Walden, Walking & Civil Disobedience (Including The Life of Henry David Thoreau) E-Book
Henry David Thoreau
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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Henry David Thoreau's masterful work 'Walden, Walking & Civil Disobedience' is a collection of some of his most influential writings that delve into themes of nature, self-reliance, and social activism. 'Walden' provides a detailed account of Thoreau's experiment in simple living at Walden Pond, showcasing his transcendentalist philosophy and love for the natural world. 'Walking' celebrates the act of walking as a means of connecting with nature and attaining spiritual enlightenment. 'Civil Disobedience' is a powerful essay that advocates for resistance to unjust laws and government actions. Thoreau's writing style is contemplative, philosophical, and deeply introspective, making this collection a timeless classic in American literature. Henry David Thoreau, a prominent transcendentalist thinker and philosopher, was inspired by his deep connection to nature and his quest for individual freedom. His experiences at Walden Pond and his commitment to civil disobedience against unjust government policies shaped his worldview and literary output. Thoreau's belief in living a deliberate and meaningful life has influenced generations of readers and activists. I highly recommend 'Walden, Walking & Civil Disobedience' to readers who are interested in exploring the themes of nature, self-reliance, and social justice. Thoreau's profound insights and poetic prose make this collection a must-read for anyone seeking to reflect on the complexities of the human experience and our relationship to the natural world. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
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Walden, Walking & Civil Disobedience
(Including The Life of Henry David Thoreau)
Published by
Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection gathers Walden (Life in the Woods), Civil Disobedience, and Walking alongside The Life of Henry David Thoreau and Thoreau by Ralph Waldo Emerson to present a unified portrait of a writer testing conscience against society and nature. The selection foregrounds three modes—memoir, political argument, and natural philosophy—balanced by two biographical perspectives. Together they trace how a single life undertakes deliberate simplicity, resists injustice, and discovers wilderness as moral compass. Presenting them together emphasizes mutual illumination: retreat informs protest, and outdoor sauntering shapes ethical clarity. The aim is to frame Thoreau’s practice as an integrated experiment rather than isolated topics.
At the center lies a philosophical through-line: the sovereignty of individual conscience tested in the court of wild nature and civil order. Walden articulates a disciplined practice of self-rule; Civil Disobedience examines the obligations of a citizen who refuses to sanctify injustice; Walking discovers wildness as measure and method. The Life of Henry David Thoreau supplies narrative bearings for this itinerary, while Emerson’s Thoreau offers a companion portrait from a close observer. The curation underscores continuities among ethical inquiry, aesthetic attention, and practical conduct, showing how daily habit, public duty, and the open road coexist within one deliberate life.
The aim is to trace an arc from the reflective seclusion of Walden to the public stance of Civil Disobedience, with Walking serving as kinetic hinge between them. This arrangement highlights a recurring motif: movement as method. In these pages, walking becomes both literal practice and figure for an ethical stride, while withdrawal becomes preparatory rather than escapist. Juxtaposing the biographical accounts with the three Thoreau texts invites readers to consider continuity between life, style, and principle. The Life of Henry David Thoreau and Emerson’s Thoreau serve as orienting maps for the same terrain mapped from within by Thoreau.
Unlike presentations that isolate a single text or separate nature writing from political reflection, this collection stages a conversation among all five works. Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Walking appear not as discrete statements but as facets of one inquiry into living well and justly. The Life of Henry David Thoreau and Emerson’s Thoreau frame this inquiry with complementary vantage points: the biographical narrative supplies continuity, and the memorial appraisal clarifies temperament and method. The result is a composite portrait that encourages comparative reading, revealing patterns and tensions that are less visible when the works circulate on their own.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Walden’s disciplined attention to daily means and ends deepens the moral claims of Civil Disobedience. The contemplative record of simplifying one’s life becomes evidence that freedom from unnecessary wants strengthens resistance to unjust commands. Walking then reorients the body within this philosophy, proposing an outward practice that keeps perception keen and allegiance shifting toward the wild. Each text tests a form of distance—spatial, economic, or civic—to recover nearness to principle. Read together, they show how private regimen trains public courage, and how the open landscape provides a grammar for action that neither shrinks into retreat nor dissolves into agitation.
Across the works, recurring motifs create resonance: morning as renewal, the pond or path as mirror, the threshold between town and woods as a testing ground. These symbols bear a shared ethical burden. Civil Disobedience presents the dilemma of whether legality binds when justice is absent; Walden contemplates the costs and rewards of voluntary poverty and attention; Walking celebrates borders and margins where culture thins and perception sharpens. The texts repeatedly ask how to measure success without conventional metrics, and how to honor community without surrendering conscience. Their motifs link sensuous observation to austere principle with spare, exacting prose.
Tonally, the collection oscillates between meditative and insurgent. Walden’s patient, observational cadence contrasts with the compressed urgency of Civil Disobedience; Walking carries a lyrical stride that opens the sentence to horizon and weather. The Life of Henry David Thoreau supplies narrative continuity and practical details of a life arranged around such convictions, while Thoreau by Ralph Waldo Emerson offers an elegiac, evaluative voice that weighs character and achievement. The varied genres—memoir, essay, travel meditation, biography, memorial—create a dialogue where style becomes argument: clarity doubles as conscience, and restraint sharpens protest without theatrics or sentimental flourish.
Within the set, echoes are discernible. Descriptions of attention, frugality, and a purposeful walk in Walden and Walking reappear as character traits affirmed in Thoreau by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The memorial’s assessments align with the self-portrait that Thoreau composes, strengthening the sense that style and life converged. The Life of Henry David Thoreau similarly corroborates the discipline and independence that underwrite Civil Disobedience. Conversely, the political essay reframes scenes of solitude as training for civic action, retroactively illuminating their stakes. These reciprocal recognitions function as cross-references in lived form, allowing each work to clarify the claims of the others.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These works remain vital because they articulate a coherent response to perennial pressures: the state’s demand for compliance, the market’s demand for haste, and the landscape’s demand for attention. Walden models sufficiency and the pleasures of exact observation; Civil Disobedience offers a vocabulary for principled refusal; Walking proposes an embodied cure for abstraction. In combination, they suggest that ecological awareness, civic courage, and daily practice are mutually sustaining. The accompanying biographies ground these ideals in a particular life, ensuring that arguments do not float free of conduct. The result is a usable ethics with tested, practicable rhythms.
Critical reception has long recognized the centrality of these texts to American letters and political thought. Walden is widely regarded as a landmark of prose and an exemplar of reflective natural observation. Civil Disobedience stands as a foundational statement on conscientious refusal and its civic meaning. Walking has become a touchstone for writing that links natural history with personal freedom. Thoreau by Ralph Waldo Emerson is a classic memorial portrait, and The Life of Henry David Thoreau remains a key biographical resource. Taken together, they occupy a durable place in discussions of style, ethics, and the responsibilities of citizenship.
Their afterlives extend across civic, artistic, and scholarly arenas. Civil Disobedience has been repeatedly invoked in debates about lawful obligation and moral limits, shaping strategies of protest and refusal. Walden continues to inform environmental writing and practices of voluntary simplicity, while Walking energizes literature and art devoted to peripatetic seeing and urban or rural exploration. Biographical readings of Thoreau, aided by the two portraits included here, animate classrooms and public conversations about the unity of life and work. The collection therefore gathers not static monuments but active instruments, still recalibrating norms of attention, duty, and delight.
Ultimately, the collection offers a single itinerary through nature, conscience, and character. Walden supplies the household of thought; Civil Disobedience tests its doors against unjust command; Walking opens those doors onto the fields; The Life of Henry David Thoreau and Emerson’s Thoreau confirm the walker behind the sentences. In their company, Thoreau appears neither recluse nor mere agitator but a citizen of the open air whose governance begins with disciplined perception. The texts remain instructive precisely because they refuse abstraction, insisting that convictions be legible in habits, places, and the measured pace of a walk.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Mid-nineteenth-century New England stood at a crossroads of agrarian tradition, commercial expansion, and partisan democracy. Town meetings, churches, courts, and the press organized daily life, while canals, factories, and the railroad reconfigured work and time. Within this environment, Walden stages an experiment in self-provisioned living at the edge of a market town, testing the promises and costs of prosperity. Civil Disobedience arises amid debates over taxation, sovereignty, and consent, sharpening questions about when a citizen must refuse complicity. Walking, composed from lectures, situates freedom in the open commons of field and wood, offering a civic defense of wandering amid the survey lines of modern property.
