““To call a man "a complete failure" tallied both the economics of capitalism and the economics of selfhood; that is, the external and internal transactions that reckon how we see ourselves and how others see us. Soon a man would be nothing more nor less than his occupation. Thoreau ground this axe in an 1854 lecture called "Getting a Living," which he mailed off to the Atlantic Monthly-under the punning title "Life without Principle"-two months before his death. He complained that people called him "a loafer" for taking daily walks in the woods. Yet were he to spend the day as a timber speculator, denuding the landscape, he would be "esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."22””
