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One of the many strange and contradictory things about the land of the free: it is the country whose citizens complain most about their own unfreedom. Here’s my favourite Independence Day story, told in the lapidary prose of the Stamford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Thoreau went to Walden Pond on the anniversary of America’s declared independence from Britain — July 4, 1845, declaring his own independence from a society that is “commonly too cheap.” It is not that he is against all society, but that he finds we meet too often, before we have had the chance to acquire any “new value for each other”. Thoreau welcomes those visitors who “speak reservedly and thoughtfully”, and who preserve an appropriate sense of distance; he values the little leaves or acorns left by visitors he never meets. Thoreau lived at Walden for just under three years, a time during which he sometimes visited friends and conducted business in town (it was on one such visit, to pick up a mended shoe, that he was arrested for tax avoidance).

It’s all in the brackets. Happy July 4th.

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