Slavery and its national entanglements pervaded the decades surrounding these works. Massachusetts reformers pressed moral claims, and federal law demanded cooperation in bondage’s enforcement. Civil Disobedience confronts the dilemma of obeying statutes one deems unjust, urging a standard of conscience not bounded by majority rule. Walden’s insistence on ethical accounting—of time, labor, and need—quietly reorients political responsibility toward the intimate sphere where complicity begins. Walking casts liberty as a bodily practice, countering a culture that fenced the land and, by extension, the mind. The Life of Henry David Thoreau and Thoreau by Ralph Waldo Emerson place these stances within a local community negotiating national storms.
The Mexican-American War intensified disputes over expansion, citizenship, and the reach of executive power. Civil Disobedience emerged from a refusal to subsidize a policy he deemed aggressive, using a single night in jail to dramatize a larger argument about law and justice. Its polemical energy is inseparable from wartime taxation, wartime propaganda, and wartime conscience. Walden, published later, registers quieter forms of resistance: frugality, attention, and restraint in an era exalting acquisition. Walking advances a geography of allegiance not to empire, but to the unbounded horizons of the continent’s remaining wildness, challenging annexationist triumph with an ethic of self-limitation.
Public life in Concord threaded together reform lectures, denominational disputes, temperance campaigns, school committees, and infrastructure debates. Walden’s satire of newspapers, rail schedules, and fashionable benevolence targets a moralism captured by habit rather than principle. Civil Disobedience tests the obligations of the town resident and taxpayer, emphasizing proximity: government is not a distant abstraction but a neighbor. The Life of Henry David Thoreau recounts his service as surveyor, pencil-maker, and lecturer, setting withdrawal against contribution. Emerson’s Thoreau, written at his friend’s death, renders a portrait of civic irregularity that is nonetheless deeply woven into institutions, even as it questions their authority.
Industrial timbering, mill-damming, and speculative subdivision altered the New England landscape. Fences multiplied, shorelines moved, and railroads pierced the woods. Walden chronicles the pond as both habitat and mirror, noting the whistle of the locomotive and the scars it leaves. Walking responds with a defense of the commons of air, path, and view, equating a town’s health with the availability of untrammeled ground. In this context, property appears as a shifting compromise between private right and collective good. The biography and Emerson’s memorial sketch situate the writer’s field notes within these practical conflicts over land use and the meaning of improvement.
Lecture halls and lyceum circuits organized argument into evenings of performance, turning ideas into itinerant events. Civil Disobedience and Walking first reached audiences as addresses, honed by rebuttal and applause. Print culture then amplified them, as Walden joined the republic of books and newspapers extended their reach. Emerson’s Thoreau, published amid civil war, interprets a life of local observation in a nation breaking apart, inviting readers to consider whether fidelity to principle can outlast national crisis. The Life of Henry David Thoreau collects these contexts into a narrative of formation, giving institutional shape to a career that continually tested institutions.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Transcendentalism supplied a grammar for these works: the priority of intuition, the dignity of the individual soul, and the permeability of nature and mind. Walden exemplifies the experiment of translating principle into daily practice, rebuilding shelter, diet, and attention so that thought becomes life. Civil Disobedience restates the transcendental conviction that moral law precedes civil statute, challenging utilitarian calculations with the immediacy of conscience. Walking elaborates an ideal of wildness as a source of renewal and truth. Emerson’s Thoreau frames this temperament with affectionate rigor, while The Life of Henry David Thoreau traces its emergence from apprenticeship to assertion.
