Some of my friends and colleagues are starting a reading group that will focus on speeches and texts that foreground political protest and resistance. The aim is to inspire and fortify hearts and minds during this difficult time for many people, with President Trump in power, supported by Republican majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives.

Perhaps such a reading group is a good idea. I’m sure I’d benefit from some boosting of my morale through regular injections of militant hope and long-term optimism. But I confess that when everyone gave as an example Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” I became…. I’ll go ahead and say it, annoyed.

I’ve taught and written about Thoreau; and much of his work, especially his beautiful, captivating Journals, greatly interests and stimulates me. But my response to him is highly conflicted, ambivalent, divided. I’m in a perpetual argument with him.

Is Thoreau a writer you care about? There’s Walden, of course, but I’m more curious about your response to “Civil Disobedience.” It’s one of the most widely taught literary works in American colleges and universities. It has been admired and discussed for many decades; it inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.; and it’s perpetually relevant to radical dissent and political action.

All of this is linked to the quirky genius and fervor for freedom embodied in Thoreau himself: the night he spent in Concord jail for refusing to pay his poll tax; and the months this principled and prickly man devoted to living in a 10 x 15 foot cabin on the shores of Walden Pond.

I almost want to say that “Civil Disobedience” is a vocal performance, not a written one. Thoreau first presented it as a lecture at the Concord Lyceum in January 1848, giving it the title, “On the Relation of the Individual to the State.” He was addressing a live audience, not solitary readers in a study or parlor.

Let’s hear his voice, urgent and assertive:

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again. Action from principle⁠, the perception and the performance of right⁠, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

“Entertain” conveys Thoreau’s impatience and mockery. He takes aim at perverse self-deception, which mystifies and exasperates him: we have opinions we say matter to us, yet we treat them as spectacles for our own amusement.

Thoreau gets zeal and vigor into his rebuke (it’s more like a scolding) through the two questions he asks at the outset. In the second, the word “aggrieved” hits hard, dramatizing the indignation at unfair treatment that Thoreau is certain we feel when someone injures us.

The third sentence is longer, emphatic at every opportunity: not a dollar but a single dollar, not just steps but effectual steps, not merely the amount but the full amount, and never, that is, not ever, cheated again. Thoreau uses the second-person pronoun eight times: hammer blows of accusation.

Thoreau tightens the tension by telling us to recall our reaction when we’re cheated by a neighbor. He says we know from experience that we retaliate to ensure we “are never cheated again.” When we’re sure we’ve been wronged, that’s not just an opinion we’re content to ruminate on.

Thoreau’s command is, “Action from principle.” We assume he’s demanding we act, but that’s not quite accurate. There’s no agent, no actor, in the sentences that close this paragraph. Thoreau’s focus is on the action itself, and on the claim that it’s revolutionary. It doesn’t accord with what existed before: it generates complete change, overthrow, reversal. “Wholly” puns on “holy”: this catalyst of transformation breaks with all creeds and institutions.

Thoreau deploys the verb “divides” three times in the climactic sentence, creating a sound pattern that culminates in the alliteration of “diabolical” and “divine.” Diabolical: characteristic of the devil, fiendish, outrageously wicked; divine: of, from, or like God or a god.

I marvel at the choice-making dexterity in Thoreau’s sentences. But I also resist him, and I wonder whether you might as well, because his writing is extremely coercive—the admonitory tone, display of disapproval, and demand for conversion. I want to reply that we might “entertain” an opinion because we’re hesitant about it and know we should subject it to scrutiny. Maybe we’ll judge we’re aggrieved, victims of maltreatment. Then again, we might conclude we’re not.

Thoreau’s word “cheated” carries a sting, the pang of an affront, an injustice. But not all neighbors seek to cheat us, and even if they do, if it’s just a single dollar, we might not care, not care enough to decide immediately (“at once”), to get back at them. We could choose to forfeit our dollar and be more vigilant in the future.

There’s a passage later in “Civil Disobedience” that’s not often quoted because it’s at odds with the pacifism we believe (or want to believe) Thoreau advocates:

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.

Thoreau concedes that refusals and renunciations could lead to violence. He moves from real blood to the blood of a gashed conscience to the blood that’s flowing now. That’s a visceral image, frightening. But it’s alluring too, like the imagined dagger that transfixes Macbeth and mesmerizes him into killing Scotland’s king.

Thoreau commands us to act. We know what’s right, he maintains, so we should not hesitate or temporize. But to me, he’s also implying we should stop thinking.

He’d be quick to reply, “No, you’re missing the point. It’s bad thinking I’m against, thinking that dawdles and broods and hangs back from commitment.” But I’m not convinced. The message I hear from him is that my mind is my enemy.

There it is: I feel my irritation with Thoreau coming to the fore. And it irritates me even more that this would please him. He’s an agitator, he’s shaking me up. But as a resource for the hard times we’re in, “Civil Disobedience” doesn’t work for me.

I could be mistaken. For I’m keenly aware that this essay has enlightened and energized many people far braver and greater than me. But my resistance to it lingers. I can’t embrace “action from principle.” What’s better to me is “action from thinking”: what am I thinking, what am I doing, and what are likely to be the consequences? Think before you act, and keep thinking when you do.

William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he enjoys teaching courses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other American writers. His recent publications include essays on Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway.