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Chapter 1. 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 traveled 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 their 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 top 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 had no friend, Iolus, to burn with a hot iron the root of the hider'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 clear 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 augian 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 out 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 Gusalion and Pyra created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them. In the genus durum sumus, experience que laborum, e documenta damus, quasimus, origine nati, or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way, from pence 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, or 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, trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slow, called by the Latins ace 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 yourself 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 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 worse 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, of 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 everyone echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow. Mere smoke of opinion which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.
What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going. New...
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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, 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 30 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 end of the fingers neither shorter nor longer undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and 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 precedence so little has been tried whatever have been thy failures hitherto quote be not afflicted my child for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone end quote 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 prevented some mistakes this was not the light in which i hold 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 are 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 i 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 when i behaved so well you may say the wisest thing you can old man you who have lived 70 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 unwittingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties so thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live reverencing our life 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 center all change is a miracle to contemplate but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant confucius said quote to know that we know what we know and that we do not know what we do not know that is true knowledge end quote 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 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 a 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 libik 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 draft 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 the 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 ales the summer in some climates make 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 stationary 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 10 or 20 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 end of the first part of chapter one