The era’s science valued precise observation, measurement, and classification. Walden arranges careful records of thaw and freeze, water clarity, ice thickness, and animal behavior, yoking empirical detail to ethical inference. Walking extends natural history into a philosophy of movement, making the itinerary itself a method. Civil Disobedience imports this empirical candor into politics, naming facts of complicity before abstracting principles. The Life of Henry David Thoreau catalogs tools, surveys, and journals, aligning artisanal skill with field science. Emerson’s Thoreau translates the minutiae of plants and weather into a metaphysics of stature, arguing that close looking can reform the seer as much as the seen.
Technological acceleration—railroad, factory time, and the telegraph—reshaped perception. Walden counters with deliberate tempo, clocked by beans, ax strokes, and the sun. Its economy of needs is an aesthetic as well as an ethic, reinstating sufficiency against accumulation. Civil Disobedience questions the moral neutrality of efficiency, warning that rapid coordination can multiply injustice. Walking adapts wandering to a recalibrated landscape, reclaiming unsurveyed hours from timetables. The Life of Henry David Thoreau records craft and measurement as disciplines rather than distractions. Emerson’s Thoreau interprets this technology of attention as the true machine of progress, making inner instrumentation answer the outer world.
These texts experiment with hybrid forms. Walden braids sermon, natural history, satire, and parable into a cyclical narrative that resists linear improvement. Civil Disobedience adopts the cadence of a town-hall oration, terse and aphoristic, designed to provoke deliberation as much as assent. Walking preserves the elasticity of the lecture, opening digressions that turn into pathways. The Life of Henry David Thoreau alternates anecdote with portraiture, while Emerson’s Thoreau refines the elegy into criticism. Together they stand against formulaic didacticism and partisan dogma, proposing literature as a site where experiment in style parallels experiment in living.
Aesthetically, the anthology balances the picturesque with the sublime, and the tactile with the visionary. Walden’s soundscape—loon calls, axe echoes, train whistles—anchors meditation in sensory particularity. Walking converts horizon-lines into a moral vector, insisting that beauty has direction as well as presence. Civil Disobedience achieves its force through plain style and proportionality, an art of the necessary sentence. The Life of Henry David Thoreau and Emerson’s Thoreau craft an image of authorship at once solitary and companionable, institutional and insurgent. The rivalry implicit here is not between writers, but between contrasting futures for art: ornamented consensus or exacting independence.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Initial reception was modest, but the posthumous years transformed these works into touchstones. Emerson’s Thoreau swiftly canonized a figure of paradoxical intimacy and resistance, while The Life of Henry David Thoreau assembled the timeline and testimony that subsequent readers used to navigate the books. New editions of Walden found audiences seeking moral clarity after civil war, and Civil Disobedience circulated among reformers who tested the limits of lawful dissent. Walking, appearing in print near its author’s death, spoke to a generation remapping a broken landscape. The anthology thus moved from local experiment to national script, its authority accruing through commemoration and reuse.
Turn-of-the-century conservation and recreation movements drew on this corpus for language, example, and pilgrimage. Walden became a toponym for protection, its pond and woods serving as both symbol and precedent for preserving places near towns. Walking offered a charter for clubs and municipalities to secure footpaths, common fields, and viewscapes against private encroachment. The Life of Henry David Thoreau provided early documentary ballast for such claims, assembling practical details that policy advocates could translate into programs. Emerson’s Thoreau stabilized a civic ideal of the naturalist as neighbor, making protection appear compatible with daily duties rather than a retreat from them.
Civil Disobedience traveled into global debates about nonviolent resistance, conscientious objection, and the ethics of refusal. Readers in independence struggles, civil rights campaigns, and antiwar coalitions found a portable method: withdraw cooperation, accept penalty, expose injustice. The essay’s insistence on personal accountability resonated where institutions stalled or legitimated harm. Walden supplied a complementary critique of consumption and conformity, while Walking modeled a public presence that is peaceful yet unmistakably assertive. Biographical narratives and Emerson’s memorial sketch guided these appropriations, fixing the image of a principled citizen whose private discipline endowed public action with credibility.
