For the last few weeks, I have been basking in the words of Henry David Thoreau’s book, Walden. I chose it to read first this summer because I believed it would set a good tone for my summer, and it has. If anything, it has deepened my appreciation for the simple things in life. It has really resonated with my own recent thoughts about life, the meaning of life, society and society’s problems, and living authentically. So far, my favorite section has been “Economy”, in which he lays out his reasoning for going to Walden Pond, and he analyzes the basic human needs of food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. For each, he tries to find the original meaning it had and how that meaning has been altered or corrupted in our present day. For example, he says that clothing was initially intended to keep our internal heat inside, to conserve our energy and keep us warm. Over time, however, society has placed more importance on the condition, style, (and brand in our modern times) of one’s clothing than the dignity and worth of the person wearing it. He says: “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. . . . Often if an accident happens to a gentleman’s legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected.”
Brilliant. And he speaks in a similar way about everything, intensely looking into the crevices of our thought and behaviors in society, trying to sift out what is wrong or unnecessary and keeping that which is true and beneficial. I find a sweet, simple inspiration in his words, and for the first time in a long time I feel a connection to a writer through his words. Sitting down to read Walden is like briefly entering another person’s thoughts, in order to benefit from his musings and strokes of enlightenment. There’s simply too much to talk about with this book. If anything, I need some time to collect my thoughts and that might take till I finish the book itself. I hope to write more on it again soon, but for now I would just like to share some of my favorite passages:
“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.”
“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”
“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”
“But lo! Men have become tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.”
“Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.”
(On students) “I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?”
“A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one’s fellow-man in the broadest sense. . . . I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins.”
“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”
“Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”
“The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”
“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, . . . 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; . . .”
“How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?”
“Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”
“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.”
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