HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Walden

OR
Life in the Woods

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Benjamin Markovits

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Introduction copyright © Benjamin Markovits 2017

Cover illustration © Cruschiform

Henry David Thoreau has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in 1854

This edition published by Vintage in 2017

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, the town where he would live for most of his life. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, he is the most famous of the American Transcendentalists, a group of philosophical thinkers who frequently explored the relationship between human beings and the natural world. He was educated at Harvard, and over the course of his life took on a number of different occupations, including lead-pencil maker, schoolteacher, and surveyor.

Thoreau was outspokenly critical of the American government, fervently opposed to slavery, and an advocate of passive resistance. Whilst Walden (1854) is his best known work, his 1849 essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ has inspired non-violent political activists the world over, including Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr, and his nature writings are considered ground-breaking works in ecology. He died in his hometown of Concord in 1862.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In 1845 Thoreau, a Harvard-educated 28-year-old, went to live by himself in the woods in Massachusetts. He stayed for over two years, living self-sufficiently in a small cabin built with his own hands. Walden is his personal account of the experience, in which he documents the beauty and fulfilment to be found in the wilderness, and his philosophical and political motivations for rejecting the materialism which continues to define our modern world.

INTRODUCTION

In August of 2008, three months before Obama won his first presidential election, my wife and I and our baby girl moved from London to Boston. I say Boston, but in fact we lived in Cambridge – in a ground-floor apartment just off Porter Square and down the road from Raymond Park, where, it was rumoured, Larry Bird used to come and shoot hoops, and where my daughter learned to climb. She was almost two when we arrived; she was almost three when we left. Her first accents were American.

That year has slowly changed colour in my memory and imagination. At the time we were still stuck in the intensity of early parenthood. The apartment was dark and cramped. It snowed without thawing for five months, so that parking our second-hand car meant finding an unoccupied ramp of ice to drive up. The car itself kept breaking down, leaving us stranded on highways and in unfamiliar neighbourhoods. We had few friends and were living in a city we didn’t know and which, for my wife, represented a foreign country. Our daughter kept waking at four or five in the morning, and in the evening, we couldn’t go out without the hassle and expense of a babysitter. The short winter days felt long. But now at this distance the trap that seemed to have caught us works the other way around – the walls encircling that year won’t let us back in.

The best thing about living in Boston, we used to say, is how easy it is to get out of Boston. One of our favourite day trips involved driving north and west twenty minutes out of town and going to Walden, especially in those first few months when the leaves were turning – and later, in the spring, after the thaw, when a muddy bit of shoreline became a beach, and kids splashed around in the shallows. The place still seemed to me a ‘working’ pond. People swam in it (unofficially) and walked around the edge – it takes about half an hour. Thoreau’s original hut is gone, but the replica in its place does the job. You can duck under the doorway and stand between the windows (which cost him two dollars and forty-three cents, including glass) and stare at the bed, the stove, the table and the three chairs. For someone whose rented rooms were covered with plastic toys, the bareness of the place seemed almost grand. It has everything you need, but not much room for kids.

About three minutes away, at least by car, just south of the woods, between Walden and Flints Pond, is the Walter Gropius House. We liked to visit it afterwards: a white box, cleverly dressed up in angles and set on a sloping expensive-looking lawn. Inside, you feel the architect’s careful attention to ordinary life – the coat rack behind the twisting stairs, the built-in furniture. There’s also a room for their daughter, and the contrast makes for part of the appeal: the moral simplicity of Thoreau’s house, the aesthetic simplicity of Gropius’s. Although the hut is also pleasing to the eye, and there’s a modesty in modernism, too. ‘Most men appear never to have considered what a house is,’ Thoreau says, ‘and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbours have.’ Gropius would probably have agreed.

And yet the hut and the house are also worlds apart. They represent a choice, between two kinds of ambition, two kinds of life. Thoreau in Walden isn’t always generous to architects:

He was thinking (according to the notes of the Riverside edition I bought that year) of a sculptor called Horatio Greenough, whose functionalist aesthetic anticipated to a certain extent the Bauhaus – and whose essays were rediscovered around the time that Gropius settled in Massachusetts.

