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| Thoreau's Text in This Column |
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| When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. |
Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, about a mile from Concord, from 1845 to 1847. Otherwise, he mostly lived with his family or with Emerson. |
I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.
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Thoreau had several reasons for living at the pond, one of which was to write the story of the trip he made with his brother on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. However, people started asking him questions about his stay at the pond, so he wrote the first version of Walden as a speech (some of the flavor of a speech is still retained). In everyday life, it is considered rude or egotistical to talk only about yourself. Even today, many teachers instruct their students not to use "I" in their papers. Here, Thoreau defends his use of the first person with an sarcastic apology; later he says he wants to "brag as lustily as Chanticleer . . . if only to wake my neighbors up." Thoreau then turns the tables by insisting that every writer must deliver an honest, first hand, simple account. Finally, Thoreau asks his readers not to distort his statements as they can be helpful to the people they apply to.
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I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars -- even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.
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Thoreau says that one reason for his book is to help explain the life the people around him are living. Since it is common for writers to claim great authority based on their travel experiences, Thoreau ironically asserts "I have travelled a good deal in Concord" (a very small town) as proof of his authority. However, he views his town as an anthropologist or sociologist would and claims that the actions of his own townspeople are even more astonishing that those of distant Indian fakirs. In comparing his neighbors' efforts to Hercules' (considered the most difficult feats in mythology), he says (using hyperbole) that his neighbors have the harder tasks, because Hercules received help, eventually finished, and had accomplishments to show for his efforts, but as soon as his townspeople finish one job, two others appear.
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I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.
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This passage supports Thoreau's later claim that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone." Emerson's "Self-Reliance" begins:
"Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet." This passage is an excellent example of ironic hyperbole; Thoreau claims the ownership of property is a terrible mistake because the soul is smothered. The Augean stables were huge stables "cleaned" by Hercules by running a river through them. |
| But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them:
Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.
Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,
"From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,
Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."
So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.
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Thoreau here refers to Jesus' attack against the acquisition of wealth, given in Matthew 6:19-34. Jesus said that people should focus on the kingdom of heaven instead. Jesus also said elsewhere, "What can it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?" Evidently Thoreau's reference to Greek mythology is intended to diffuse his use of Christian themes (along with his reference to "an old book"). The story of Deucalion and Pyrrha is the Greek version of the flood story. Notice Thoreau's lack of respect for their faithfulness to their instructions. Although Thoreau was religious, read the Bible (and the bibles of other religions), and felt close to God, he rejected doctrine and organized religion.
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Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance -- which his growth requires -- who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
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Thoreau feels that we are so busy with unnecessary worries and works that we can't appreciate life. Work is less physically challenging today, but the clock has become much more demanding, with people rushing around constantly in the "human race" without ever getting caught up, let alone ahead, and certainly without time for appreciation, meditation, thought, and intimate communication. Alienation and violence are often the result of our overconcern for the unimportant and our lack of concern for each other.
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Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.
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A woman admitted to me that she was living with a man just to have food and shelter. How many are or have been in her position? Lying or exaggerating about abilities and accomplishments is almost a necessity in job hunting; once on the job, office politics are required to remain employed, especially during downsizing, and then one must butter up the boss to get the next raise. The entrepreneur has an even rougher task. Health insurance and retirement are major worries; However, sedentary office jobs improve the chance of heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and other long-term ailments while exposing the worker to every passing disease. Health insurance is of only limited value for dealing with these problems: a healthy lifestyle is much better insurance.
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I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination -- what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
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Here, it may seem that Thoreau is taking hyperbole too far by stating that our own opinion of ourselves is worse than any slavery. It should not be inferred by this that Thoreau did not take slavery seriously: he helped with the underground railroad and supported John Brown. However, a slave that runs away can become a free man, while a slave that can think of himself only as a slave is condemned to slavery even after emancipation. When people become locked into an opinion of themselves, further change becomes impossible. In the 1950's, General Semantics called this "identifying." William Wilberforce was responsible for the end of slavery in the British Empire (1833).
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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
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"Quiet" and "desperation" fit uncomfortably together, and yet everyone has experienced the sick feeling that things won't get better and that no one cares. Sometimes desperation turns violent: vehicular assult, attacks against spouses and children, and drive-by shootings attest to a hidden rage.
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When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.
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Now, Thoreau is getting to the main theme of Walden: what is the purpose of our lives? The answer found in the Westminster Catechism is "to glorify God and enjoy him forever." This purpose, while not stated here, is a reminder to the readers of the contradiction between their beliefs and their behavior. Thoreau also asks the questions about the necessities and means of life because he is going to examine those subjects as well. Two paragraphs earlier, he was urging his readers not to be locked into their own opinions of themselves. In the majority of this paragraph, however, he is warning his readers not to be locked into old ways of thinking. Although there is a tendency to see Thoreau as someone who was opposed to progress, it's quite definite here that he sides with modern ways of thinking and doing. His advice is to learn to understand life for ourselves and to not depend upon or trust authorities who have their own failures to look back at. While Thoreau is hoping to inflence others, he is not seeking followers: each person has to interpret life anew as an individual.
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One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.
