keyword "feed" title "big fish, little pond" in misc. flash fiction

Henry David Thoreau wrote about the thrills of splendid isolation in the vastness of his New England wilderness in a cabin a mile-and-a-half from town, where he could walk back to the family home to get his laundry done in forty-five minutes, where he could feed his soul with the myth of roughing it and feed his belly, nonetheless, with his mother’s picnic lunches.

He never commented on the dissonance, of course, that his great transcendental back-to-nature New Age monster was constructed upon a mud puddle close enough to Boston’s suburbs to still hear the train whistles blow at noon but then, that wasn’t his job. He’d gotten rich reformulating how to make good pencils cheaply, it was his to say who he was and what he did with the rest of his life’s idleness. A million other wags have pointed it out, of course, I needn’t dogpile on his long-digested corpse.

Rather, I will just say, it mattered to him because he believed it. Yes, he may as well had been living in a treehouse off Snickers and Capri-Suns but in his mind, he was a minor mountaineer and in the end that is what mattered. I’m not saying you should buy the myth yourself and think that you are communing with the gods by living in the changing shed beside an in-ground pool, but one must also remember, it was real to him.

It serves a purpose to tear down our gods, especially for good reason when the firmament their deification was built upon was a quicksand of delusion, but hopefully that purpose is to chase down what truth we can find in the fog of history. Having some idea of what the past was really like is in its way important, of course. The problem is when we tear down the little white lies of yesteryear, just to feel more evolved, to feel smarter, to clear the grounds that we might better place ourselves up in that place instead as gods. As much as we must appreciate what happened back through our own echoes, it’s just as important to consider the value of our asking why.

Henry David Thoreau believed he was a new survivalist, even if he may as well have been two bus stops away from the mall, and he wrote up some amazing inspiring things because of it, he made us think new ways about nature’s balance, even if he was fooling himself at least a little. What ultimately matters aren’t the veracities of his inspirations but rather the work he did and what we the people trying to build our own statues of selves manage to do with it.

In 2015, the state of Massachusetts had to release the warning that we should no longer swim in his Walden Pond, so polluted had it become by tourists and well-wishers flocking there to chase down old Henry David’s dream. Perhaps that’s the thing we should be worried about instead. Conservationists, perhaps, conserve thyselves.