It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
–From “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau

In rereading Walden for the first time in twenty years, I see how much he was rebelling against social conditioning and mental sludge. His vow to live deliberately had more to it than simplifying his lodgings and his diet. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he writes. We are trapped by an enormous amount of peer pressure and willful make-believe.

“It is never too late to give up our prejudices,” he writes. “No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.”

He tells us to read the classics in their original languages (“I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature.”), to beware of technology (“But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.”), to value our private opinion of ourselves more than any public opinion (“What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”) and to stop checking the news (“Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels.”)

The practice of eating animals is another example of how we are blindsided by what is accepted as normal behavior: “I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”

I think Thoreau’s main enemy is the deeply human need to be approved of by others. We do things because everyone else does. We think things aren’t possible for us because we see ourselves through the lens of those maintaining the status quo. We are pack animals desperate for “likes” on Facebook. We are terrified of rejection. In rereading Walden, I see that Thoreau’s act of boiling everything down to its essence is an act of rebellion against social rules and regulations.

He moved into that tiny cabin in 1845 as a way of separating himself from the multitudes and trusting that voice inside his head. I’m sure his closest neighbors thought he was a madman.

Brother Luke was right: the cutting was better. When he did it, it was as if he was draining away the poison, the filth, the rage inside of him. It was as if his old dream of leeches had come to life and had the same effect, the effect he had always hoped it would. He wished he was made of metal, of plastic: something that could be hosed down and scrubbed clean. He had a vision of himself being pumped full of water and detergent and bleach and then blasted dry, everything inside him made hygienic again. Now, after the final client of the night had left, he took Brother Luke’s place in the bathroom, and until he heard the brother telling him it was time to go to bed, his body was his to do with what he chose.
–From “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara

I love that story Buddhist meditation-instructor Sharon Salzberg tells about her first meeting with the Dalai Lama in 1990.

“Your Holiness, what do you think about self-hatred?” she asked him.

After a pregnant pause, he answered: “What’s that?”

“How could you think of yourself that way?” he asked her after she gave him some clarification about the popular Western “cycle of self-judgment, guilt, unproductive thought patterns.” In the end, he emphasized that “we all have Buddha nature.”

But, wow, you don’t know self-hatred until you meet Jude St. Francis in Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life.
Jude has a horrific history of sexual and physical abuse that is parceled out in painful doses. Yanagihara’s thorough dedication to Jude’s every act of self-mutilation made me wonder at times if I were engaging in self-hatred simply by reading this book. After all, repetitive thoughts of self-annihilation are a poor habit for the mind to get used to. And sometimes I felt that the self-punishment was sensationalized.

But after finishing the novel, I admired the author’s ability to step into the darkness and stay there, stopping to savor every razor’s slice, every thought of unworthiness, every feeling of being despicable, worthless, and alone.

Is it cathartic in the end? Clearly Jude is the king of self-loathing. Most mere mortals can’t compete with their garden-variety inferiority complexes.

One thing Yanagihara captures is the sheer pain of life. Yet there are many characters in the book who love and support Jude. Somehow their compassion isn’t enough for him, but that is his choice. And now that I have finished the 800-page book and am no longer reading about Jude’s every shade of self-doubt and every flirtation with death, there is a sweet sensation of weightlessness. It hollows me out inside and makes me feel almost hopeful.