On a Saturday afternoon, driving from one house to the other, you can imagine yourself in the shoes of the Harvard professor, working at your desk in the wide-windowed study, and later, joining your students for dinner, while they admire the house you designed yourself and envy you … or in the shoes of the young Harvard grad, perched in front of the fire whose chimney you built with your own hands, ‘a mile from any neighbour,’ on a hard chair, reading, while the night closes in and you can hear the loons calling over the lake.

These days, I’m back in London and fill up the gaps in a writer’s life and salary by teaching. One of my classes is a seminar on the great American novella. We start with The Scarlet Letter (not exactly a novella, but by Thoreau’s contemporary and occasional friend, Hawthorne), and work through Bartleby and Ethan Frome and Hemingway and Bellow and finish with Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The picture these novels paint of American life is not a flattering one, and much of what their characters have to complain about, Thoreau talks about too: ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ It’s probably the most famous line in Walden and describes Bartleby and Ethan Frome and Edna Pontellier and Tommy Wilhelm and even Oedipa Maas pretty well.

But the relevance of Walden to these books is more specific than that. About the burden of inheriting a farm in Ethan Frome: ‘The man who has actually paid for his farm with labour on it is so rare that every neighbour can point to him.’ And the stress of chasing the buck in Seize the Day: ‘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.’ Or the blandness of suburbia, which Oedipa Maas frantically tries to escape in Lot 49: ‘our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad neighbourhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves.’

The course is a third-year seminar; my students are all about to graduate and enter what I remember ironically referring to at their age as ‘the real world’. On the last day, I give them a test, a list of anonymous quotations from the books, which they have to trace to their sources, Hemingway, Wharton, Bellow, Chopin, etc. Whoever wins gets a copy of Walden, because unlike the novels, Walden tries to offer a solution to the problems they describe – a carefully planned and precisely costed working-out of Bartleby’s famous motto ‘I prefer not to’. As if Bartleby had, instead of dying in prison, walked out of Wall Street and headed for the woods. ‘The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.’ Thoreau is trying to do something more.

Walden is a book about what your life would look like, how you would fill your days, how your relation to the world would change, if you didn’t have to spend money on real estate. ‘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 food, he recommends a vegetable diet and tells you how to grow what you need. Fuel is easily gathered, and if you don’t follow fashions, it shouldn’t be hard to acquire and maintain a decent set of working clothes. But shelter is really what we spend our money on – in other words, it’s what we spend our lives on. And as soon as you get the need of a house off your back (‘such a house as your neighbours have’), the world looks like a very different place.

‘Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students.’ It isn’t just their poverty that appeals to Thoreau and makes him want to appeal to them – but the fact that students are still at a stage in life when they are willing and able to think things through from scratch:

Part of the power of this passage comes from the fact that we can’t help associating that toolbox with a coffin – and the life he seems to recommend with something like death.

In the years that Thoreau spent living in the woods, America was going through a golden age of experiments in communal living, some of them run and organised by people he knew. (Brook Farm, probably the most famous, burned down and eventually failed while he was at the lake.) Walden was pitched as an alternative to these alternatives. It was designed to leave a lot of life out, not only kids and family but everything that comes with them – competitive dinner parties, the struggle for promotion. Because when we buy or rent a house, when we work the job it takes to afford it, we’re striving not just for shelter but a whole range of ordinary ambitions. To have children and neighbours, to go through the usual transitions into middle age and retirement. What would we spend our love and freedom on if not on those things? Answering this is the real challenge Thoreau sets himself – and it’s harder than explaining how to build a hut.

The opening of Walden includes one of the great first pages in American literature but the book that follows is often harder to like. It never quite lives up to the standard he sets himself: ‘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.’ Part of the power of that opening paragraph is that it promises to explain something – why he retired to the woods, and why after all he returned to ‘civilised’ life – which he chooses never really to explain. If this is the letter he sends to his ‘kindred’ then it leaves much out and contains a lot of second-hand material: quotations, myths, poems, translations and stories about other people.

So that reading Thoreau, even more than reading other classics, involves a kind of wrestling match – in which you try (and mostly fail) to get out of him something he doesn’t want to give you, while he, on his side, tries to throw you off your balance. It has survived almost in spite of itself or its author, because of the great simple power of his original idea. I want out. Here’s how. Some of the strongest portions of the text contain his practical advice: on how to build a shelter and dig a vegetable patch, how much the tools and materials cost, what he learned in the process. But we also remember the book for his beautiful and detailed accounts of the processes of nature, and the way these details turn into metaphors and then back again, so that you can never quite tell if you’re reading a parable or a diary.

