Thoreau posits and reposits the question of what, at the very least, we can add to ourselves in order to live most fully. For it is in adding to ourselves external things, that we diminish our inner resources, and our capacity to see clearly. His is a stripping away of the addition process itself--the "common" human means and attitudes towards work endeavors, where motives and objectives are mismatched to the processes by which by which we pursue what we seek. There is always an opportunity cost at stake--each thing external, by covering, distracting, clouding the essential things, smothers us--mediates our connection to the world and makes us dependant on the mediator, rather than on our own internal resources--our intellectual lives and the consciousness of our most personal and direct contact with the world.
Thoreau reverses the way we conceive of addition, because the addition of the "external heat, greater than our own," diminishes our capacity to access "our own internal" resources (12). By adding on or clothing or creating something new around us, whether it be heat, clothing, shelter, or art, we forego, to some degree, the cultivation of already-existant matter we have inside us. This is a strange economy, strangely ego-centric, and yet conservationist to the extreme, reversing the way we thing about human/nature transactions, in that neither is dependant on or independent of the other.
Thoreau demonstrates the lengths to which we go to procure and ascertain "external" things, even at the expense of our own bodies, and how we readily lay ourselves to waste pursuing things outside ourselves. This is the case with the man who walks to town with a broken leg in order to buy new pants. It is, similarly, the case with fashion in clothes and art, which arises like fuel, from a desire to improve or increase onself by acquiring something else--ultimately social approval and status which work against the very objectives from which they stem. Thoreau illuminates the faulty logic in the way we work--our "cookery" (12)--and the giant breach between what we desire and how we approach it, and he goes to great lengths to compress the perceived breach between what we need and what we truly desire--that they are closer than our economy would have us to believe.
Our cookery seems to stem, to some degree, from a fear of taking oneself seriously, and the kind of escapism that ensues from this fear. He speaks of a fear of looking inward and inward change, and a resistance to questioning, which we tend to cope with by changing and covering and amassing what is external. Inheritance of property and sacred texts, alike, suggest an unquestioning and blind acceptance that perpetuates itself, further mediating and therefore distancing the individual from his/her world--it is not his/her world without the conscious choice to inhabit one's own place in it.
Furthermore, cookery seems to be the opposite of conservation--that through complacency, or active "cookery"-- by devoting our time and efforts to creating new things outside ourselves, we lay waste to what exists already and bring into existance more waste. Surely an aesthetic position follows from this. As such, it seems that Thoreau would have to be opposed to Buell's "world-making," that is, if it stops at the world of the text. If acts of our creation serve the essentials, and bring to the surface what is most necessary for life, it seems to follow that creative work should serve to, much like Bachelard's Poetics, stimulate one's own attention to personal (intellectual and physical) experience, and to thereby forge a greater connection to the physical world. I'm not sure if I fully believe the link between Bachelard and Thoreau yet...
Certainly, though, Thoreau places a great responsibly place on "The Professor" to not "profess" what is not also lived, as the writer must not facilitate the breach between man and himself, must not produce only leisure or escape, another layer of clothing or shelter or fuel. Thoreau cites travel reading, romance and noveldom which are allow us to go somewhere else at the expense of self-reflection--and how without reference to the self, and reality, we "suffer the nobler faculties to sleep the while" (74). There is always a reason for doing things--and it is our responsibility as conscientious humans, writers, and readers, to know why we are doing what we do, and to examine ruthlessly the methods by which we pursue the things outside ourselves, and what we forego--even waste--in so doing.
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Kelly--wonderfully written post. It does lead me back to Ben's comment, though, about the nature of Thoreau's own text, one he purposely did NOT simplify, but one that grew, inexorably, through accretion, through the adding of externals... if the book is a coat (as Thoreau suggests at the beginning) then the chapters of Walden add many layers to it. Did Thoreau want to challenge us, faced as we are with his proliferating, extremely allusive text, to perform the work of simplification ourselves?
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