Walden

“Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond,” the building story begins, and “It is difficult to begin without borrowing,” he admits, but he “returned it sharper than I received it.” He felled young white pines on a hillside above the water and squared the timbers himself. For boards he bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irish labourer on the new Fitchburg Railroad, for four dollars and twenty-five cents, took it apart the same morning, and carted the boards to the pond. In early May friends helped raise the frame, among them, according to his biographer Walter Harding, Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Channing and the farmer Edmund Hosmer and his sons. Thoreau moved in on 4 July 1845, Independence Day, before the walls were plastered or the chimney built.

The finished house was ten feet by fifteen, with a garret, a closet, a window on each side, a brick fireplace and a door at one end. Then he did something no other classic does: he printed the bill. Boards, $8.03½. Refuse shingles, $4.00. Two second-hand windows, $2.43. A thousand old bricks, $4.00. Two casks of lime, $2.40 (“That was high”). Hair for the plaster, 31 cents (“More than I needed”). Nails, hinges, a latch, a penny’s worth of chalk. In all, $28.12½, about what a Harvard student then paid for one year’s rent of a room.

To earn a little cash he planted about two and a half acres, mostly beans, and sold the crop for $23.44, leaving $8.71½ after expenses. Odd jobs in the village brought in $13.34. His food for the first eight months cost $8.74, about twenty-seven cents a week: rye and Indian meal, rice, potatoes, a little salt pork, molasses and water. He confesses one dinner of woodchuck, which had been eating his beans. And he notes, in a line his critics would later seize on, that the bills for “washing and mending, which for the most part were done out of the house,” had not yet come in.

“Economy,” the long first chapter, grew out of a lecture. Concord neighbours kept asking what he ate out there, whether he was lonely or afraid, and in February 1847 he answered them from the stage of the village lyceum with a talk listed as a history of himself, so popular he was asked back the following week. The chapter keeps the lecture’s swagger. Thoreau says he has “travelled a good deal in Concord,” and everywhere, in shops, offices and fields, he has seen people doing penance as strange as any Hindu ascetic’s.

His targets are not the idle but the busy. He pities the young men who have inherited farms, “for these are more easily acquired than got rid of,” and pictures them pushing barns and acres down the road of life before them. He turns on the reader directly: there are many keen and subtle masters, but the worst of all is when you are “the slave-driver of yourself.” And then the sentence everyone knows: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The bleak line is a set-up for a hopeful one. Most people, he argues, live the common way because they think there is no choice. “It is never too late to give up our prejudices.”

The centre of the chapter is a definition that still stings: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” A Concord house of eight hundred dollars, he calculates, costs a labourer ten to fifteen years of his life. “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes,” he warns. His own discovery, from five years of earning by his hands, was that “by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living,” leaving most of the year free. He insists he isn’t prescribing his way to anyone; each person should find their own.

The second chapter explains why he went, in the most quoted paragraph in American prose: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” He wanted, he says, to suck out all the marrow of life, to drive it into a corner and find out whether it was mean or sublime, and then report back honestly either way.

His diagnosis of everyone else is overload. “Our life is frittered away by detail.” Count to ten on your fingers, he says, keep your accounts on your thumbnail, eat one meal instead of three if need be. “Simplify, simplify.” He mocks the frantic national rush to build railways and telegraphs, wondering whether anyone has stopped to ask what all the speed is for. “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us,” he writes, and then turns the joke dark: the sleepers under the rails are men, Irish and Yankee labourers, laid down and covered with sand. Newspapers get the same treatment. Read about one robbery or one shipwreck, he says, and you have the principle; you need never read of another.

The chapters that follow slow down to show what deliberate living looked like. In “Reading” he urges people to read the great old books slowly, in their own languages where possible, as hard as they were written. In “Sounds” he admits that the first summer he didn’t read at all: “I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans.” Some mornings he simply sat in his sunny doorway from sunrise until noon among the pines and sumachs, and he refuses to apologize for it. “I love a broad margin to my life,” he writes. Then the Fitchburg train whistles past the pond, a hundred rods south of the house, carrying cattle and cotton and commerce, a reminder that the busy world runs right along his shoreline.

