Word: walden
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...moment, $80,000 and up. That is the tag on a custom-made "contemplative environment"-the latest extravaganza offered in the Neiman-Marcus department-store Christmas catalogue. "Very basically, it's enclosure, the womb," declares the environment's design chief, Richard Stonis. While it is not exactly Walden Pond, the plush private world is like a self-contained dollhouse that can be outfitted with film screens to show custom-made movies, a stand-up bar, isometric exercise equipment, a round water bed and anything else the purchaser might desire...
...Skelton's psyche. Skelton is a modern Thoreau. A refugee from prolonged drug miasmas and the turbulence of modern society, Skelton has retreated to his hometown to slow down his pace of life and get back to the core of his being, allowing just the essential eccentricities. His Walden is the ocean surrounding Key West...
Henry David Thoreau went into the woods to confront what he grandly called "the essential facts of life." Spartan-like, he observed flowers blooming, raindrops falling, seasons changing. Of course, the essential facts of Thoreau's life included Emerson's loan of the cabin site at Walden Pond and such genteel activities as frequent walks into Concord for civilized conversation and home cooking. H.D.T. had it both ways, which is more than can be said for the nature he wrote about. The shadow of the surveyor and his Damoclean plumb bob had already fallen across the land...
This underlying system of attitudes is more manifestly at work in the Twin Oaks community than in Walden Two, because the former lacks much of the scientistic veneer which cloaks these attitudes in Skinner's work. Behaviorism is, in this context, a vehicle by which Skinner advances the prejudices of an age in the imposing guise of "objective understanding...
...hope at all for Twin Oaks, and any redeeming feature of its concept, it is to be found in the basic good faith of its members (sometimes a naivete), which often makes for a certain easy trust, sympathy, nay, love. But then again, as the protagonist admits in Walden Two, "What is love, except another name for the use of positive reinforcement...