My brother’s sister, an English woman who now lives in Connecticut, said to me in the middle of her first winter: ‘The people who thought this was a habitable continent made a mistake’. And some of the intensity of survival comes through in Thoreau’s prose, which has the almost uncomfortable heat of a close fire. Those two years turned out to be the heart of his life, they’re what he’s remembered for. Intensity, of one kind or another, is often what we end up being nostalgic for. And for me the book will always bring to mind that year we spent in Cambridge, a twenty-minute drive from Walden Pond – not just because of our visits there but for the whole passage of the seasons, which Thoreau faithfully records. The fall that turns every tree into a source of light. The five months of winter and snow, so that just to walk our daughter to the park we had to wrap her up like the Michelin Man. Spring, when it finally arrived, felt like a rainbow after the flood, forgiveness for something; by the summer we were gone.

Our landlords in Cambridge lived in the apartment above us. He was an architect, who knew Gropius from his student days. (He had met Rothko, too, and worked on the room at the Holyoke Center, for which Harvard commissioned a series of Rothko’s paintings.) His wife must have been very beautiful once, a kind of Jewish Brahmin hippy. She spent much of her early life travelling the world. ‘By another spring I may be a mail carrier in Peru, or a South American planter, or a Siberian exile, or a Greenland whaler … So wide is the choice of parts’, as Thoreau once wrote in his journal. But she ended up agoraphobic and trapped in a space not much bigger than his hut: a Walden of the mind. Because she hoarded, too, and their apartment was really composed of little alleyways threaded between stacked newspapers and excess furniture. (He once left a bone for the dog cooking in the pot; it smoked, and I had to go upstairs to turn off the hob.)

Very occasionally, on sunny days, she sat smoking on the steps underneath our front window – the house was raised high above the level of the street. It’s a pleasantly wealthy neighbourhood, shaded by trees, and in the afternoons you can watch commuters coming from the T-stop at Porter Square or kids walking to the park. Human nature watching. But then it was winter and by the end of the winter she had died. Her husband was away for the weekend, visiting his mother. We were supposed to feed their dog, and so we called to it every evening at the backdoor, while his wife lay upstairs. The big old dog, not much more social than its mistress, padded down and afterwards padded back up again; and part of what changed our memory of that year is our sense of failure on this occasion to go beyond the doorway of someone else’s life.

A few months ago, shortly before Trump’s inauguration, I answered questions, or sat in on a kind of reading group, about Walden in the Bloomsbury Waterstones, a studenty bookshop in central London. The only thing anyone wanted to talk about was Trump, or what Thoreau would have said about Trump. I remembered our election party on the night Obama won in 2008, when our Cambridge apartment was crowded with recently met (and now mostly forgotten) friends, including a distant descendant of the great American poet Edgar Allan Poe. In Cambridge, somehow, all of these grand old figures of Am Lit seem close enough that you could run into them at a sandwich shop – Henry James and Longfellow and Hawthorne. Their names are on all the side streets.

I don’t know what Thoreau would have said about Trump, but it probably would not have been what everybody wanted to hear. The opening of Civil Disobedience begins with the not very helpful reflection that ‘That government is best which governs not at all’. The danger with a writer like Thoreau is that we take from him what we want – and use him, as I used him that year in America, as a kind of weekend getaway from our ordinary lives, a flavour-enhancer for a country walk. Look at the leaves, listen to the birds, notice how the light on the water keeps changing. Whereas what he wanted was probably the opposite of that … His message is like the message that shines out from all sides of Rilke’s bust of Apollo – which, because it’s headless, has a gaze you can’t hide from: ‘You must change your life’. That doesn’t mean we have to agree.

ECONOMY

WHEN I WROTE the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbour, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labour of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilised 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 Brahmins 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 labours of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbours 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 labour. They have no friend Iolas 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 labour 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 wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labour enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

But men labour under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed 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: –

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way: –

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 labours 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 labouring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labour 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 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 œs alienum, another’s brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favour, 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 neighbour to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourself 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 fertilising 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 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 plough 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 prætors have decided how often you may go into your neighbour’s land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbour.’ 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 neighbours call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behaviour. 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 honour 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 will 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 the 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 civilised man? According to Liebeg, 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, &c., 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 à 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 nobler 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 neighbour 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 labour 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 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.