Reading Reading

John Kaag warns you before the chapter "Reading" in Henry David Thoreau's Walden: Thoreau comes across as a total grump here, scolding his neighbors for spending their literacy on garbage. Kaag admits his own hours lost to clickbait and then gives the critique a lineage. Emerson's "American Scholar," from the late 1830s, worried that readers leaned on past scholars until they lost their own experience; Thoreau goes one step further and says that by the 1850s Americans had stopped reading altogether, at least in any deep sense.

The pairing with "Sounds" is the point you'd miss. Deliberation, for Emerson and Thoreau, was never just thinking things through; it meant being receptive, open to what Kaag's mentor John McDermott called "every sensorial nuance." So the questions shift from what you read and whether it has ever changed your life to what you can hear right now and why Thoreau is so careful about it. Both chapters, Kaag says, answer the same demand: live deliberately.