The Satellite Dish Bigger Than the House

A thunderstorm drives Thoreau under the leaking roof of Baker Farm, near Walden, where John Field lives with his wife, his children, and a list of wants that keeps him poor. Kaag has met Field's descendants. At twenty-two, driving a Honda Civic across eastern Montana, he passed a house dwarfed by its own satellite dish, and he has been thinking about that dish ever since. Quiet desperation, it turns out, has a mechanism, and this chapter takes it apart: what the wanting does to a man, why a Talking Heads song understands Walden, and the bargain most people have already signed without reading its one crucial clause.