Last year around this time I posted a few thoughts on Socrates and Thoreau, specifically regarding the likely influence of a passage in Book VI of Plato's Republic on Thoreau's attitude toward mere professors of philosophy, who unlike true philosophers do not live according to the dictates of wisdom. The other day, while re-reading key passages in Plato's dialogues as part of my research on Aristotle, I suddenly realized that on the very next page in the 1804 edition of Plato's works that Thoreau borrowed from Emerson can be found the inspiration for Thoreau's attitude toward the news, best encapsulated in an aphorism from his essay Life Without Principle: "Read not the Times. Read the Eternities."
Here is the relevant passage from the Republic, in the translation that Thoreau would have read (Sydenham and Taylor 1804, p. 337):
For somehow, Adimantus, the man at least who really applies his dianoëtic part to true being, has not leisure to look down to the little affairs of mankind, and, in fighting with them, to be filled with envy and ill nature; but, beholding and contemplating such objects as are orderly, and always subsist in the same manner, such as neither injure not are injured by each other, but are in all respects beautiful, and according to reason, these he imitates and resembles as far as possible; or, do you think it possible by any contrivance that a man not imitate that, in conversing with which he is filled with admiration?
We can find significant echoes of these thoughts in Life Without Principle, such as:
Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair -- the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish -- to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself -- an hypaethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind's chastity in this respect.
And:
If we have thus desecrated ourselves -- as who has not? -- the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate ourselves, and make once more a fane of the mind. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
Thus Thoreau, as Socrates two millennia before him, had a deeper purpose for avoiding trivialities: to model himself on the highest principles of what is sacred and beautiful and divine in human existence.
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION