Henry David Thoreau
So Far I’ve only read Walden, which is the bulk of this collection, I’m going to read the others later but evaluate them as I go along.
I loved Walden, but did find myself falling asleep through the middle chapters. Economy, the first chapter, and the Conclusion were my favorite parts of the book, I read them intensely. Some of the things Thoreau says really help me confirm what I have been thinking lately. Recommended reading.
Don’t buy it: Walden is available on Project Gutenberg.
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. (7)
Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, “be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?” (9)
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. (10)
So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change.
This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. [...] 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. (10)
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. (19)
In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. (27)
The point that our homes these days are so expensive and hard to get for the average person just shows how overdone everything in our society is – it could be millions and millions of times simpler, but this way we’ve “made progress.”
the savage owns his shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to hire. (27)
Why shouldn’t people be able to live in Wigwams, quality buildings naturally made and constructed by hand? Would this be a cultural suicide? Who would visit me if I build myself a home of sticks and mud?
The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it. This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. (29)
Evolution of modern society seems to have built a soaringly over-complex system of living. We live in a world of nothing built upon nothing again upon nothing until the bits of nothing become something. But how can we exist on nothing!
Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or, gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! (31)
It seems that these days people think little of what they want and need, while thinking much of what other have and require. We strive to be of the mode of another, and lose that which had been ourself.
It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which
the herd so diligently follow. (32)
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way. (33)
It’s becoming hard to see why I have always bought new clothes, spent money needlessly, and I almost wish that as a consumer I could have a refund for everything ever purchased – surely I would have enough wealth to live well for a time. I could get along with one pair of shorts and a shirt or two—I have been all summer this far. Do I really need a closet to keep my clothes in?
I cannot but perceive that this so-called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and I do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, my attention being wholly occupied with the jump; for I remember that the greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is that of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. Without factitious support, man is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance. (34)
On the topic of education, incorporated universities, with the need of money to provide education:
I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides. Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme—a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection—to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights successive generations have to pay. (46)
I might go to college after I finish High School, I don’t know. I’m surely talented enough – I could breeze through the last years of my ‘education’ as I have the first and middle years. But students these days just float through their educations, not gaining much, in fact losing chunks of their lives. Is it worth it to lose the youth just to go through college and get your $250,000 job? What good would that do me, to earn buckets of money and bang a girl until she married me? I could live without any effort if I wanted, but why would I want to?
What makes a BMW worth an outrageous sum, it’s surely not real value. What makes the job that you have pay you money? It’s probably not truly worth it to spend eight hours a day working for your company, sitting in an office, moreover wasting your time. Do dollars truly make nothing into something?
that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. (50)
Sounds great.
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. (62)
What could be better? Going to college?
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. (63)
It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not
leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure—if they are, indeed, so well off—to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord? (98)
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. [...] we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. [...] The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him. (123)
If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform
to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all
travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to
dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old
philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. (287)
Do you really learn that much of value in college? Would it really be worth the investment of my life in this society?
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: 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. (288)
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. [...] The philosopher said: “From an army of
three divisions one can take away its general, and put it in
disorder; from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought.” Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. (292)
Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money
is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. (293)
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