Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify

My great grandma Malvina had a black crater in her leg that I could put my finger in. She looked a me with big serious eyes and said it was from a tick and ticks are everywhere so I should inspect my skin carefully after playing outside. For a long time I imagined that tick inside her leg, feasting on leg parts and building its tickly mansion in the depths of her quadriceps, padding the nest for its writhing maggoty offspring. I was disgusted and fascinated and I always inspected, secretly wondering: if I found a tick, should I just go ahead and let it build a castle? Don't ticks need a warm and safe place too? Maybe we could set up a symbiotic sort of arrangement... I rearrange the corporeal furniture and make room for one tick family in my lower right extremity, they wheel and deal with their fellow parasites to keep me otherwise hale and hearty. It had its possibilities. But sadly, no candidate appeared.

Grandma Malvina and her husband Grandpa Ernie had a farm, and Mom used to visit her in the summers. Mom told us how when she was a girl it was her job to hold the chickens by the feet as Grandma Malvina stuck their heads through a metal cone and lopped them off. Dinner was squawking away in the henhouse one minute and being plucked and parboiled the next.

A generation later and in the sanitized suburbs, my dinner was dependent not on what Grandpa shot or whose feathers Grandma had just plucked, but on which odorless, plastic-wrapped package of muscle was on sale for 99 cents a pound. No blood, no feathers, no squawking, no dirt. No connection to the earth. No suggestion of a farmer except the stylized cow on the butter packaging.

For exactly that reason, I was fascinated when I ran across a copy of Walden on Mom's bookshelf in high school. Thoreau's sense of connection, his idealism, flowed smooth like honey off the page and mingled with my own. "Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." I knew just enough about myself to look up and see the bottoms of my castles. And in Walden maybe I'd found an instruction manual for constructing the foundation.

My construction manual was shelved for a while until Human Expression, that most hated of Core Courses, designed to introduce physics geeks and business majors to The Joys of the Humanities. I lucked out and got an ethnomusicologist who made every topic sing. And when we got to Thoreau, he sang "Simplicity."

"Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, simplify, simplify. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness."

I've been close enough to simple living to see that this is true. I did a year of volunteer service. I had little to no pocket money, and didn't once feel poor. We had the world at our feet, we had thousands of entertaining ways to spend an evening. We built our castles in the air and lived in them, rent-free.

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand. Instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail."

I'm trying, Henry David. I'm trying. Sometimes I feel like I do have a million affairs in the air, when really I want to ditch them all and build one simple castle, nestled up all parasitic-like in someone else's universe. One dream. One life. One castle.