AS Epitomes
Henry David Thoreau: Walden or Life in The Woods
Abstract
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Contents Updated: Saturday, 23 February, 2008
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau, America’s poet naturalist, was born at Concord, Massachusetts, 12 July, 1817. His parents were French and Scottish, his father being a pencil maker. Thoreau was educated at Harvard for the teaching profession, but the example of Emerson, his bosom friend with whom he lived for several years, led him to write and to study outdoor life. In 1845 he built himself a hut by Walden Pond and lived there, solitary, for two years. After this he mingled writing and the doing of odd jobs for a living. He died in 1862, perhaps surprisingly, from consumption.
Thoreau’s fame will always rest on Walden, his naturalistic, philosophical and autobiographical work, first published in 1854. Walden is immortal. It is a record of his two years’ solitary life in the Walden Woods in Massachusetts, and the fascination of its author is irresistible. He was not only a keen observer, but also a enthusiastic naturalist, but without the dullness of the pedant, and his communion with birds, animals and fishes was characterized by an intimacy more extraordinary even than that of S Francis of Assisi. Walden must always have a deep psychological interest.
Pleasures of the Simple Life
When I wrote the following pages I lived alone in the woods, a mile from my neighbours, in a house I had built for myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labour of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably astonish those who know nothing about it. How many mornings, summer and winter, before my neighbour was stirring about his business, have I been about mine. So many autumn, aye, and winter, days spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! At other times waiting at evenings on the hill tops for the sky to fall that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that, manna wise, would dissolve again in the sun.
For many years I was self appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply, nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles.
Men labour under a mistake. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed laying up treasure which moth and rust will corrupt. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. But it is never too late to give up our prejudices.
To many creatures there is but one necessity of life—food. None of the brute creation requires more than food and shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may be distributed under the several heads of food, shelter, clothing and fuel. I find by my own experience a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, etc, and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts, of life are positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of voluntary poverty.
My House and Living
When I consider my neighbours, the farmers of Concord, I find that for the most part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years that they may become the real owners of their farms, and we may regard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses. And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer, but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him.
The simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the primitive ages imply that they left him still a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in the tent of this world. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth, and forgotten heaven.
Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy, white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. Before I had done, I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, having become better acquainted with it.
By the middle of April my house was framed and ready for raising. At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my acquaintances, I set up the frame of my house. I began to occupy it on 4 July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain, but before boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the meantime out of doors on the ground, early in the morning. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way.
The exact cost of my house, not counting the work, all of which was done by myself, was just over twenty eight dollars. I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually. Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method in order to meet my unusual expenses, I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas and turnips. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the ploughing, though I held the plough myself. My farm outgoes for the first season were, for implements, seed, work, etc, 14 dollars 72½ cents. I got twelve bushels of beans and eighteen bushels of potatoes, besides some peas and sweet corn. My whole income from the farm was 23 dollars 44 cents, a profit of 8 dollars 71½ cents, besides produce consumed.
The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land which I required, about a third of an acre, and I learnt from the experience of both years, not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on husbandry, that if one would live simply, and eat only the crop which he raised, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen and to plough it, and he could do all his necessary farm work, as it were, with his left hand, at odd hours in the summer.
My food for nearly two years was rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a little salt pork, molasses and salt, and my drink, water. I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food even in this latitude, and that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe cakes, which I baked before my fire out of doors, but at last I found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable. I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread making, going back to the primitive days. Leaven, which some deem to be the soul of bread, I discovered was not indispensable.
Thus I found I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get clothing and fuel. My furniture, part of which I made myself, consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet and a frying pan, a dipper, a wash bowl, two knives and forks three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses and a japanned lamp. When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all, I have pitied him, not because it was his all, but because he had all that to carry.
For more than five years I maintained myself solely by the labour of my hands, and I found that by working about six weeks in the year I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school keeping, and found that my expenses were out of proportion to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain.
I have tried trade, but I have learned that trade curses everything it handles, and though you trade in messages from heaven the whole curse of trade attaches to the business. I found that the occupation of day labourer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in the year to support one. The labourer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labour, but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.
But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged little in philanthropic enterprises. However, when I thought to indulge myself in this respect by maintaining certain poor persons as comfortably as I maintain myself, and even ventured to make them the offer, they one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor.
Life with Nature
When I took up my abode in the woods, I found myself suddenly neighbour to the birds, not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and orchard, but to those wilder and more thrilling songsters which never, or rarely, serenade a villager. Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say, innocence, with nature herself.
I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. Morning brings back the heroic ages. Then, for an hour at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? As for work, we haven’t any of any consequence. Hardly a man takes a nap after dinner but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, “What’s the news?” as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. “Pray tell me everything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe”, and he reads it over his coffee and rolls that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River, never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark, unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.
Time is but the stream I go fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its current glides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper, fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. My residence was more favourable, not only to thought but to serious reading, than a university, and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world. I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. To read well that is to read true books in a true spirit is a nohle exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise. Books must be read deliberately as they were written.
I did not read books the first summer, I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s waggon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.
I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. This was sheer idleness to my fellow townsmen, no doubt, but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting.
In the Companiable Woods
Regularly at half past seven in one part of the summer the whippoorwills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stnmp by my door, or upon the ridge pole of the house. When the other birds were still, the screech owls took up the strain, like mourning women their ancient ulula. Wise midnight hags! I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside.
They give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. “Oh o o o o that I had never been bor r r r n !” sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles, with the restlessness of despair, to some new perch on the grey oaks. Then “That I had never been bor r r r n !” echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and “bor r r r n!” comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods. I rejoice that there are owls. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have.
I am not sure that ever I heard the sound at cock crowing from my clearing, and I thought that it might be worth while to keep a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird’s, and if they could be naturalised without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods.
I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds, neither the churn, nor the spinning wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort me, only squirrels on the roof, a whippoorwill on the ridge pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a woodchuck under the house, a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night.
Liberty in Nature
This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in nature, a part of herself. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath, yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled, but not ruffled. Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud. God is alone, but the devil, he is far from being alone, he sees a great deal of company, he is legion. I am not more lonely than a single dandelion in a pasture, or a humble bee, or the north star, or the first spider in a new house.
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there for a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond side, and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct.
So with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity. I learned this, at least, by my experiment, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. In proportion as he simplifies his life the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor will poverty be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