Mid-twentieth-century consumer growth and suburbanization prompted renewed attention to household economies and forms of sufficiency. Walden inspired back-to-the-land experiments and pedagogies of simplicity, as well as critiques of escapism and privilege. Civil Disobedience served draft resisters and tax protesters testing the outer edges of legal tolerance. Walking reappeared as urban design advocacy for green corridors and human-scaled streets. The Life of Henry David Thoreau mediated between ideal and practicable, showing the mix of dependence and independence that any experiment entails. Emerson’s Thoreau, widely anthologized, continued to set expectations for a stalwart, sometimes obstinate, integrity.
Environmental science later returned to the field notebooks embedded in Walden, treating phenological records as baselines for studying changing seasons. Walking fed arguments for rewilding and local biodiversity, connecting aesthetic preference to ecological function. Municipalities and citizen groups used the books to justify buffer zones, trail networks, and water protections. Civil Disobedience informed direct action aimed at pollution and habitat loss, linking personal restraint to public remedy. The Life of Henry David Thoreau and Emerson’s Thoreau helped reconcile data and devotion, suggesting that rigorous observation and moral suasion could coexist in a single civic language.
Scholarly reassessments now probe the conditions and limits of the anthology’s vision. Critics interrogate how notions of wildness intersect with histories of property, labor, and settlement, and how claims of simplicity rely on community infrastructures tallied in the biography. Civil Disobedience is read against evolving theories of democracy, weighing individual conscience against collective decision. Editors revisit the lecture-to-essay pipeline shaping Walking, and the canon-making power of Emerson’s Thoreau. Walden’s compositional layering invites debates about genre, audience, and irony. Across these inquiries, admiration endures, tempered by a keener sense of context, cost, and the ethics of exemplarity.
Synopsis (Selection)
Walden (Life in the Woods)
Thoreau recounts his experiment in living simply at the edge of Walden Pond, using the seasons of a two-year stay to examine work, consumption, time, and attention to the natural world.
Blending memoir, natural history, and moral reflection, he argues for deliberate living and the riches of solitude while observing the rhythms of woods, water, and neighbors.
Its lyrical yet unsparing tone complements the ethical stance of Civil Disobedience and deepens the celebration of wildness elaborated in Walking.
Civil Disobedience
This essay contends that just governance depends on the primacy of individual conscience, and that citizens should withhold cooperation from laws and institutions that make them agents of injustice.
Thoreau outlines a minimalist vision of the state and models nonviolent resistance grounded in personal responsibility rather than party or policy.
Its concise, polemical voice supplies the civic edge to the self-reliant life tested in Walden and offers the political corollary to the untamed freedom prized in Walking.
Walking
Part nature-ramble, part cultural critique, this essay makes a case for walking as a mode of thought and for wild landscapes as sources of health, liberty, and imagination.
Thoreau contrasts the vitality of exploratory impulses and uncultivated places with the constraints of settled town life, mapping a geography of spirit as much as of terrain.
Its expansive, prophetic register extends the natural attentiveness of Walden and illuminates the freedom that undergirds the stance of Civil Disobedience.
Biographical Writings: The Life of Henry David Thoreau & Thoreau (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
The Life of Henry David Thoreau presents a concise narrative of his upbringing in Concord, education, friendships, fieldwork, and writing, situating his books within the reformist and literary currents of his time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s memorial portrait, Thoreau, offers an intimate assessment of his character, methods, and ideals from a close contemporary, mixing admiration with clear-eyed appraisal.
Together these accounts supply context for the essays’ arguments and the Walden experiment, showing how a commitment to simplicity, observation, and conscience grew from a particular life and community.
Walden, Walking & Civil Disobedience (Including The Life of Henry David Thoreau)
Books
Walden (Life in the Woods)
Table of Contents
Economy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 offenses; 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.
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.
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.
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 to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, 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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 a la mode.
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?
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.
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.
If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished.
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.
To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.
So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening 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 a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.
I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.
In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off — that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed — he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had already got. 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; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.
I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time — often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore; — to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization — taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation; — charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier — there is the untold fate of La Prouse; — universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno and the Phoenicians down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a man — such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge.
I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.
As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer’s character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this — Who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a gentleman’s legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master’s premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she “was now in a civilized country, where . . . people are judged of by their clothes.” Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. But they yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless; a woman’s dress, at least, is never done.
