Today I’m supposed to start being an adult. I asked my mom this morning if I looked like an adult and she said “no.” But what does an adult act like? And lots of people who are older than eighteen don’t know either. I pointed out adult means “grown” in Latin, and that sounds too final for me, like you’re already finished living or something. Adolescent, on the other hand, an adjective usually reserved for the youthful period of physical burgeoning (okay, I’ll say it—puberty!), actually makes more sense to me as a word for people of all ages who still consider themselves to be growing. That’s what the -sc- infix in adolescere indicates: it is an “inchoative verb,” intrinsically evolving and ever-changing, continually becoming. My favorite of this class of verbs is rubesco, to grow red, to blush. I am continually growing redder and redder in the face! My parents named me well.
I not only don’t look like an adult. I don’t feel like one either. At least not in the sense that I don’t want people to tell me what to do anymore. Gee, I need the advice! My parents can’t send me to my room anymore. But what if I deserve it? Sometimes it’s hard to know when you’re in the wrong without a few minutes’ distance. In a way I wish they still had that power over me because I don’t know if I’ll use my freedom for the better.
My mom also said that “you show your maturity in each situation.” Maturity is more than taxes, mortgages, and colleagues. It’s how you comport yourself.
So if all that’s the case then this is just the beginning of my moulting season, as Cavell describes Thoreau’s time ‘in the woods.’ Thoreau just happened, ‘by accident,’ to begin his solitary residence at Walden Pond on the Fourth of July, the American Independence Day. His abode was “not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks.” If we’re reading Walden (and I hope you’re reading with me), as Cavell does, as an esoteric work, then we can take the cabin to be the whole project, the reexamining of a life. It was not finished for winter—he is not completely ready. It was merely a defense against the rain—he has realized he must take himself away and that is half the work done already. Thoreau is not completely autonomous, as he admits. He is, after all, living on his friend Emerson’s land. But he is self-sufficient in the sense that he can physically sustain himself and intellectually stimulate himself.
“To be a philosopher,” Thoreau writes, “is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” This is his declaration of independence, cheekily delivered on the same day as his country’s. In his nation state of Walden Pond he must solve the problems of life, simply, independently, magnanimously, and faithfully. He announces his intention to live differently, but that does not mean that he is entirely equipped to do so. It is not a clean detachment but a period of intense growth and change, simultaneously negotiating some unseverable bonds. Thoreau was born only a generation after America became a country. Along with his near contemporaries, Thoreau is figuring out where he is living and what he is living for.
So I declare my independence from—that is, my intention to live without—teenage self-consciousness, internal turbulence, and external boorishness. I intend to live deliberately, courageously, and generously. I now have the freedom to choose to behave rightly, instead of being reminded to do so. I am very much dependent on my family, my teachers, my friends, and I would not wish it to be otherwise.
My house is not finished for winter, but it does provide defense against the rain.
