Walden [Annotated]

The Village Chapter IX: The Ponds Chapter X: Baker Farm Chapter XI: Economy Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4. Note how the definition of "civilized" will soon be drastically revised. 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.

We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Typee, which is set in the Sandwich Islands. Such "exotic" works were very popular. 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. 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. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

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. We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him.

Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly. Talk of a divinity in man!

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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 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , a book memorializing a river trip he took with his brother John, who died in of lockjaw. 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.

Annotated Walden – The Walden Woods Project

There is no play in them, for this comes after work. When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the One suspects that Thoreau would have had a different answer, though not terribly different. He is suggesting that most men have not chosen joy in any form. What everybody echoes 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. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

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Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown. The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to have been cared for. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? Thoreau was not interested in "engineering for all America" but in re-engineering America itself.

Chapter I: Economy

Instead of looking at just the problems of the 's, Thoreau based his philosophy on ageless truths from the past and looked into the future. He predicted in Walden , "When a man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.

Events that seem to be completely unrelated to his stay at Walden Pond have been influenced by it, including the national park system, the British labor movement, the creation of India, the civil rights movement, the hippie revolution, the environmental movement, and the wilderness movement. Today, Thoreau's words are quoted with feeling by liberals, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, and conservatives alike.

But I think Thoreau's words will be even more important in the future than they are now. N onetheless, Walden is a difficult book to read for three reasons: First, it was written by a gifted writer who uses surgically precise language, extended, allegorical metaphors, long and complex paragraphs and sentences, and vivid, detailed, and insightful descriptions. Thoreau does not hestitate to use metaphors, allusions, understatement, hyperbole, personification, irony, satire, metonymy, synecdoche, and oxymorons, and he can shift from a scientific to a transcendental point of view in mid-sentence.

Second, its logic is based on a different understanding of life, quite contrary to what most people would call common sense. Ironically, this logic is based on what most people say they believe. Thoreau, recognizing this, fills Walden with sarcasm, pardoxes, and double entendres double meanings.

He likes to tease, challenge, and even fool his readers. And third, quite often any words would be inadequate at expressing many of Thoreau's non-verbal insights into truth. Thoreau must use non-literal language to express these notions, and the reader must reach out to understand. P erhaps because of this, Walden tends to be treated as either an whimsical, idiosyncratic literary text that is, a purely personal account with difficult language or as a journal full of Nature writings for those who love to read about little furry animals.

But it really is neither. The purpose of Walden is to argue for, explain, and demonstrate Thoreau's philosophy of life, a philosophy that is practical and poetic, personal and universal. Thoreau developed his own sense of economics, an understanding that differs greatly from that of Karl Marx communism or that of Adam Smith capitalism , an understanding that can free an individual from a life of toil and worry. But in addition, he developed a purpose for life, something that the communists and capitalists overlooked, a purpose more important than economics.

Rather than seeing the acquisition of wealth as the goal for human existence, Thoreau saw the goal of life to be an exploration of the mind and of the magnificant world around us. A Thoreauvian lifestyle is almost exactly opposite of the consumer treadmill that most people find themselves running on today Thoreau asked, "Does Wisdom work on a tread-mill? A Thoreauvian lifestyle is poor in all the gewgaws most people accumulate and is rich in time, opportunity, and vast quantities of invisible wealth which can not be bought, sold, or stolen.

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I decided to write these pages for two reasons. First, I am aware from teaching that many American and international students have a great deal of difficulty understanding Thoreau, so I wanted to help. I cannot explain everything for you, but I can point you in the right direction. And second, I sincerely believe that Thoreau put his finger on the primary weaknesses of the American culture.

I feel that unless we resolve these problems that future generations will suffer heavily. A Thoreauvian lifestyle not only can make our individual lives more worthwhile but it can also help preserve our planet. M y comments, intended to make the text easier to comprehend, are of six different kinds: Please keep in mind that other interpretations are possible, including other interpretations that I would make, if I had room for unlimited comments.

Often one of Thoreau's paragraphs will communicate multiple, subtle messages or different levels of meaning, and a book would not exhaust all the implications. Still, this will provide a start. Never assume that I have provided a complete explanation. A lthough I have been an English teacher and first taught about Thoreau in college in the 60's, these remarks are mainly from my viewpoint as a Thoreauvian.

I remember clearly the day when I first picked up a copy of Walden at the age of My friend told me that it was too difficult, but I was already exploring the woods, walking 2. Although we have our differences both in degree and kind, I have never met another person as much like me as Thoreau. His insights were powerful in helping me improve my life, and Thoreau gave me permission to lead the life I wanted to live. My father, before he died, saw me as a failure, much as Emerson viewed Thoreau, but my father never saw the magical world that I have lived in, a world that is richer than anything money could ever buy.

I always felt sorry for him. I f you wish to live a boring and conventional life, devoting your days to working for someone else, your nights to watching TV, your weekends to cutting grass, and your cash to purchasing one consumer product after another, Thoreau is not for you. If you wish to experience life, then you will find that Thoreauvian insight can free up your time, energy, and possibilities.

I must warn you that it is not easy to be a Thoreauvian. As Emerson said in "Self-Reliance," "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. You will have to march to distant music and to weave your own baskets. You must learn to how to keep yourself awake, so you can suck the marrow out of life. You will have to find some Symmes' Hole to reach the unexplored interior of your soul and there set up a Realometer to measure your shams and delusions.

You will have to toe eternity and face a fact. But when you come to die, you will know that you have lived.

Walden Study Text

I s it possible to succeed? 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.