The Business Of Living.

"Henry at Work

By John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle

(Princeton, 203 pages, $27.95)

In November 2021, John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle published an article in Fast Company magazine called "What Thoreau Can Teach Us About the Great Resignation."

A year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, white-collar workers around the world had learned that many of the trappings of the traditional job -- conference rooms, commuter trains -- might not have been necessary after all. White-collar and blue-collar workers alike had learned that showing up for work could literally kill you.

One response was what's been called the Great Resignation. More and more people questioned whether their paychecks were worth what it cost them. For as Thoreau writes in "Walden," "the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."

In their article, Messrs. Kaag and van Belle, both scholars of philosophy, summarized Thoreau's own struggles with making a living. Having graduated from Harvard just in time for the Panic of 1837, Thoreau looked for work in Maine, taught school for a time with his brother, and looked for work in New York City. Then, in 1845, the year he turned 28, he built a simple house by Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass., where he lived for two years, two months and two days.

Messrs. Kaag and van Belle call the move to Walden "opting for a life of resignation." But in Thoreau's case, resigning from paid work didn't mean an end to labor. Along with building his house and growing beans, he applied himself to the task of becoming a writer, completing a draft of "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and much of what would become "Walden, or, Life in the Woods."

Developing the ideas presented in Fast Company, Messrs. Kaag and van Belle have written "Henry at Work," a short book that uses Thoreau as a springboard for thinking about the nature of meaningful work. Lively and informal, it will prompt fruitful conversations about the role of work in our lives. Scholars of Thoreau, however, may find that it doesn't go far enough into Thoreau's own rigorous thinking on the subject.

The problem of making a living is at the heart of "Walden." In its very first sentence, Thoreau makes a point of saying that during his time at the pond, he earned his living "by the labor of my hands only."

Pages of the "Economy" chapter of "Walden" are devoted to the hardships of earning a living in the way most people do. "I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways."

Thoreau's message: It doesn't have to be that way.

"I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do."

How did Thoreau solve this problem in his own life? By reducing his needs to the minimum, "for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." He lived in his parents' home, he had few possessions, and he avoided the expense of consuming meat, alcohol and coffee.

The chapters of "Henry at Work" include "Resignation," "Clocking In," "Manual Work," "Meaningless Work," "Immoral Work," "Compensation" and so on. These seem like the right topics to address, but one would like to see them addressed more deeply.

Meaningless work, for instance, is the subject of the late David Graeber's 2018 book "Bullsh*t Jobs." In it, Graeber argues that roughly half of the work being done in our society, mostly in the private sector, doesn't need to be done. Graeber believes that the holders of bullsh*t jobs know it on some level and pay a psychological price. Thoreau would surely agree, but it's not a subject explored in "Henry at Work."

Messrs. Kaag and van Belle quote from Thoreau's writings on work but move quickly toward relating these thoughts to current events, anecdotes from their own lives, and seemingly random people like Craig, a 22-year-old who says of his job as a salesman at Home Depot: "I get high before I go work. It is just easier that way."

Rather than hear from Craig, I would like to know the authors' thoughts about the many times in Thoreau's journal when he compares himself to the god Apollo, required to tend the cattle (or as Thoreau has it, the sheep) of King Admetus.

"Who is King Admetus?" he asks in August 1851. "It is Business, with his four prime ministers Trade and Commerce and Manufactures and Agriculture." And as he noted the month before, "trade curses everything it handles."

Messrs. Kaag and van Belle are not ivory-tower philosophers. They believe that philosophy can be applied in practice to make our lives better. Yet their language suggests that they don't take Thoreau as seriously as they do their previous subjects Friedrich Nietzsche and William James. "The self-styled gurus and captains of late capitalism would have driven him utterly bonkers," they write.

Though Mr. Kaag lives in Thoreau's hometown of Concord, he and his Oregon-based co-author slip up on some Thoreauvian details. Thoreau did help his father build the family's so-called Texas House, but the house wasn't moved from a different location. Thoreau never "crept through the Estabrook Woods, stalking a deer for a peek." Though deer are overabundant in today's Concord, they were completely absent in Thoreau's day.

Messrs. Kaag and van Belle deserve credit for bringing attention to a central theme in the work of an important American writer. Their book is, to use their own phase, "of this moment": one in which "a vast number of people are resigning their traditional posts" and "forgoing compensation for meaning." Still needed is something built to last: a wide-ranging scholarly study of Thoreau's philosophy of work and mastery of the business of living.

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Mr. Wisner is the editor of "Thoreau's Wildflowers," "Thoreau's Animals" and the forthcoming "A Year of Birds."" [1]

1.  The Business Of Living. Wisner, Geoff. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 07 June 2023: A.15.