Was he lonely? In “Solitude” he insists he was not. “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude,” he writes, and on rainy days he felt the whole wet world as company. But “Visitors” opens with a cheerful correction to the hermit legend: “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Twenty-five or thirty people sometimes squeezed in at once. Children came berrying, railway men and fishermen stopped by, self-styled reformers bored him, and “One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the northstar.”

His favourite visitor was a woodchopper from Canada, whom he declines to name in print: Alek Therien, about twenty-eight, who had left his father’s house in Canada a dozen years before. Therien could hole fifty fence posts in a day, carried cold woodchuck for lunch, laughed until he rolled on the ground, and listened rapt while Thoreau translated Homer for him. Thoreau couldn’t decide whether he was “as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child.” When a reformer asked whether he wanted the world changed, Therien answered with a chuckle: “No, I like it well enough.”

“The Bean-Field” turns farming into comedy and philosophy: seven miles of rows, a war against weeds and woodchucks, and the question of who is learning from whom. “The Village” is frank about something his critics later treated as a scandal: “Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip,” taken, he says, in small doses, like medicine.

On one of those walks, late in July 1846, near the end of the first summer, the village constable Sam Staples arrested him. Thoreau had refused for years to pay the poll tax, in protest against a government that supported slavery and was fighting an unjust war with Mexico. Walden gives it one sentence: he was jailed for refusing to recognize “the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house.” Someone, probably his aunt Maria, paid the tax that night. Released next morning, he collected his mended shoe and went huckleberrying. That night became the essay later known as “Civil Disobedience.”

“The Ponds” is a love letter to water. Walden is a mile and three-quarters round, fed by no visible stream, so clear you can see the bottom twenty-five or thirty feet down, and “blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view.” “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature,” he writes. “It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” Townsfolk swore it had no bottom. Early in 1846 he went out on the ice with a cod-line and a stone and found that it did: “The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet.”

“Baker Farm” is the chapter readers argue about most. Caught in a rainstorm, Thoreau shelters in the leaky hut of John Field, an Irish labourer who is “bogging” a farmer’s meadow by the acre while his wife and many children crowd round the stove. Thoreau tries to convert him on the spot: give up tea, coffee, butter and beef, and you won’t have to work so hard to pay for them. Field sighs. Thoreau leaves with a line that is either compassionate or insufferable, depending on the reader: “living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and failing so.”

“Higher Laws” pulls the other way. Coming home with a string of fish one dark evening, he sees a woodchuck cross his path and feels “strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw.” He confesses an instinct toward a spiritual life and another toward a wild, primitive one, and says, “I love the wild not less than the good.” Then he argues himself toward vegetarianism and an almost monkish purity, a side of him many readers find hard to love.

“Brute Neighbors” is pure delight. On his woodpile he watches a war between red ants and black ants and narrates it like Homer, noting with a straight face that the battle took place “in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill.” And on a calm October afternoon he chases a loon around the pond in his boat for an hour, “a man against a loon,” the bird diving, surfacing far off and laughing at him, until a wind rises as if in answer to its wild cry and he gives up.

In “House-Warming” he builds the chimney, plasters the walls and gathers driftwood and stumps for fuel. Snow made the woods emptier, and in “Former Inhabitants” he fills them with the dead. Walden Woods, he points out, had once been home to people Concord had pushed to the margins: Cato Ingraham, enslaved by a Concord gentleman who let him build a house in the woods; Zilpha, a Black woman who spun linen and sang so loudly the woods rang, until British prisoners of war burned her house during the War of 1812; Brister Freeman, who planted apple trees on the hill that still bears his name. His cabin, it turns out, was not the first in those woods built by someone outside the town’s good graces.

Friends still came through the drifts. A poet, usually identified as Channing, arrived through the deepest snows, and the two made the little house “ring with boisterous mirth.” In his last winter Bronson Alcott, “One of the last of the philosophers,” walked out through snow and rain to share long evenings of talk, the two of them building castles in the air. There was also one friend, generally taken to be Emerson, with whom he had what he calls solid seasons at the friend’s house in the village.

