Yet, while the townspeople were looking upon him as a loafer, Thoreau was then, in the late 1830s and early 1840s, mapping out his strategy to become as famous and influential a transcendentalist writer and lecturer as Emerson. He tried teaching again in 1838 with his brother John, and they conducted what today would still be considered a progressive school. But this was only a tangential interest for him; he had already decided what his primary vocation would be. In 1837, he had begun his journal, the workbook to which he would practically devote his life and in which he would perfect his art. Until his death in 1862, Thoreau religiously worked day in and day out at this occupation of which the scoffing townspeople were ignorant. To realize the intense seriousness with which he pursued it, one can profitably read through his journal of 1838. There one finds the anxiety of the struggling, would-be master craftsman whose work does not yet meet his own standards of excellence:
But what does all this scribbling amount to? What is now scribbled in the heat of the moment one can contemplate with somewhat of satisfaction, but alas! tomorrow — aye, tonight — it is stale, flat and unprofitable — in fine, is not; only its shell remains like some red parboiled lobster shell which, kicked aside ever so often, still stares at you in the path.
In short, Thoreau was deadly serious when he took up his pen — so serious that, as was usual with Thoreau, he probably revised and polished the above complaint several times before he entered it in his journal.
