Today I’m beginning a new segment of Journey Casts, the Quote of the Week, where I’ll take some time each week to peruse my book shelves, pull down a book, set down a quotation, and say a few things about it. I’ll work to keep these short, direct, hoping to share some insights, observations, images…with you, from the many, varied books I have lining the walls of my house. You can easily find these under the new “Quote of the Week” section on the homepage. I will also include a link to the book, if I can find one, where you can purchase it, if you like, on my affiliate page at bookshop.org. I encourage you to add a favorite quote of your own in the comments section or respond to the quotation.
Today, I found myself thinking about when I used to teach Thoreau’s Walden and how in discussion, I once said something like, “it’s as if so many of these lines could be on bumper stickers or in a fortune cookie”—and two girls surprised the class later that week with a big batch of homemade fortune cookies, a quotation from Walden inside each one! I still have those handwritten “fortunes,” and even a few never-eaten/never-opened (though now crumbling) cookies.
The quotation:
“Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.” Thoreau, Walden
While I don’t wholly agree with Thoreau here, and I think what one wears can be a highly expressive, even artistic choice, I love the writing, the metaphor of having “sailed in some way” that we feel “new” enough to actually require new clothing. The “new wine in old bottles” simile is classic Thoreau, and the general sentiment here, along with his famous entreaty to “live deliberately,” is worthy of consideration, inviting us to link even our most mundane choices to deeper objectives. This whole opening chapter, “Economy,” is worth reading carefully in this era of “Fast Fashion” and impulse Amazon ordering. Beneath it all is the call to work to make oneself “new,” to become better—morally, intellectually, spiritually—and not to only think of “betterment” as having to do with acquiring material possessions.
This fully annotated edition of Walden from Yale University Press looks incredible. It’s going on my wish list.