Criticism & Thoreau

<-- Thoreau, brave enough to sport "neck-beard"

We recently had an interesting essay topic concerning the value and importance of criticism. Here is a short excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's Walden that we covered in class which has some relevance to the topic,

"But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes, -his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say, richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes... ...Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives."

To quickly summarize Walden, for more than a year Thoreau went out to a pond near his hometown, Walden Pond, built a hut and lived on his own away from society. He didn't have to spend any money and was in complete solitude. He was mostly interested in exploring the possibility of escaping the rules and expectations of society to explore an individual life.

In this quote Thoreau makes an interesting point by making us think: Why do we buy new clothes when our old clothes work just fine? A lot of this has to do with expectations - we want to fit in, we want to look as nice as other people, we consider ourselves "fashionable". But Thoreau seems especially interested in how clothes are connected to our work. If we buy new clothes we are probably doing so because we don't want to face the criticism of dressing differently from everyone else. We want to fit in with the crowd. Once we fit in, we escape criticism. But Thoreau wants us to consider changing our souls before we change our clothes.

You might argue that Thoreau wanted to escape all criticism and only deal with self-criticism, he felt the best critic was internal because it knows itself best.