Two Minutes Dead

Thoreau’s most famous sentence, from the one guide for whom it is autobiography.

John Kaag on Henry David Thoreau's Walden

28 seconds, in their own voice

When I was brought back I immediately thought to myself, oh my gosh, 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. And so the scariest part of death isn’t the dying part, but it’s rather the looking back and realizing that you haven’t lived in the appropriate way.

John Kaag is a philosopher, and one of Rebind’s editors. In Episode Nine of his thirty on Walden, he reaches the most quoted sentence Thoreau ever wrote, the one about living deliberately so as not to discover, at the end, that you had not lived, and tells the truth about why he can’t talk about it calmly. At forty, he had a cardiac arrest. His heart stopped for two minutes.

That’s one episode of thirty of John Kaag on Walden, opening this fall at Rebind Classics.

The full series

30 episodes · John Kaag on Thoreau’s Walden

Why Walden, Why Now. Handed Walden at fourteen by a Latin teacher, Kaag walked the pond, made a promise about the rest of his life, and opens the series reading Thoreau as an ancient philosopher in American clothes.
Emerson's Land, and Ours. The pond was never wilderness, so Kaag puts the ground under the book before its first page: Emerson's woodlot, the citizen's bargain with the state, and the Concord of now, where the criticism turns around and finds him.
To Dwell. Kaag defends the dullest opening any classic ever risked, because the counting in Economy is the point: what a life actually costs, who keeps the books, and where the famous loner's boards really came from.

Show all 30 episodes

Quiet Desperation. Kaag tests the book's most famous sentence against its strongest objection, his own grandfather, who worked warehouses and never seemed desperate a day in his life, and the answer costs him something personal.
The Mortgage Mortgages Your Life. Thoreau itemizes his house down to the half cent, and Kaag runs the bill forward: the brand-new mortgage quietly spending his neighbors' lives, and the question of what a short life should be spent on.
Penance. Kaag's heart stopped at forty and the cardiologists could chart everything but the why; Thoreau knew the why, watching prosperous Concord do penance for gods it would never admit to worshipping.
Goodness Tainted. Thoreau turns on the one group nobody dares to question, the do-gooders, and Kaag backs him up with Plato's buried ring, a kindergarten story that still makes him angry, and an unflattering diagnosis of the philanthropist.
The Confessional 'I'. Readers have called Walden's "I" egotism for a century; Kaag traces it instead through Socrates, Augustine, and Montaigne, then faces the memoirist's question of where an account of a life becomes a monument to a self.
Why the Woods. Two Concord dates seventy years apart, a war at the North Bridge and a cabin on the Fourth of July, let Kaag ask what revolution Thoreau thought was still unfinished, while his own first marriage teaches what "deliberately" demands.
Two Minutes Dead. Kaag was dead for two minutes on a treadmill, so the most quoted sentence in Walden reads differently to him, and he can tell you what becomes clear at the place it points to.
Improve the Nick of Time. Kaag finds a private grief inside the small word "nick," then sets living deliberately against its enemy, Thoreau's railroad then and our feeds now, with a seven-day audit of his own frittered hours.
On Reading. Kaag hated books until his mother sat him down at the kitchen table, which is why he takes reading as athletic training seriously, gives Thoreau the snob a fair trial, and won't quite defend his own university.
The Owl and the Sick Soul. Night comes down over the pond and the owls start; Kaag, a self-described Jamesian sick soul, is honest about why their wilder, sadder call reaches him, then goes quiet and just listens.
Solitude Is Not Loneliness. Kaag argues Thoreau saw our feeds coming a century and a half early, gives the misanthropy charge a real hearing with Hannah Arendt's help, and ends on his favorite question in the book: the one Thoreau puts to the dirt.
Three Retreats. Three times Kaag ran for the woods, at fifteen from his house, at twenty into the Alps with no food or map, at twenty-eight from his father's death, and the retreats explain why tragedy sends us toward the wild.
Three Chairs. Kaag takes Thoreau's three chairs seriously: the melon parties that acquit the hermit, the bare table and mile's walk that filter the company, and the woodchopper who may be a simple man or a Shakespeare.
Knowing Beans. The happiest, most mystical chapter in the book, read through Kaag's five-foot mother, who talked to the ground until the ground talked back, ending at a piano with Liszt's answer to what a beautiful sentence means.
One Night in Jail. Walden spends a single sentence on a night in jail, and Kaag follows it to Gandhi, King, and the Underground Railroad, ending on the hardest knot in Thoreau's politics: a man of nonviolence applauding a man of blood.
Thoreau Anticipates Marx. Kaag packed trucks in a Pennsylvania warehouse at fifteen, so he knows alienated labor from the inside, and makes the most provocative case he can defend: with Lowell's mills ten miles off, Thoreau anticipated Marx.
The Pond Will Tell You Who You Are. Six weeks after bypass surgery, Kaag tried to swim across Walden in April water and lets the pond deliver its verdict on him, the way Thoreau's humble religious site measures anyone who enters it quietly.
The Satellite Dish Bigger Than the House. Quiet desperation has a mechanism, and Kaag takes it apart with John Field's leaking roof and a Montana house dwarfed by its own satellite dish, which he passed at twenty-two and has been thinking about ever since.
The Gun That Shot Photographs. Kaag grew up hunting birds with binoculars because his grandfather built him a gun that shot photographs, and that contraption unlocks Higher Laws: the hunter maturing into the naturalist without losing the instinct.
The Loon Is Thoreau. Boyhood summers among loons convinced Kaag the bird is Thoreau's self-portrait, eccentric, mournful, and austere to the point of grace, and behind that reading waits transcendentalism's central claim, which has political teeth.
Burnt Woods. Concord called Thoreau "Burnt Woods" after his campfire took three hundred acres, and Kaag reads the reverent first fire as atonement, testing autumn's lesson, that things are precious because they pass, at his mother's hospice bedside.
Brister Freeman and the Prophet of Walden Woods. Before the cabin, Walden Woods was where Concord put the people it did not want to see, and Kaag reads Thoreau's writing down of his formerly enslaved neighbors as prophecy, and as a trap with two exits, both costly.
Wyman, Quoil, and What Masks. Kaag has reached for the bottle and watched his father die of it, so he reads Thoreau's ruined neighbors more personally than most, asking whose failure the ruin was: theirs, or the dream that manufactured their shame.
Questions the Morning Answers. Some questions can only be lived through, and Kaag knows it from the worst year of his life; then a hundred men saw the frozen pond into blocks, and the chapter becomes a mirror he admits he cannot flatter himself in.
Wildness Is the Infrastructure. Rebirth is really forgiveness, Kaag argues, the fixed and the sorrowful breaking open, as spring reads two ways at once: wildness as the quiet infrastructure holding civilization up, and Easter moved to a pond in Concord.
He Leaves for the Reason He Came. Thoreau's most honest sentence is his exit line, and Kaag takes it as a warning that even the deliberate life hardens into a rut, then follows the daimon Socrates knew by name to what castles in the air are missing.
Do Not Hate Your Life. The final pages answer the old Greek verdict that it is better never to be born, and Kaag, who has walked with this book most of his life, ends where it does: one command in the title, and a bug asleep sixty years in a kitchen table.

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