One consistent difficulty I have had with blogging in recent months is the sense that the Henry David Thoreau meme just doesn't work anymore. I see the problem as twofold. First, Thoreau's philosophy and insights are part of a vanished world, the bucolic, arboreal world of New England in the 1840's, at the dawn of the Industrial Age where Thoreau, with his uncanny prescience and brilliance, sensed where mankind was headed and offered his cautionary ideas. To say the least, he was completely ignored except by certain iconoclastic thinkers who enjoy the fantasy of independent living.
At a more profound level, Thoreau's approach seems irrelevant. One can search his writings for signs of what we in modern times would call existential despair, but you just won't find it. Henry never says, for example, "...but even if you follow my approach, I have to warn you that life is pretty much a meaningless exercise anyway, so what's the big dif? Why not live it up and use up as much of the Earth as you can?"
This resonates with an intuition I have long had (untestable now in modern times) that existential despair arises from the actual conditions in which modern life is lived, and not because of a "baseline" philosophy that deep thinkers access through considerations of teleology.
Which is to day, we have created, for the most part, a garbage dump out of our natural patrimony, and pay the psychological price commensurate with this desecration. Given this situation, evoking Thoreau seems very much like casting pearls before swine, the pigs in question being us. Although, really, I like pigs.
Switching gears also allows me to use Blogger's newer features. I was trapped in the old format and lost the ability to see comments, for example. That was the result of Blogger going to Google +, I think, which I was never quite able to figure out, or at least could never adapt the old blog to the new format. So I will put the old wine in the new bottle, contrary to Biblical injunction.
It will take a while to trick out the blog with gadgets, pictures, et cetera. All in good time. But it will be fun to approach things from a looser perspective. Henry David Thoreau, after all, is something of a ponderous, though deeply wise, voice, whereas Woody Allen's Fielding Mellish is just kind of nuts, like the modern world.
