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WorkHenry David Thoreau

Walden

Two years in a ten-by-fifteen-foot house beside a Massachusetts pond, written up as a set of accounts showing how little a free life costs.

by Henry David Thoreau429 passages held

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First published
(aged 37)
Original language
English

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Overview

Concord wanted to know what he ate, whether he was lonely, and how much he gave to charity. Henry David Thoreau had moved on 4 July 1845 into a house he had built himself, ten feet wide by fifteen long, beside Walden Pond on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, a mile from the nearest neighbor. He stayed until 6 September 1847: two years, two months and two days. Walden began as a lecture he gave at the Concord Lyceum in February 1847 to answer his townspeople's questions, and its first and longest chapter, "Economy," answers them with accounts. The house cost $28.12½, and Thoreau found that about six weeks of paid work a year covered everything he needed. The argument of the book rests on that arithmetic. Most people, he says, spend their lives earning the means to live and never reach the living; someone who cuts down what he needs buys back his time, and can then find out by trial what a life is for. His opponent is not a rival author but the farmers around him, whom he describes as crushed under the barns and acres they inherited. He tells readers plainly not to copy him, and says he left the pond because he had other lives to lead. The writing took far longer than the stay. Thoreau put the manuscript through seven versions and folded the two years into one, running from summer to spring. Ticknor and Fields of Boston published it on 9 August 1854 in an edition of 2,000 copies. Most of the early reviews were favorable, but the edition took five years to sell, and the book then stayed out of print until 1862, the year he died. Later critics attacked the man as well as the book: Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish novelist, called the life unmanly. Walden has since been published in most of the world's major languages.

Key concepts

What does Thoreau mean by economy in Walden?

Economy, in Walden, is the art of managing a life so that as little of it as possible is spent on earning. Thoreau starts from what he calls the necessaries of life, which are food, shelter, clothing and fuel, and asks how cheaply each can be had. Everything a person obtains beyond these is paid for in working time. The chapter's lists of prices are meant to show how small the necessary sum is.

What is voluntary poverty?

Voluntary poverty is choosing to own and need little, so as to see human life clearly. Thoreau holds that no one can be an impartial or wise observer of life except from that vantage ground, and that the wisest have always lived more simply than the poor. It differs from being poor. The Irish labourer John Field, whom he meets at Baker Farm, works hard to pay for tea, coffee and meat, and is poor without having chosen anything.

What does Thoreau mean by quiet desperation?

Quiet desperation is the hidden despair of people who spend their lives working for things they never get to enjoy. Thoreau says the mass of men live this way, and that what is called resignation is only desperation confirmed. It shows even in their games and amusements, in which there is no play, since play comes after work. He does not think it a fate: people choose this common mode of living because they believe no choice is left.

Why does morning matter so much in Walden?

Morning, for Thoreau, is a state of mind and not an hour: it is whenever a person is awake and there is a dawn in him. He calls it the most memorable season of the day, when the mind is least asleep. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep, and people must learn to wake themselves by an infinite expectation of the dawn. The book ends on the same image. The sun is but a morning star.

Why does Thoreau call his stay at the pond an experiment?

He calls it an experiment because he treats life as something to be tried and not taken on report from one's elders. The old, he says, have told him nothing to the purpose, since life is largely untried by each person. The stay tests one question, how little is needed to live well, and he reports the result: whoever advances confidently in the direction of his dreams meets a success unexpected in common hours.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

What a thing costs in life

How much of a life goes into paying for a house, a farm, a coat? Thoreau keeps accounts to show that most people buy their living at the price of the life itself.

The cost of a thing, Thoreau writes, is the amount of life that must be exchanged for it. An average house in Concord takes a labourer ten to fifteen years to pay off. He sets his own figures against that: a house for $28.12½, and about six weeks of paid work a year to meet every expense. His targets are the farmers around him, pushing an inherited barn and a hundred acres down the road of life, men who have become the tools of their tools. Food, shelter, clothing and fuel are necessary. Whatever is added beyond them has to be paid for in time.

  • labor
  • simplicity
  • poverty
  • property
  • economics
  • materialism
  • self-sufficiency
  • architecture
  • agriculture
  • technology

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Living deliberately, awake and alone

What is left of a life once everything inessential is taken away? Thoreau went to the woods to find out, and holds that hardly anyone is awake enough to know.

Thoreau went to the woods, he says, to live deliberately and front only the essential facts of life, so as not to discover at death that he had not lived. Being awake is his word for this. Millions are awake enough for physical labour, and he has never met a man who was quite awake. Solitude serves the same end: he found no companion so companionable, and thinks people lonelier among others than in their rooms. Yet he is no hermit. The house has three chairs, visitors come, and he leaves after two years because he has other lives to live.

  • solitude
  • self-reliance
  • freedom
  • attention
  • time
  • reading
  • education
  • experience
  • hospitality
  • spirituality
  • domestic life

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What the pond and its animals teach

Can close attention to one pond and the creatures around it tell a person anything about himself? Thoreau measures, watches and records as if it could.

A lake, Thoreau writes, is earth's eye, and whoever looks into it measures the depth of his own nature. So he sounds Walden with a line and a stone, finds one hundred and two feet where neighbours said there was no bottom, and is thankful it was made deep and pure for a symbol. He reports a war between red and black ants, plays a game with a diving loon, and reads leaf shapes in thawing sand as proof that the earth is alive. The wild is in him too: he is tempted to eat a woodchuck raw, and reveres that instinct beside the spiritual one.

  • nature
  • perception
  • observation
  • animal behavior
  • human-animal relations
  • hunting
  • imagination
  • knowledge

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Within this work

passages held
429
distinct concepts
574
by passages held, corpus-wide
#174

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “nature” and “perception”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
natureperception30
natureobservation25
naturesolitude18
labornature14
laborsimplicity9
naturetime8
self-reliancesimplicity7
natureself-reliance6
laborself-reliance5
labortime4
naturesimplicity4
observationperception4
observationtime3
perceptionsolitude3
laborperception1
laborsolitude1
observationsolitude1
self-reliancesolitude1
simplicitysolitude1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1849 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

    The first of Thoreau's two books, drafted at Walden Pond in memory of his brother John and printed at his own expense. Its failure to sell made him hold back Walden, which waited five more years.

     EN
  2. 1854 Walden you are here EN
  3. 1863 Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

    Lectures, reviews and magazine essays from about 1840 to 1863, several of them printed only after Thoreau's death in 1862. They run from an 1843 review of a plan to abolish labor by means of machinery to the anti-slavery speeches of the 1850s and the late nature essays.

     EN
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