The other Walden

by Les

Lately I’ve been introverting. I had such great plans earlier this month, only to be stymied by some events. So I decided to crawl into my shell, where one feels safe (whether this is true or not). Synchronistically enough, I’ve been reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, where she reflects on certain insects. Grasshoppers, mantises, moths, giant water bugs, and so forth: Possessors of exoskeletons, quite unlike us, whom Dillard describes as “soft-side-out.”

Which is why, I’m thinking, I need my shell. My Great Wall, my cave. At home, the presence of another person (who has, once upon a time, rifled through my journals) is so draining, I want to cry. I love her, but these days when I go home, I just want to be alone. I want to go to my alone place where nobody disturbs me, nobody judges me, nobody makes demands, nobody makes me do anything or be anything. The world is so distracting. It eats you up until nothing is left but a vague wistfulness.

Or maybe I’ve just had enough of where I am. For more than 10 years I’ve been angsting about not being a match with my school, the school of the superficial, the extraverted, the technocratic, the facile. I don’t want to be really old by the time I realize I’ve spent my one life in a place where I had never belonged. Thoreau wrote that the mass of men lived lives of quiet desperation. I’m going to need a lot of courage to change certain things. On my terms.

In front of Thoreau's woodpile beside his hut, in Walden, Massachusetts