To pen a hobgoblin

A Thoreau debunking

I awoke in the land of Marecia, and not for the first time.

The sun peaked over the eaves of a county jail with walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, and I found myself pressing on its heavy door of wood and iron, the grating receding from my eyes to reveal the indoor shade of the jail’s nineteenth-century lobby.

“Good day, Ralph,” said the attendant to someone entering just behind me. I turned to see a man with a serious gaze and a stately nose striding past me to confirm that he was here to see “Henry.” Having no apparent purpose of my own, I joined Ralph being ushered to the iron bars that held Henry inside his newly whitewashed cell.

“Now you’ve done it,” said Ralph to Henry. “Here you sit, my fine student in a cage like an exotic hobgoblin at the Zoo of Fools.” His severe voice was belied by the proud grin on his face.

Henry displayed himself by turning about in the cell with pompous arms. “Nay,” he said. “I finally reside in the only true place for a just man. After my latest contemplations, I could no longer pay this poll tax, such a paltry monstrosity, and so I had to put my hapless neighbor, the local tax collector, to the test of enforcing it. He passed.”

The student and his teacher chuckled.

“I see, then,” said Ralph, “that you have struck a consistency between your behavior and your principles.”

Henry’s eyes twinkled. “Aye,” he declared. “And now I am locked behind bars. How foolish am I?”

“A foolish consistency…” I mumbled, feeling a tickle in the schoolboy part of my brain.

Ralph turned to me. “Yes,” he said. “My dear Henry wanted to make fools of the little statesmen who corrupt our history even as it unfolds. With their dead and dry consistencies, they keep the empty-headed conventions that hold up slavery and slaughter. But no sooner had Henry begun, then he found himself forging a dubious consistency of his own.”

Henry shrugged through the bars. “I could hardly pay the tax after such recalcitrant thoughts, could I?”

“Of course not,” said Ralph, patting him sweetly on the shoulder through the bars. “That would be terribly inconsistent.” Ralph turned to me again and demanded, “What say you? Is Henry foolish?”

“Uhh, well,” I replied, “Being locked up is never good. You can’t fix anything or convince people of anything from in here.”

“Do not doubt my pen!” cried Henry. “It is mighty enough to shout through these iron bars, which only serve to inspire me with words for the ages. They contain me no more than the invigorating air I breathe!”

“His pen cannot be penned,” chortled Ralph.

“Good point,” I replied. “Maybe not all consistencies are foolish.”

“Of course not!” roared Ralph. “If I could somehow take back one thing from all my years,” he lamented, “It would be the silly notion that I denounce all consistency! As if by ‘foolish consistency’ I meant to declare every consistency foolish and to embolden every half-wit who trapped himself in the sublime structure of truth to wriggle free by branding the nearest opponent a hobgoblin!” His hands covered his eyes, and he shook his head.

“I have a remedy,” said Henry thoughtfully, “if our guest would oblige by serving as our scribe.” Through the bars, he handed me a beautiful fountain pen and thick linen paper to match.

The two of them directed me to draw a large grid, two boxes high and two boxes wide. We labeled the top row “Foolish” and the left column “Consistency.” In the corresponding box went the words “hobgoblin of little minds,” and I drew a stick figure there to represent Henry pointlessly rotting in his cell.

“But if we give him a pen,” Ralph coached me. “Down here,” he added, pointing to the box beneath.

I looked at him blankly, then filled the awkward silence by drawing another stick figure in the lower box of “Consistency.” Ralph was still staring expectantly, so I added a pen in the stick figure’s hand.

“With his mighty pen,” I ventured, “he no longer foolishly wastes his time in jail.” Ralph nodded. Henry looked into the distance as if composing words in his head. Beside the lower box, underneath the label “Foolish,” I wrote “Not Foolish.” Ralph grabbed the pen, crossed it out, and wrote, “Wise.”

“The wise Henry,” I began.

“The wisely consistent Henry,” Ralph corrected.

“With his pen,” I continued, “to make his captivity no longer foolish…”

“He is no hobgoblin now!” declared Ralph.

