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A sappy Thoreau misquote becomes a viral meme online
14 November 2010
I came across a quote allegedly from Henry David Thoreau's work, Walden, today, and it bothered me that it rang false. The attributed quote was, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
Humbug. What Thoreau actually wrote in Walden was, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."
Nowhere in all his works (especially not in Walden), did Thoreau write that sappy suffix about going the to grave with the song. Someone much more recent made it up.
But this misquote is spreading online faster than the common cold in a nursery school. It completely misrepresents what Thoreau said! And there are entire blog pieces and essays built around this misquote - which entirely discredits the author if he or she is too lazy or stupid to confirm the authenticity of the quote in the first place (e.g. see The Rants, Veronica Drake, Associated Content and One Spirit Project, just a few of many such sites that attempt to build a comment or argument based on a mistaken quote. Can you trust the rest of what they say, knowing that? Obviously not! They become just more digital detritus).
It also thoroughly discredits the hundreds (maybe thousands) of amateur quotation sites that blindly add this mistake to their list of quotations as if it were authentic without even a gesture made towards confirming it.
I wrote about this sort of misquote getting into popular usage a year ago, using a misquote from Shakespeare. A meme, of course, is a cultural or social idea that spreads like a virus through the population. Think of the Internet as a petri dish to incubate it faster. The New perpetuates all sorts of superstition, urban legends, pseudoscience, quackery, fraud and egregious mistakes like this one.
Another blogger named Tasmin Smith found this earlier than I did, and wrote,
The misquote is, according to this Walden Woods Project page, a clumsy conflation of partial quotes from Thoreau and Oliver Wendell Holmes:
You can read and search the entire text of Walden online, including here: www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm and confirm this yourself. Once again, this underlines the inability of millions of people to use the Internet as gospel instead of using some basic common sense and critical thinking.
Humbug. What Thoreau actually wrote in Walden was, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."
Nowhere in all his works (especially not in Walden), did Thoreau write that sappy suffix about going the to grave with the song. Someone much more recent made it up.
But this misquote is spreading online faster than the common cold in a nursery school. It completely misrepresents what Thoreau said! And there are entire blog pieces and essays built around this misquote - which entirely discredits the author if he or she is too lazy or stupid to confirm the authenticity of the quote in the first place (e.g. see The Rants, Veronica Drake, Associated Content and One Spirit Project, just a few of many such sites that attempt to build a comment or argument based on a mistaken quote. Can you trust the rest of what they say, knowing that? Obviously not! They become just more digital detritus).
It also thoroughly discredits the hundreds (maybe thousands) of amateur quotation sites that blindly add this mistake to their list of quotations as if it were authentic without even a gesture made towards confirming it.
I wrote about this sort of misquote getting into popular usage a year ago, using a misquote from Shakespeare. A meme, of course, is a cultural or social idea that spreads like a virus through the population. Think of the Internet as a petri dish to incubate it faster. The New perpetuates all sorts of superstition, urban legends, pseudoscience, quackery, fraud and egregious mistakes like this one.
Another blogger named Tasmin Smith found this earlier than I did, and wrote,
Quote
Henry David Thoreau’s most famous words are being stalked by a lyric doppelganger. Readers of Walden, will recall Thoreau admonishing those who lamely deep-six free will and choose the numb comfort of resignation over the wild abandon deliberate living. Here’s the crescendo: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Ouchy. That line always makes me howl just to prove I still can.
But what of this new shadow? An opening has emerged from the shade of a full stop, a parade of foundling words now follow the progenitor in numerous listings across the internet. Several popular quotation sites offer us this Thoreau: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
I’d be downright miffed on Thoreau’s behalf (he did die after all in 1862); if something about this mysterious orphan attachment didn’t intrigue me. There’s more to it than even Thoreau’s own notion that some step to the beat of a different drummer. What I hear in this misquote is the suggestion that each of us has a distinct and singular tune that is core to us as individuals. It’s not so much that some can pick up a groovier beat than others, but that every soul has a unique melody line of his or her own. It’s an inner power not an external frequency that needs to be tuned in. Thoreau’s an example of someone who not only dialed in his own song but turned it up to volume eleven for the rest of us.
But what of this new shadow? An opening has emerged from the shade of a full stop, a parade of foundling words now follow the progenitor in numerous listings across the internet. Several popular quotation sites offer us this Thoreau: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
I’d be downright miffed on Thoreau’s behalf (he did die after all in 1862); if something about this mysterious orphan attachment didn’t intrigue me. There’s more to it than even Thoreau’s own notion that some step to the beat of a different drummer. What I hear in this misquote is the suggestion that each of us has a distinct and singular tune that is core to us as individuals. It’s not so much that some can pick up a groovier beat than others, but that every soul has a unique melody line of his or her own. It’s an inner power not an external frequency that needs to be tuned in. Thoreau’s an example of someone who not only dialed in his own song but turned it up to volume eleven for the rest of us.
The misquote is, according to this Walden Woods Project page, a clumsy conflation of partial quotes from Thoreau and Oliver Wendell Holmes:
Quote
Misattribution. Second half of this quotation is misattributed to Thoreau and may be a misquotation or misremembering of Oliver Wendell Holmes' (1809-1894) "The Voiceless":
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them.
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them.
You can read and search the entire text of Walden online, including here: www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm and confirm this yourself. Once again, this underlines the inability of millions of people to use the Internet as gospel instead of using some basic common sense and critical thinking.