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To give an example of how people become locked into foolish ways of thinking, Thoreau gives this example of a farmer and his thoughts about vegetarianism. Surprisingly, until very recently, US doctors were still claiming that a meatless diet was impossible, in spite of the hundreds of millions of vegetarians in the world.
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The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman praetors have decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?"
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There is a tendency to see Thoreau as someone who is locked in the past and who doesn't want progress: actually, Thoreau felt that our "factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life" were keeping us from making progress. He imagined spiritual and intellectual progress on a grander scale with materistic progress being given much less attention. Unfortunately, we have become so focused on materistic gains that we ignore the plight of the poor, the destruction of natural habitats, and the disruption of our climate.
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We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology! -- I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be.
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Thoreau gives here some intimations of how our lives could be changed just by changing our thinking. Imprisoned within our bodies, our opinions of ourselves, and others' opinions of us, we can easily fail to see that the world is more strange, more complicated, and more beautiful than what we perceive. Encounter groups are a recent method of helping us break through our shells to talk openly to each other.
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The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man -- you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind -- I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.
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Here again Thoreau is reminding us that our conventional thinking can be a trap. Emerson preached in "Self-Reliance" the necessity of being true to our own nature and ignoring the wishes of society: "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."
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I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men at length establish their lives on that basis.
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The "well-nigh incurable disease" is now medically recognized. Type A behavior and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder are two modern mental diseases and heart disease, stroke, and suicide are triggered by anxiety. Many people have a two value logic system: everything is right or wrong/black or white/good or bad. Thoreau points out that there are infinite ways and possibilities. Thoreau's bold statement about reducing "a fact of the imagination" to the understanding is supported by the ideas that have changed the way we think and live. In Thoreau's day, the railroad, the steamboat, and the telegraph were recent inventions that were changing the world.
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Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be troubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence: as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.
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Note that Thoreau's suggestion here to return to a primitive lifestyle is for the purpose of reevaluating our lives. I think it's extremely valuable for young people to bicycle across the US or backpack the Appalachian Trail for the same purpose. He points out that our civilization hasn't changed the actual needs of our bodies.
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By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest or the mountain's shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, "to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According to Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us- and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without -- Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed.
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Thoreau reduces the necessities of life to four items: food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. He also points out that we have made ourselves more dependent on these necessities than is absolutely necessary. Thus our desire for comfort can lead to sedentary and unhealthy lives. Within my lifetime, we have finally realized that keeping our houses very hot during the winter is not healthy; however, I still occasionally find the house or public building that is kept in the 80's (Farenheit) during the winter and in the 60's during the summer. Of course, if all we need are these four things, the cost of living can be very low. A nutrious diet can cost as little as $60 a month, a few hundred dollars can buy enough shoes and clothing to last for years, a simple cabin can be built for $2,000, and firewood for a week can be gathered in a couple of hours (my own personal experience).
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The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as 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. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live -- that is, keep comfortably warm -- and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course á la mode.
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The reference to "robbing the nests and breasts of birds" refers to using feathers and down to stuff pillows and mattresses. Thoreau also adds to his four necesssities some near-necessities such as simple tools to make life easier plus the writing and reading materials helpful to an intellectual life. He points out the irony of people sacrificing years of their lives in difficult, dangerous, and unhealthy tasks when our needs are really quite simple.
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Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men. But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?
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Thoreau points out that the luxuries of life are actually handicaps. It's very interesting to see the number of very wealthy men who have completely ignored their wealth and have chosen instead to concentrate on their labors. In weathy families, each generation becomes less capable than the previous. Due to the prosperity of the US, we find that very few American students are going into medicine and science; thus, we are having to import doctors and scientists from other countries. Our universities, instead of being filled with wise and great leaders, are filled with political infighters who watch their every word and write undecipherable books. Yet we give them the title of doctor of philosophy. Thoreau makes the claim that a philosopher should not be a conformist but should live a life quite different from those around him as the Greek and Roman philosophers once did.
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When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above? -- for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which, though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they have perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season.
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Of course, ironically, what most people do want, after they have obtained the necessities, is "more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing." However, Thoreau suggests an alternative; instead of spending one's life obtaining more necessities and luxuries, spend it on self-improvement. |
I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live -- if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers -- and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not; -- but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.
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Thoreau states that he is not writing for 1) self-actualized individuals who know their own goals or for 2) those who cherish and love their present life or for 3) those who feel they are accomplishing something worthwhile with their lives. Instead, he says he is writing for 1) the people who are complaining because life is not fair to them, 2) the people who are "doing their duty" and are miserable, and 3) those with wealth who would be better off without it.
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| Comments | SECTIONS: | The New World | Writing |Thoreau | Home | Bike Pages | |
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WALDEN: | Economy I | Economy II | Economy III | Economy IV | Where I Lived | Reading | Sounds | Solitude |
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WALDEN: | Visitors |The Bean-Field | The Village | The Ponds | Baker Farm | Higher Laws | Brute Neighbors |
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WALDEN: | House Warming | Former Inhabitants | Winter Animals | The Pond in Winter | Spring | Conclusion |
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"Economy" is the longest and most important chapter in Walden, occupying about one-third of the book. While it would be nice to print it as a single page, the size of the resulting file would make downloading difficult, and it would be a very long chapter to try to read in one sitting. However, Thoreau himself provided divisions within "Economy," making a four-part separation possible.