with commentary by John Kaag
John Kaag reaches the most quoted sentence in Walden and tells you why he can't read it calmly.
From Episode 10 of thirty, John Kaag on Walden. Listen to the whole episode: Two Minutes Dead →
So we've reached a section in Walden that is probably the most quoted part of the entire book. And he writes, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." What does that passage mean to you? To me it registers in a few different ways. First of all, when I had bypass surgery, and before that, when I had a cardiac arrest at the age of forty after hopping off of the treadmill at University of Massachusetts Lowell, when I died for two minutes before the EMTs brought me back with their little defibrillator, when I was brought back I immediately thought to myself, oh my gosh, like, I am so lucky, because I get a chance to try again at this thing called life. But most people, when they die, they really don't come back.
John Kaag is a philosopher and one of Rebind's editors, and Henry David Thoreau's Walden is the book he has carried since a Latin teacher handed it to him at fourteen. The episode this comes from, Two Minutes Dead, stays inside a single sentence, the one everybody quotes, and he opens by telling you why it was never abstract for him. At forty, his heart stopped on a treadmill. For two minutes he was dead.
The clip stops one sentence early. What he says next is what the scary part of death actually is, and it isn't the dying. From there the episode follows Thoreau's sentence back to Socrates, who thought an unexamined life was worse than death, and forward to the death in Thoreau's own family that taught him to write it.
Listen to the whole episode: Two Minutes Dead →
Thirty episodes. John Kaag on Henry David Thoreau's Walden, for members.