Aethlos — Walden by Henry David Thoreau — Spencer Lord’s Weltanschauung

WALDEN & ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Contents

WALDEN

1. Economy

2. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

3. Reading

4. Sounds

5. Solitude

6. Visitors

7. The Bean-Field

8. The Village

9. The Ponds

10. Baker Farm

11. Higher Laws

12. Brute Neighbors

13. House-Warming

14. Inhabitants and Winter Visitors

15. Winter Animals

16. The Pond in Winter

17. Spring

18. Conclusion

-- On the Duty of Civil Disobedience --

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 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 life, 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

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. 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 woodlot! 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 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. 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 qua 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 aes 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, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry

favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison

offenses; 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 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. 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.

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. 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. According to Evelyn, "the wise

Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and

the Roman praetors have decided how often you may go into your

neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without

trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor." Hippocrates has

even left directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even with

the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. 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?"

We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for

instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once

a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would

have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I

hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles!

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. Who

shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater

miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for

an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour;

ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology! -- I

know of no reading of another's experience so startling and

informing as this would be.

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. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

You may say the wisest thing you can, old man -- you who have lived

seventy years, not without honor of a kind -- I hear an irresistible

voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons

the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.

We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow

elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our

strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh

incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance

of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if

we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live

by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night

we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to

uncertainties. 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. All change is a miracle to

contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every

instant. Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know, and

that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."

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.

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; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to

see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what

they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the

improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential

laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be

distinguished from those of our ancestors.

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. Man has

invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly

from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the

consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity

to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second

nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our

own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is,

with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery

properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the

inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were

well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm,

these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his

great surprise, "to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing

such a roasting." So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked

with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it

impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the

intellectualness of the civilized man? According to Liebig, man's

body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal

combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less.

The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and

death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or

from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the

vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for

analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the

expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression,

animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps

up the fire within us -- and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food

or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without --

Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus

generated and absorbed.

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! The poor man is wont to

complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical

than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The

summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian

life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun

is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its

rays; while Food generally is more various, and more easily

obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary.

At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my own

experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a

wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and

access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be

obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other

side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote

themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may

live -- that is, keep comfortably warm -- and die in New England at

last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm,

but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course

a la mode.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of

life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the

elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the

wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.

The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were

a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so

rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that

we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more

modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an

impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground

of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the

fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature,

or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not

philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once

admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle

thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to

live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence,

magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of

life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great

scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not

kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity,

practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the

progenitors of a noble race of men. But why do men degenerate ever?

What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which

enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of

it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even

in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed,

warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and

not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?

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, his

vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The soil, it appears,

is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it

may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man

rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the

same proportion into the heavens above? -- for the nobler plants are

valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far

from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents,

which, though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they

have perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this

purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season.

I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures,

who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and

perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the

richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they

live -- if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to

those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the

present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and

enthusiasm of lovers -- and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this

number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever

circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not;

-- but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly

complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they

might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically

and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their

duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most

terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but

know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their

own golden or silver fetters.

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life

in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who

are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly

astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some

of the enterprises which I have cherished.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been

anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too;

to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future,

which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will

pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than

in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from

its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and

never paint "No Admittance" on my gate.

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am

still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken

concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they

answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the

tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud,

and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them

themselves.

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if

possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter,

before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been

about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning

from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight,

or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted

the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last

importance only to be present at it.

So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town,

trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express!

I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into

the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either

of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in

the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching

from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new

arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall,

that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that,

manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun.

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide

circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk

of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only

my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their

own reward.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and

rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of

highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping

them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where

the public heel had testified to their utility.

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a

faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I

have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm;

though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a

particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have

watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree,

the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow

violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.

In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without

boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and

more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the

list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate

allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully,

I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less

paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the

house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to

buy any baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the

reply. "What!" exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do

you mean to starve us?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors

so well off -- that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by

some magic, wealth and standing followed -- he had said to himself:

I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I

can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have

done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He

had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth

the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it

was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while

to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but

I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the

less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and

instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my

baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling

them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one

kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the

others?

Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any

room in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but

I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever

to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into

business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using

such slender means as I had already got. My purpose in going to

Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to

transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be

hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense,

a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as

foolish.

I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they

are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial

Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem

harbor, will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as

the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine

timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will

be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to

be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and

sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write

or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports

night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same

time -- often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey

shore; -- to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the

horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a

steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and

exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the

markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the

tendencies of trade and civilization -- taking advantage of the

results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all

improvements in navigation; -- charts to be studied, the position of

reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and

ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of

some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have

reached a friendly pier -- there is the untold fate of La Prouse;

-- universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all

great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants,

from Hanno and the Phoenicians down to our day; in fine, account of

stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. It is a

labor to task the faculties of a man -- such problems of profit and

loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it,

as demand a universal knowledge.

I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for

business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade;

it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it

is a good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled;

though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It

is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the

Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.

As this business was to be entered into without the usual

capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that

will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be

obtained. 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 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. But even if the rent is

not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I

sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this -- Who could

wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave

as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if