The Illustrated Walden Read online

  What he felt upon this subject he gave utterance to with all frankness. “I confess,” he says in one of his letters, “that it is rare that I rise to sentiment in my relations to men,—ordinarily to a mere patient, or may be wholesome, good-will.” He could imagine something more, but is speaking of things as they are. But if he talks thus about his fellows, he can be equally unsparing with himself. He is himself only a kind of scarecrow,—“a bundle of straw in a man’s clothing, with a few bits of tin to sparkle in the sun dangling about me, as if I were hard at work there in the field.” “Do not waste any reverence on my attitude,” he charges a correspondent, who, we may guess, had been rather profuse in his protestations. “I merely manage to sit up where I have dropped. I am sure that my acquaintances mistake me. They ask my advice on high matters, but they do not know even how poorly on’t I am for hats and shoes. I have hardly a shift. Just as shabby as I am in my outward apparel, ay, and more lamentably shabby, am I in my inward substance. If I should turn myself inside out, my rags and meanness would indeed appear. I am something to him that made me, undoubtedly, but not much to any other that he has made.” Let utterances of this kind be remembered in his favor when he seems, as he sometimes does, to be exalting himself above his weaker brethren,—who must live near a doctor, poor things, and can hardly venture to go a-huckleberrying without taking a medicine-chest along; who are still a little afraid of the dark, although Christianity and candles have been introduced.

  It is to be remembered always that “Walden” is a young man’s book. A philosopher of thirty may be pardoned for holding the truth somewhat stiffly; finding the ideal truer than the actual, and his own faith a surer guide than other people’s experience. At that age the earnest soul still believes it possible to live according to one’s inner light. With added years, of course, there come added wisdom and a tempering of desire. We no longer expect the moon for a plaything. The thought of personal perfection mostly ceases to haunt us. Our mood has grown humbler, and we wear an easier yoke. We have learned to take things as they are, to feel less confidence in our own intuitions and more respect for traditional and collective opinion. Both outward and inward things are seen in a different light from what formerly shone on them. If we read the same Bible, we give it another interpretation. We have a more practical scale of values. We no longer cultivate poverty as a garden herb; on the whole, as we now think, a good house and money in the bank are more desirable. Nothing is quite so good or quite so bad as we used to imagine. With years we have learned toleration, especially of things evil.

  Whether Thoreau would ever have arrived at this pitch of catholicity is more than any one can say; he died before the age of ripeness; but perhaps he was likelier to settle more and more firmly upon his first conviction. As he said of the yew-tree, “flexibility is not known for one of his qualities.” When he went to Walden, at all events, he was still in the enthusiasm of youth and the pride of idealism. It was not the good that he wanted, but the best. He would sell his clothes and keep his thoughts. Nothing that men called prosperity could allure him; nothing that they called adversity could daunt him. He believed in the certainties. No guesswork for him. “There is solid bottom everywhere;” and he meant to find it and build on it. “Better than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” he could say; and again he said, “Say what you have to say, not what you ought.” He would not be strangled by consistency, nor enslaved to the past. “You must make tracks into the Unknown,” he avers. “That is what you have your board and clothes for.” Nothing in his life as a hermit became him better than the manner of his leaving it when the time came. How serenely and bravely he sums up its results:—

  “I learned this, at least; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

  Listen also to the following confession of faith written, in a letter to Mr. Blake, six months after the close of his sojourn at the pond:—

  “My actual life is a fact in view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak. Every man’s position is in fact too simple to be described. I have sworn no oath. I have no designs on society, or nature, or God. I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live. I love reform better than its modes. There is no history of how bad became better. I believe something, and there is nothing else but that. I know that I am. I know that another is who knows more than I, who takes interest in me, whose creature, and yet whose kindred, in one sense, am I. I know that the enterprise is worthy. I know that things work well. I have heard no bad news.”

  The man who wrote thus might be pardoned for exaggeration, for mysticism, for sharpness of speech, though these were a thousandfold more and worse than are to be found anywhere in Thoreau’s books. To call him a prig, or an idler, or a shirk, is not to damage him. No doubt he had his imperfections. No doubt, too, they were of a kind to be easily turned to ridicule. All virtue is attended by its shadow. Thoreau knew this, not only as a general truth, but as a truth specially applicable to himself. His independence, his individuality, were not without an obverse side. “I am perhaps more willful than others,” he wrote in his diary. “I sometimes seem to myself to owe all my little success, all for which men commend me, to my vices.” But he was not for that reason to be deterred from following his own path. What other path should he follow? It was foolish for him to live in a hut in the woods, men said,—as if they knew the difference between folly and wisdom! But meanwhile he lived there, and wrote his book; and though it is early yet to talk of American classics, or even, perhaps, of American literature, it is beginning to be evident that Time, the ultimate critic, has taken Thoreau’s part, and is very unlikely to forget him in the day of final award.

  BRADFORD TORREY.

  I

  Economy

  W hen 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 li
fe, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

  I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders “until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach;” or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars,—even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend 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 labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! 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 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:—

  Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,

  Et documenta damus quâ simus origine nati.

  Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,—

  “From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,

  Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.”

  So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

  Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

  Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins œs 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, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, 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 neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

  I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination,—what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

  The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

  When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody e
choes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.