“Winter Animals” is a bestiary of the dark months: owls hooting across the ice, foxes barking, a red squirrel stealing his corn with comic drama, chickadees, jays and hares. In “The Pond in Winter” a hundred ice-cutters swarm onto Walden in the winter of 1846–47 to harvest blocks for a speculator, and Thoreau, who has just spent his mornings with the Bhagavad Gita, marvels that the people of Charleston and New Orleans, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta would soon drink from his pond.

“Spring” is the book’s great finale. Thoreau watches the thawing sand and clay ooze down the bank of the railway cut in the shapes of leaves, veins, lobes and fingers, and sees the whole earth as a living thing, still being made. The ice on the pond groans and splits, the geese come back, and, in a phrase that echoes the parable of the prodigal son, “Walden was dead and is alive again.” At the end of April he watches a small hawk tumbling over and over in the air for the sheer joy of it.

Then comes a quiet confession: “Thus was my first year’s life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it.” He had warned readers early on that he was “putting the experience of two years into one.” The book’s single year, summer to spring, is a work of art built from two years, two months and two days of life.

He left on 6 September 1847, when Emerson set off to lecture in Britain and asked Henry to look after his family and garden. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there,” he wrote. “Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.” The “Conclusion” sends the reader off with his most famous encouragements: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; “that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” It ends with a beautiful insect gnawing its way out of an old farmhouse table, decades after its egg was laid in the living tree, and a last line that became a motto: “The sun is but a morning star.”

Publication took seven more years. His first book, the river journey with John, came out in 1849 at his own expense and flopped; in 1853 the publisher sent back 706 unsold copies of the 1,000 printed. Meanwhile he kept rewriting. J. Lyndon Shanley found seven drafts in the surviving manuscript, and the ice dates in “Spring” run up to 1854. Walden finally appeared on 9 August 1854, in 2,000 copies that took about five years to sell. Thoreau died of tuberculosis on 6 May 1862, aged forty-four, the year it came back into print. It has never been out of print since.

The first chapter, “Economy,” began as a lecture answering neighbours who asked what he ate and whether he was lonely. It is a bold attack on busy lives. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he writes, pushing inherited farms and debts before them, each the slave-driver of himself. The cost of a thing, he argues, is the amount of life you trade for it, and he found that about six weeks’ work a year covered his needs. Then comes the reason he went: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” to front only the essential facts of life and not discover, when he came to die, that he had not lived. “Our life is frittered away by detail,” he writes. “Simplify, simplify.” He reads slowly, hoes beans, and sometimes sits in his doorway from sunrise to noon, because, he says, “I love a broad margin to my life.”

The cabin was never as lonely as the legend. “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” he writes. He had crowds of visitors, including a fugitive slave he helped on his way north, a cheerful Canadian woodchopper, Alek Therien, who liked the world well enough as it was, and he strolled to the village every day or two. On one such walk in July 1846 he was jailed overnight for refusing to pay a tax to a government that supported slavery; out of that night came his essay on civil disobedience. He lectured a poor Irish labourer, John Field, on giving up coffee and meat, a scene many readers now wince at. He watched red and black ants fight a war on his woodpile, chased a laughing loon round the pond for an hour, sounded the “bottomless” pond at 102 feet, and spent the winter with owls, foxes, ice-cutters and old friends who came through the snow.

In spring the ice broke, the thawing railway bank flowed into the shapes of leaves, and “Walden was dead and is alive again.” He admits he has squeezed two years into one to make the story. He left on 6 September 1847, saying he had several more lives to live. The Conclusion urges readers to step to the music of a different drummer, to put foundations under their castles in the air, and to wake up, because “The sun is but a morning star.” He rewrote the book through seven drafts before it appeared in 1854, selling slowly. He died in 1862, aged forty-four. Today Walden is one of the most read and most argued-over books in America: a guide to simple living for some, and for critics, the sermon of a man whose mother did his laundry.