I'm Christopher Lighten, and this is Open Source.

It's Labor Day Week, 2023, and Henry David Thoreau is the heart of our conversation.

It's not with him, but it's driven by his example, American thinking at its best on the

matter of how to make a living.

I have no doubt that the Gabby man about conquered in the 1850s was our worker.

Experts surveyor, gardener, as many trades as fingers, he said.

Not to mention the writer of Walden and civil disobedience, of course, and a life journal

that came to two million words.

We read Henry Thoreau a new for his insight into our work, not his.

This often fruitless, driven, underpaid labor of the 2020s, and, other than that, our midnight

anxiety that chat GPT could take it all away.

I'm in the Harvard bookstore with our friend, the philosopher, John Cagg, who co-wrote this

pungent and personal handbook titled Henry at Work.

So part of this book is about going through the pandemic and also through a cardiac arrest

and bypass surgery and wondering what to do both with life and also work, and my wife

Kathleen and the kids were in conquered or in Carlisle very close to Walden pond.

And it was an occasion, basically, to think what would Thoreau say about our moment in

which the way that we work was being revised and questioned and the meaning of life was

also at the same time being revised and questioned.

And I had always thought about Thoreau as a sort of vacationer at Walden when I was in

elementary school and then in high school.

But as I began to reread Thoreau during this time, my position changed and I'll read

...