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Chapter 1, LibriVox Part 2. Most of the luxuries in 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 meager life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindu, 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 radical 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, and 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 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 a 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 travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard of 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, days, 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 hilltops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that, mana-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 snowstorms and rainstorms, 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 eel 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 today, 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 sincere 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 anyone'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 courthouse, 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 county 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 dispatch 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 Prusse, universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanol 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 tear and trent, engaging 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 he...
But he... 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 reaches dress a scarecrow in your latest 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 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 as 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 madame pfeiffer in her adventurous travels around 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 traveling dress when she went to meet the authorities for she was now in a civilized country where people are judged 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 besides clothes introduced sewing a kind of work which you may call endless a woman's dress at least is never done a man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in for him the old will do that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet if a hero ever has a valet bare feet are older than shoes and he can make them do only those who go to soirees and legislative balls must have new coats coats to change as often as the man changes in them but if my jacket and trousers my hat and shoes are fit to worship god in they will do will they not whoever saw his old clothes his old coat actually worn out resolved into its primitive developments so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still or shall we say richer who could do with less i say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes and not rather a new wearer of clothes if there is not a new man how can the new clothes be made to fit if you have any enterprise before you try it in your old clothes all men want not something to do with but something to do or rather something to be perhaps we should never procure a new suit however ragged or dirty the old until we have so conducted so enterprise or sailed in some way that we feel like new men in the old and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles our molting season like that of fowls must be a crisis in our lives the loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it thus also the snake casts its slough and the caterpillar its wormy coat by an internal industry and expansion for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion as well as that of mankind we don garment after garment as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis our false skin which partakes not of our life and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury our thicker garments constantly worn are our cellular integument or cortex but our shirts are our liber or true bark which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man i believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt it is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that if an enemy take the town he can like the old philosopher walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety while one thick garment is for most purposes as good as three thin ones and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars which will last as many years thick pantaloons for two dollars cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar and a winter cap for sixty two and a half cents or a better be made at home at a nominal cost where is he so poor that clad in such a suit of his own earning there will not be found wise men to do him reverence when i ask for a garment of a particular form my tailoress tells me gravely they do not make them so now not emphasizing the they at all as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the fates and i find it difficult to get what i want simply because she cannot believe that i mean what i say that i am so rash when i hear this oracular sentence i am for a moment absorbed in thought emphasizing to myself each word separately that i may come at the meaning of it that i may find out by what degree of consanguinity they are related to me and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly and finally i am inclined to answer her with equal mystery and without any more emphasis of the they quote it is true they did not make them so recently but they do now end quote of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character but only the breadth of my shoulders as it were a peg to bang the coat on we worship not the graces nor the parse but fashion she spins and weaves and cuts with full authority the head monkey at paris puts on a traveler's cap and all the monkeys in america do the same i sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men they would have to be passed through a powerful press first to squeeze their old notions out of them so that they would not so soon get upon their legs again and then there would be someone in the company with a maggot in his head hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when for not even fire kills these things and you would have lost your labor nevertheless we will not forget that some egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mommy on the whole i think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art at present men make shift to wear what they can get like shipwrecked sailors they put on what they can find on the beach and at a little distance whether of space or time laugh at each other's masquerade every generation laughs at the old fashions but follows religiously the new we are amused at beholding the costume of henry the eighth or queen elizabeth as much as if it was that of the king and queen of the cannibal islands all costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque it is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life past within it which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people let harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too when a soldier is hit by a cannonball rags are as becoming as purple the childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires today the manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color the one will be sold readily the other lie on the shelf though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the more fashionable comparatively tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called it is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin deep and unalterable i cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing the condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the english and it cannot be wondered at since as far as i have heard or observed the principal object is not that mankind may be well and honestly clad but unquestionably that corporations may be enriched in the long run men hit only what they aim at therefore though they should fail immediately they had better aim at something high as for a shelter i will not deny that this is now a necessary of life though there are instances of men having done without it for long periods in colder countries than this samuel lang says that quote the laplander in his skin dress and in a skin bag which he puts over his head and shoulders will sleep night after night on the snow in a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in any woolen clothing end quote he had seen them asleep thus yet he adds quote they are not hardier than other people end quote but probably the man did not live long on the earth without discovering the convenience which there is in a house the domestic comforts which phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family though these must be extremely partial and occasional in those climates where the house is associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly and two-thirds of the year except for parasol is unnecessary in our climate in the summer it was formerly almost solely a covering at night in the indian gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day's march and a row of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified that so many times they had camped man was not made so large-limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world and wall in a space such as fitted him he was at first bare and out of doors but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather by daylight the rainy season and the winter to say nothing of the torrid sun would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house adam and eve according to the fable wore the bower before other clothes man wanted a home a place of warmth or comfort first of warmth then the warmth of the affections we may imagine a time when in the infancy of the human race some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter every child begins the world again to some extent and loves to stay outdoors even in wet and cold it plays house as well as horse having an instinct for it who does not remember the interest with which when young he looked at shelving rocks or any approach to a cave it was the natural yearning of that portion any portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us from the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves of bark and boughs of linen woven and stretched of grass and straw of boards and shingles of stones and tiles at last we know not what it is to live in the open air and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think from the hearth the field is a great distance it would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof or the saint dwell there so long birds do not sing in caves nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots however if one designs to construct a dwelling house it behooves him to exercise a little yankee shrewdness lest after all he find himself in a workhouse a labyrinth without a clue a museum an almshouse a prison or a splendid mausoleum instead consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary i have seen penobscot indians in this town living in tents of thin cotton cloth while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them and i thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind formerly when how to get my living honestly with freedom left for my proper pursuits was a question which vexed me even more than it does now for unfortunately i am become somewhat callous i used to see a large box by the railroad six feet long by three wide in which the laborers locked up their tools at night and it suggested to me that every man who has hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar and having bored a few auger holes in it to admit the air at least get into it when it rained and at night and hope down the lid and so have freedom in his love and in his soul be free this did not appear the worst nor by any means a despicable alternative you could sit up as late as you pleased and whenever you got up go abroad without any landlord or house lord dogging you for rent many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this i am far from testing economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity but i cannot so be disposed of a comfortable house for a rude and hardy race that lived mostly out of doors was once made here almost entirely of such materials as nature furnished ready to their hands gookin who was superintendent of the indians subject to the massachusetts colony writing in 1674 says quote the best of their houses are covered very neatly tight and warm with barks of trees slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up and made into great flakes with pressure of weighty timber when they are green the meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush and are also indifferently tight and warm but not so good as the former some i have seen sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet broad i have often lodged in their wigwams and found them as warm as the best english houses end quote he adds that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats and were furnished with various utensils the indians had advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most and taken down and put up in a few hours and every family owned one or its apartment in one end of chapter one part two