OK, so what could Walden Pond and The Scream possibly have in common (yes, that is the actual Walden Pond, not a random photo produced by Creative Commons' search engine as a response to the query "tranquil pond." What kind of charlatan do you take me for?)? Thoreau and Munch were not contemporaries but they just barely missed the overlap - Thoreau died in 1862 and Munch was born in 1863. In Walden, Thoreau reveals the unsettling news that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." I think his choice of the word quiet is especially significant; poignant, even. Walden Pond is quiet but The Scream certainly is not. Of the two, which is preferable? How many times do we find ourselves outwardly expressing an image of poised stillness such as Walden Pond while inside we are the very essence of this hairless person halted in a mid-fjord traverse by an overwhelming sensation that aligns us, without our express consent, with a primal anguish from the collective unconscious?
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