1 - “A False Position in Society”

Summary

Until [a man] can manage to communicate himself to others in his full stature and proportion, he does not yet find his vocation. He must find an outlet for his character, so that he may justify his work to their eyes.

Emerson (CW II, 83)

I must confess I have felt mean enough when asked how I was to act on society – what errand I had to mankind – undoubtedly I did not feel mean without a reason – and yet my loitering is not without defence.

Thoreau (PJ 1, 339)

Like many of his Harvard classmates of 1837, Henry Thoreau left Cambridge for a provincial world in which times were hard, jobs scarce, and prospects uncertain. Ultimately the Panic of 1837 would cause less practical suffering among middleclass New Englanders than was initially feared, but for the literary-minded of Thoreau's generation the apparent collapse of the economic order served to confirm an alienation from commercial America already widely felt and in some cases profound. By any objective measure Emerson vastly overdramatized the case in “The American Scholar” when he described “young men of the fairest promise” who “are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire,” and who “turn drudges, or die of disgust, – some of them suicides” (CW I, 69).