of social, political and commercial details, all chase each other over the slender and unconscious wires.

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With a little updating of the language, this could be a description of the moment-by-moment randomness now offered by any digital screen. There was simply a great deal more information bearing down on everyone, and even the home was no safe haven. In The Victorian Internet, a history of the telegraph, Tom Standage quotes W. E. Dodge, a prominent telegraph-era businessman from New York, describing the plight of a family man battling information overload:

The merchant goes home after a day of hard work and excitement to a late dinner, trying amid the family circle to forget business, when he is interrupted by a telegram from London, directing, perhaps, the purchase in San Francisco of 20,000 barrels of flour, and the poor man must dispatch his dinner as hurriedly as possible in order to send off his message to California. The businessman of the present day must be continually on the jump.

In other words, the telegraph was the latest agent of the “quiet desperation” that Thoreau saw all around him and felt in himself. Devices meant to relieve burdens were imposing new ones, pulling people away from life’s most meaningful experiences, including the family dinner table. “But lo! men have become the tools of their tools,” he wrote, and though he wasn’t specifically referring to the telegraph, elsewhere in Walden he made it clear that the slender wire could make tools out of people. New technologies, he said, are often just “pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things… . We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Yet at other times, he wrote about the telegraph in a hopeful, lyrical way, suggesting he saw the wonder of the technology and perhaps its potential to do good. “As I went under the new telegraph wire, I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead,” he noted in his journal. “It was as the sound of a far-off glorious life.”

Naturalist that he was, it’s often assumed that Thoreau loathed technology. In fact he was a sophisticated user, and occasionally a designer, of technologies. He never made much money from writing and supported himself by working in two different tool-intensive fields: as a surveyor and in the pencil-manufacturing business owned by his family. At one point he took on the ambitious project of reengineering the Thoreau pencil so it might fare better in a competitive marketplace. He worked hard on it, conducting extensive research into why certain European-made pencils were so superior to their American counterparts. Based on what he learned, he changed the materials, design, and manufacturing process of his company’s pencils, essentially developing a brand-new product. His efforts were a great success, producing “the very best lead pencils manufactured in America” at the time, according to Henry Petroski’s The Pencil, a history of the tool.

Thoughtful student of technology that he was, Thoreau saw that as the latest connective devices extended their reach into the lives of individuals, they were exacting huge costs. They’re the same costs we’re paying today—extreme busyness and a consequent loss of depth. The more wired people became, the more likely they were to fill up their minds with junk and trivia. What if we built this fabulous global telegraph network, he wondered, and then used it only to keep up on gossip about celebrities? “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile a minute does not carry the most important messages.”

That is, he saw that instant communication had the potential to exacerbate the very problem he had gone to Walden to solve, the superficial, short-attention-span approach to life that afflicted his friends and neighbors and often himself. They were all living from one emergency to the next, he writes at one point, consumed by their work, always checking the latest news… .

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Once the consciousness was hooked on busyness and external stimuli, Thoreau saw, it was hard to break the habit. Never mind the telegraph, even the post office could become an addiction, as he observed in a speech:

Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip… . In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters proud of his extensive correspondence has not heard from himself this long while.

This is the problem of our time, too, of course. And it’s what he went to Walden to solve. The mission: to see if, by building a home at a slight distance from society—disconnected, yet still connected in many ways—and living there thoughtfully, he could go back inward, regaining the depth and joy that was being leached out of everyday life.

Among all those who were struggling with this challenge in the mid–nineteenth century, Thoreau was unusually well situated to find an answer. Concord was the center of American Transcendentalism, a philosophical movement that provided a rich vein of pertinent ideas. Transcendentalists believed that true enlightenment does not come from other people or outward sources such as organized religion, scientific observation, and books; rather, it comes from within. The profoundest truths about existence are available to each of us through intuition and reflection.

It was a philosophy that spoke directly to a time when trains and telegraph lines, as well as industrialization and other forces of modernity, were pulling people in exactly the opposite direction—outward. The crowd seemed terribly important and powerful in those days, just as it does now, and it was hard to resist its influence. It was as if you had no choice but to submit, fall in line. The Transcendentalists believed that resistance was crucial. Emerson, the movement’s leading figure, wrote in his great essay “Self-Reliance” that to be truly happy and productive, you have to tune out the crowd and listen to “the voices which we hear in solitude.” In another piece, Emerson described a Transcendentalist as a person who essentially wakes up one day and realizes, “My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world.” And then does something about it.

Guided by this philosophy, the Walden project was really an exercise in practical reengineering. In this case, the device that needed redesigning wasn’t a pencil but life itself. Thoreau’s method was to strip away the layers of complexity that outer life imposes, to “Simplify, simplify,” as he wrote, and, in so doing, recover that lost depth. As Thoreau scholar Bradley P. Dean puts it, “By simplifying our outward lives, we are freer and better able to expand and enrich our inward lives.”

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The heart of the effort, serving as both headquarters and object lesson, was Thoreau’s tiny house and the life he constructed there. It was seriously spartan, reflecting the simplicity creed. But there was another kind of simplicity that mattered even more than the material kind: simplicity of the mind. Though the house was right in the midst of civilization, close to town, in sight of the railroad, and within easy reach of visitors, he defined it as a zone of inwardness, and that’s what it became… .

Zoning is way overdue for a comeback, a digital revival, and it’s surprising it hasn’t happened yet. Thoreau could be the model. Our situation is different from his, in that the crowd is no longer just nearby—it’s right in the home, wherever there’s a screen. So our zoning has to be interior. Every home could have at least one Walden Zone, a room where no screens of any kind are allowed. Households that take their tranquillity seriously, and have sufficient room, might designate such a space for each person. There could be a shelf or cabinet outside the doorway where, upon entering, all smart phones and laptops are turned off and put away.

The wireless signals in those rooms won’t go away, of course, and that’s a problem. But as with Thoreau, the point of the zone is to use an idea as a constraint on behavior. For a Walden Zone to work, you first have to believe it’s a good idea; once you do, it’s a lot easier to resist temptation. The mind puts up an invisible wall, which blocks the invisible signal. Technology could help, too. Perhaps a canny entrepreneur with an eye to the Thoreauvian future will come up with a device that scrambles wireless signals in any designated space.

The opposite of a Walden Zone would be a Crowd Zone, any room specifically designated for screen life. Home offices would be automatic Crowd Zones for most people. Since the kitchen is a natural gathering place in many homes, it’s a good Crowd Zone candidate. In a thoughtfully zoned house, a kitchen with floor-to-ceiling wall screens begins to make sense. Connectedness is much more appealing and rewarding when you know there’s a place nearby to get away to.

Another option is whole-house zoning, in which the entire dwelling becomes a Walden Zone during certain times of the day or certain days of the week. This requires more commitment, as it means truly swearing off screens during designated times. The advantage of this approach is that it creates a genuine refuge, as Thoreau’s house must have been on quiet winter nights when the town seemed a thousand miles away. My family has had great success with a regimen of this kind… .

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The point is not to withdraw from the world but within the world. It’s funny that Thoreau, of all people, should be the source of this wisdom. But remember, Walden was just a two-year experiment. When it was done, he returned to society and lived the rest of his life there. But he took a valuable piece of knowledge with him: you can go home again, whenever you need sanctuary, so long as you have a home that serves this purpose. It doesn’t have to be far off in the woods or up in the mountains or anywhere special. It’s not the place that matters, it’s the philosophy. To be happy in the crowd, everyone needs a little Walden.

“You think that I am impoverishing myself by withdrawing from men,” Thoreau once wrote in his journal, “but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.”

(2010)