Looking for & Listening to America

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America
All come to look for America

Paul Simon sang about it, John Steinbeck took his dog Charley on the road and wrote about it, Charles Kuralt filmed a popular TV series about it. For as long as the United States of America has existed as an idea and a location, we've been endlessly "looking for it."

In doing my work on Henry Thoreau and the American punk rock ethos, I have been doing the same. That has included reading quite a few individual "takes" on Thoreau and what his thoughts were about the nation. Truly, I believe Henry's entire body of work was about exploring and exposing America's failure to live up to the promise of its premise. Yet, even as he drew that conclusion, Concord's favorite son was also filled with hope about what America can be.

So, in taking a look at some of my Thoreau explorations, I was pleasantly surprised to find a grand experiment from Clay Jenkinson called Listening to America. The Thoreau connection came from a reflection called "Reading Walden and Wrestling With Thoreau." Published last year on the final day of 2024, Jenkinson spent some time with Thoreau's magnum opus, Walden, or Life in the Woods, and found the work both challenging and inspiring. Which is good because that's exactly what it should be.

Alone on the northern plains, I have the whole day before me and several important books to read. The principal task of the day (how can I call it a task?) is to read much of Thoreau’s Walden. Yesterday and on Christmas Eve, I read “Economy,” the first and longest chapter of Walden and the one that causes the most frustration. Here’s why. If you add up all the passages in that opening chapter about Thoreau building a cabin near the shore of Walden Pond, they occupy only a handful of pages, maybe four or, at most, five. The rest is “argument” in several senses of the term. Most readers of Walden chafe at the complexities of “Economy” and just want Thoreau to build the damn cabin and start observing Nature. Ah, but Thoreau is not in any hurry to do that.

So what is he asking of us? Above all, he wants you and me to look closely at our lives — along Socratic lines, on the principle that the unexamined life is not worth living. Thoreau wants you and me to ask ourselves what we surround ourselves with and at what cost. And “cost,” it turns out, is not merely the number of dollars you had to lay out for whatever it is, the number of days you have to work for your _______ (boat, home theater, lake cottage, Mercedes, jet ski, wedding ring, etc.), but for the larger and more important “costs” — the opportunity cost (what else might you have done with your finite time and money), the cost to the poetry in your soul, the cost to your happiness, the cost to the principle of distributive justice, and (now) the cost to the planet Earth.

Beyond that reflection, however, I sort of went down the rabbit hole and explored more of Jenkinson's site, which is focused on the important task of "listening to America."