“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline toward the religion of solitude.” – Aldous Huxley

Justin Vernon went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately. He wished to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to route all that was not life… to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the genuine meanness of it and publish it to the world…

Oh, wait a minute.

That wasn’t Vernon at all, was it?

Maybe it was Chris McCandless, or those wacky kids over at Welton Academy. Or maybe it was Ted Kaczynski. Could’ve even been that “Fire walk with me” guy, come to think of it.

Nope. That doesn’t sound right either.

Alas! I’ve got it. It was Henry David Thoreau that got all sturdy and Spartan-like.

You remember Thoreau, right? He was the Emerson type who got so fed up with rules and such that he packed it in, grabbed an axe, and built himself an old-fashioned log cabin right there along the banks of Walden Pond.

Sure, you remember Thoreau. Who could forget?

His two years, two months, and two days spent in the woods outside of Concord, Massachusetts provided the backdrop for the most influential testament to Transcendentalism ever written. But his words could have just as easily applied to countless others who have disappeared into the wilderness since then, in search of answers, or themselves, or—in the most rudimentary of senses—distance from everyone else.

Thoreau viewed the woods as a place where he could “transact some private business with the fewest obstacles,” and where he could awake every morning to “[his] own genius,” rather than “the mechanical nudgings of some servitor.” 

It was in that same spirit that Vernon (Bon Iver) spent an entire winter in the Wisconsin woods last year. Vernon saw the woods as a place where he could recharge his battery, while reclaiming a part of himself that had gone missing.

Thoreau built his cabin on a plot of land owned by Emerson and described it as a place where “the morning wind forever blows, [and] the poem of creation is uninterrupted.” Vernon shacked up in a hunting lodge owned by his father, and described it as a place where he could see “death on a sunny snow.”

Thoreau emerged from the woods with Walden under his arm.

Vernon emerged with For Emma, Forever Ago under his.  

That’s not to say—by way of comparison—that Justin Vernon is some sort of modern-day Thoreau. Nor is it to say that 150 years from now academics the world over will sit around debating the relative merits of “Skinny Love.”

But it is to say that self-imposed exile does have its perks.

There are no dress codes or table manners in the woods, no pecking orders or chains of command, critics or Catholicism. There are only those rules in which a person chooses to live by.

Depending on which book you read, that’s either a very good or a very bad thing.   

A person could become Ralph, or he could become Jack. He could become Andy DuFresne or he could become Jack Torrance; Robinson Crusoe or Colonel Kurtz.

You see where I’m headed with this.

Point is, solitude has a way of shaking dandruff from the senses, of allowing people to view the world through an unfiltered lens. And it also serves as a reminder that nature is a powerful force, not to be fucked with.   

A man can still go to the woods if he wishes to live deliberately. He can still split and reevaluate when the world turns to shit around him. He can still find something innately good about the idea of hibernation. 

The problem is that most of us live in a world where distractions are the order of the day. Given the choice between spending an afternoon alone with an empty canvas and playing a quick game of Snood, the majority of people would opt for a quick game of Snood. 

Why not? Snood rocks.     

Maybe Thoreau was right. Maybe people really want something to be. Maybe the lot of people never find what that something is because they’re too busy working themselves to the bone in pursuit of someone else’s something. Maybe the mass of men do “lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Maybe Justin Vernon’s three-month stint in the woods is the only reason he’s not pumping gas on the outskirts of Raleigh right now.

Maybe.

And maybe there are certain questions people need to answer for themselves. 

Watch: Bon Iver, “Flume“  [at youtube.com]

Watch: Henry David Thoreau “Walden Pond” [at youtube.com]

Read more from the Switchback:

Sons of Rock: Rufus Wainwright vs. Julian Lennon

1967 Psych: Pearls Before Swine vs. The Beatles

Mine vs. Gut: Built to Spill and Band of Horses