The Thinker 103
understanding of others, and sometimes with persecution. But the
potential reward is great: the thinker may actually come to see life
as, in itself, it truly is, not only for the pre sent but for the past and
future as well; not only for his own culture, or the culture of the West
or the East, but for all cultures, all men and women.
The thinker is, fi rst of all, poor: he is poor in youth to be sure,
and if middle and old age do not fi nd him in modest circumstances
at best, there is reason to believe he has betrayed his calling. He lives
simply— Thoreau calls it the life of voluntary poverty— because a
commitment to simplicity allows him to take his mind away from
what does not matter. All material striving takes place in time— gray
grinding Chronos— and the timely, the opportune, and the dead-
line impede genuine thought. The thinker must rise above time,
just as he must rise above conformity and the demands of what
Heidegger calls the They- self, if the thinker is going to achieve his
goals. So, in his own fashions, he follows the example of Socrates,
who wears a simple tunic summer and winter and is rarely seen by
his contemporaries wearing shoes.
Like Thoreau, he is inclined to hang on dearly to his old clothes:
Thoreau is, among many other things, a phi los o pher of clothes. He
tells us to beware of any enterprise that requires new ones. No man
ever stood lower in the estimation of Thoreau— the Socrates of
Walden— because he wore a patch on his pants. If you have anything
daunting to do, Thoreau says, do it in your old clothes. New clothes
are an attempt to create a new self, without the attendant labor that
goes into au then tic self- remaking. Plato’s guardians wear simple
tunics; their natures, the phi los o pher claims, are of gold, but their
garments homespun.
Socrates reputedly said that we must eat to live, not live to eat.
The thinker avoids complex foods; he generally despises sauces and
chefs. Thoreau’s preference for corn mash, the beans he sowed and
reaped and ate so as, he says, to “know beans,” and the woodchuck