Simplify, Simplify

'Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.' Thoreau wrote this as an imperative, not a suggestion, and the doubling was not rhetorical. He knew that the first impulse of a complicated life, upon hearing 'simplify,' is to complicate the simplification — to add it to the list of things to do, to make it another project, another optimization. Saying the word twice was emphasis born of the conviction that what he was asking for was so contrary to every cultural pressure that repetition was necessary for the instruction to land. His simplicity at Walden was not aesthetic minimalism — the tasteful curation that substitutes fewer, finer possessions for many ordinary ones. His simplicity was structural. It was the systematic removal of everything that consumed life without contributing to living, enacted with the ruthlessness of a surgeon removing tissue to save the patient.