“That’s right!” I answered. “He is a… valiant… true… wise person!”

“A professor,” suggested Ralph. “A teacher.”

“A shepherd,” concluded Henry, “of great minds.”

“I like it!” Ralph said.

“A wise consistency,” I summarized. “Is the shepherd,” I repeated, writing it in the lower-left box, “of great minds.”

There was a bustle back out in the lobby, where another visitor had opened the heavy door of wood and iron and was now finishing a businesslike conversation with the attendant. That led to the attendant poking his head into our hallway and announcing that Henry would be released shortly. The visitor had paid Henry’s tax.

“Oh-ho!” chortled Ralph with great mischief. “That brings us to the right-hand boxes!”

I tried to think of an artful label to write above those boxes, opposite “Consistency,” but Ralph again grabbed the pen and wrote “Inconsistency.”

“A foolish inconsistency,” crowed Ralph, “would be what, pray tell?”

Henry looked ashen-faced. “A foolish inconsistency would be to return to the comfort of my home, canceling my civil disobedience to slavery and slaughter, just because some kind, thoughtless soul has paid my share of it.”

“What’s more mindless than a hobgoblin?” I asked. “Maybe… a zombie?”

“The zombie of empty minds!” announced Ralph with a giggle. I jotted it in the “Foolish inconsistency” box. Only one empty box remained.

“I shall have to stay,” mumbled Henry, “resisting my eviction from these premises, so that I may remain true to my conscience, to continue to do at any time what I think is right…”

Ralph winked at me and retorted, “Only if you want to be consistent.” He straightened his jacket in preparation to leave.

“Or is it not a man’s duty,” Henry continued, pacing and muttering, “as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him…”

“We really must be going,” announced Ralph with glee. “Good luck with your decision, Henry!” He ushered me back to the lobby and out the heavy door.

We walked back the way we had come, though I had no memory of it, and spent several minutes in silence. Then finally I asked, “What about the last box?”

Ralph let out a pensive breath. “The wise inconsistency. Yes, yes indeed. It is the crown jewel, isn’t it?”

“What do you think Henry will do?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s a smart one. He’ll figure it out. He can’t stay in that cell forever! But his hard words of today will be misunderstood, their flat forms like shadows on the wall mistaken for the transcendent truth from which they are cast.”

“That last box really has the deepest thinking, doesn’t it?” I replied. “You have to see how the words fail, even while they make the most sense. Like a... guru?”

“A sage…” mused Ralph.

“A fortune teller…” I offered.

Ralph stopped us and grabbed the pen again. He filled in the final box and recited, “A wise inconsistency is the prophet of deep minds!”

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CrowdHealth is where rugged individuals gather together… collectively… to pay each other’s medical bills.

Now that’s a wise inconsistency!

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Notes

“Self-Reliance,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series, 1841.

Online source: The Project Gutenberg eBook of Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day… To be great is to be misunderstood.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

That famous excerpt is often cited in the shallow manner that so peeves our Ralph character. Adding depth is the following, and many similar passages, from the same essay:

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind… let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not… Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.

— also Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

Self-Reliance, Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Reliance

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson

“Resistance to Civil Government,” by Henry David Thoreau, 1849.

Online source: “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” by Henry David Thoreau

My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer… How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace…?

— Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” a.k.a. “Civil Disobedience”

Never does Thoreau plead for a “right of civil disobedience” to keep him out of jail, as if pursuing a national hobby licensed by the very State he protests. Quite the opposite:

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up… I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.

And, though it is not our purpose today, we must pause to admire Thoreau’s opening line:

I heartily accept the motto,—‘That government is best which governs least;’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.

How are today’s legions of “liberal” English teachers coping with this line? Has it yet been struck from their texts? Have they stopped teaching Thoreau and his transcendentalist friends with the breathless wonder of The Dead Poets Society? My money is on raging cognitive dissonance.

Civil Disobedience (Thoreau), Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_(Thoreau)

Henry David Thoreau, Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau