Jack attempts to persuade Ennis to climb out of the rut of heteronormative expectations in rural Wyoming, but Ennis is traumatized by a childhood episode in which his father took him and his brother to see a gay man tortured and beaten to death for having the temerity to live openly with another man. So the fear of violence is a realistic one. But in choosing to live his life from a script written by someone else, Ennis is false to himself, to his wife and his children, and most of all to the man who loves him fully, the only person for whom Ennis feels genuine passion. In their final encounter, Jack confronts Ennis with the desperately sad truth that they have wasted their lives in outward conformity and secret transgression. Ennis has settled for mere existence, wasting years in a loveless marriage, unable to overcome his fears. The price of outward conformity to a rigid code of heteronormativity is a slow inward death for both of them. As Thoreau puts it bluntly, "A living dog is better than a dead lion." If only Ennis had read Thoreau; or if only Jack had read Thoreau to him. I suspect the passage “Walden” that Jack would have chosen would have been this famous declaration: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer." Or maybe Jack might have tried this folksy buffalo metaphor from “Walden,” perfectly suited to Brokeback Mountain: "…it depends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cowyard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time." But the passage that should have spoken clearly to Ennis is this one, perhaps the most eloquently poetic in all of Thoreau: "I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now." And what is that "moonlight amid the mountains" of which Thoreau speaks? It is the sheer exhilaration of the authentic life lived fully in the integrity of one's own truest self. Ennis and Jack glimpse the literal moonlight amid the mountains when they live on Brokeback and later return to it on their periodic 'fishing trips.' But only Jack can see the metaphorical moonlight of the authentic life that offers itself to them before they descend from the mountain into the dreary desperation of heteronormative conformity and loveless marriage.

Canonical philosophy may be of little appeal to most people, whether lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered (LGBT) or otherwise; the ponderous and sometimes obscure style of many of the canonical texts may account for their limited popularity among the reading public, though the anti-intellectualism of American society no doubt also plays a role. But at
its most practical, philosophy poses – and attempts to answer – the most basic of questions that we all face as human beings: what is life all about and how shall we live it? The authentic life is there for the living, and the deepest tragedy of "Brokeback Mountain” is the refusal of Ennis to accept Jack’s invitation to live it. In my view, Thoreau gives as good an answer to the question of how to live one’s life as any philosopher. The passage in “Walden” in which Thoreau gives the most cogent summary of his philosophy of life been a great inspiration to me ever since I first read it in high school, but I consider it wise counsel to anyone – LGBT or not – seeking to live an authentic life:

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently
in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations
under them."

Pauline Park is a member of the Philosophy Forum, a discussion group that meets at the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan every second and fourth Saturday. For more information, contact Pauline directly through her website.