Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Tiny extract from Walden, which I tried / pretended to read as a teen. great example of a completely different ethos from mine. He opens with a little C18th verbal dance about how immodest and outré it is to write in the first person about your own life. I sometimes miss that norm, which he helped kill. Then there's the quiet misanthropy and primitivism inside certain forms of the love of nature, which I can't really attribute to him. And lastly the contempt for work, all work except food and shelter and confessional writing anyway. Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine tomorrow. As for work, we haven’t any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus’ dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still.