HENRY DAVID THOREAU - WALDEN

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 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 Iolaus 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. (…)

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 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. (…)

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. (…)

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. (…) 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. (…)

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
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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
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. (…) 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. (…)

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; (…)

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. (…)

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! (…)

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 (…).

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

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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. (…)

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. (…) 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. (…)

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 was 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
hook 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 jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it 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. (…) 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. (…)

Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements.
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit
them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man's
pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross
necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former? (…)

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to
where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their
youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus
to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his
hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. (…)

Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house, which were already impervious to rain,
with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten
with a plane.

I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a
garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap-doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace
opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting
the work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very few are able
to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which
compose them:

Boards................................$ 8.03 1/2, (mostly shanty boards.)

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Refuse shingles for roof and sides.... 4.00
Laths................................. 1.25
Two second-hand windows with glass.... 2.43
One thousand old brick................ 4.00
Two casks of lime..................... 2.40 (That was high.)
Hair.................................. 0.31 (More than I needed.)
Mantle-tree iron...................... 0.15
Nails................................. 3.90
Hinges and screws..................... 0.14
Latch................................. 0.10
Chalk................................. 0.01
Transportation........................ 1.40 (I carried a good part on my back.)
----- In all................................$ 28.12 ½

These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and sand, which I claimed by squatter's right. I have
also a small woodshed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house.

I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as
soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one.

I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater
than the rent which he now pays annually. (…)

Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in
order to meet my unusual expenses, I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it
chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven
acres, mostly growing up to pines and hickories, and was sold the preceding season for eight dollars and
eight cents an acre. One farmer said that it was "good for nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on." I put
no manure whatever on this land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not expecting to cultivate
so much again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got out several cords of stumps in plowing, which
supplied me with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould, easily distinguishable through
the summer by the greater luxuriance of the beans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable
wood behind my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder of my fuel. I was
obliged to hire a team and a man for the plowing, though I held the plow myself. My farm outgoes for the
first season were, for implements, seed, work, etc., $14.72 1/2. The seed corn was given me. This never
costs anything to speak of, unless you plant more than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen
bushels of potatoes, beside some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn and turnips were too late to come to
anything. My whole income from the farm was $ 23.44

Deducting the outgoes............. 14.72 1/2

I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary
food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and
strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane
(Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. (…) Yet men have come to such a
pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries; and I know a good
woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only. (…)

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For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by
working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well
as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school- keeping, and found
that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress
and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. (…)

As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed
well, I did not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a
house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire
these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I relinquish to them the pursuit. Some are
"industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse
mischief; to such I have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure
than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do- work till they pay for themselves, and
get their free papers. For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of
any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer's day ends with
the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his
labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the
other. In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a
hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the
sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow,
unless he sweats easier than I do. One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told
me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. I would not have any one adopt my mode of
living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for
myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each
one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's
instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me
he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave
keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port
within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course. (…)

CHAPTER 2: WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR.

AT A CERTAIN season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.
I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have
bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each
farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at
any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it- took everything but a deed of it-
took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk- cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and
withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This experience entitled me to be
regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape
radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat?-better if a country seat. I discovered
many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the
village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for
an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see
the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure
that they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, wood-lot, and
pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each
blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow, perchance, for a man is rich in
proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several farms- the refusal was all I wanted-
but I never got my fingers burned by actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual possession was
when I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to
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make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife- every
man has such a wife- changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him.
Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that
man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However, I let him keep the ten
dollars and the farm too, for I had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for just
what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten
cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich man without any
damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded
without a wheelbarrow. (…)

The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were: its complete retirement, being, about two miles from
the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by abroad field; its
bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was
nothing tome; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put
such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, nawed by
rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it from my
earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through
which I heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some
rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the
pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready to
carry it on; like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders- I never heard what compensation he received for
that- and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be
unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the
kind I wanted, if I could only afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have said. (…)

The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose to describe more at length, for
convenience putting the experience of two years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write anode to
dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my
neighbors up.

When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which,
by accident, was on Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter,
but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough, weather-
stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. (…) This was an airy and unplastered cabin,
fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over
my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts
only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few
are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.

The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally
when making excursions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing
from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With this more substantial shelter about me, I had
made some progress toward settling in the world. (…) Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly
neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. I was not only
nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those smaller and more
thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager- the woodthrush, the veery, the
scarlet tanager, the field sparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many others.

I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord and
somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two
miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods that
the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the
first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain,

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its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing
of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while
the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of
some nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on
the sides of mountains.

This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain-storm in August, when, both
air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and
the wood thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at
such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being, shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of
light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important. From a hill-top near by,
where the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a
wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each
other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none.
That way I looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon,
tinged with blue. (…)

Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least.
There was pasture enough for my magination. The low shrub oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose
stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the
roving families of men. "There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon"-
said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures.

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in
history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by
astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of
the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that
my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. If
it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair,
then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and
twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such
was that part of creation where I had squatted; (…)

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with
Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the
pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were
engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it
again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as
much affected by the faint burn of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my
apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sailing with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet
that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath
and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the
everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is
the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes
which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day,
to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor,(…)

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation
of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the
unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint
a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to
carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To
affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its

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details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up,
such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I
could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish
to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite
necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to
put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it
to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and
publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it,
whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here
to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like
pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its
occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has
hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the
rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a
thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst
of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one
items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make
his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.
Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce
other things in proportion. (…) Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice,
and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but
whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge
rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will
build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home
and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you
ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee
man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They
are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some
have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. (…)

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are
hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine
tomorrow. (…)

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important
communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my
life- I wrote this some years ago- that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution
through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest.
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or
murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or
one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter-
we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for
a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit
and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. (…)

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily
observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we
know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only what is

8
inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried
and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that
petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. (…)

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and
mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or breakfast, gently and without
perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry- determined to
make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed
in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger
and you are safe, for the rest of the way is downhill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it,
looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its
pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle
ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and
tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London,
through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and
religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no
mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might
found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that
future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you
stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will seethe sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a
cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily
conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the
rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how
shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose
bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been
regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way
into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is
hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ
for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my
way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and
thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.