Walden is one of those books that I keep running into. Every lover of nature, solitude, and reflection, seems to refer to Thoreau’s most famous work. The Dutch 2019 version starts with an introduction by the popular Italian author Paulo Cognetti, whose works bear heavy influences of Walden. The book is popular. Now more than ever.
In times of hyper technological advancements and chaotic geo-political times, people revert back to their most simpel state: nature, rocks, trees, growing their own food, chopping wood, reading books, writing journals. That kind of stuff. Very individualistic, self-reliant, simpel, and controllable.
And who is the O.G. fella who experimented with these themes? Henry Thoreau. In 1854 he said goodbye to his privileged life (son of a pencil factory owner, private teacher by trade) and moved into the forrest near Walden pond. On this patch of land (owned by his friend — the philosopher Emerson), he build the little hut of 3x4 where he would spend the next two years of his life.
This book is his memoir of that time. The chapters range from very minute details of his accounting, to agricultural tips and tricks, to the more philosophical reflections on life. Those last reflections is what most people expect to read when they start this book. You just imagine this old hermit-turned-philosopher, who connects to the woods to find the answers of life.
But Thoreau was not really a hermit. He was just lounging around. Doing a bit of gardening, a bit of walking around, he enjoyed visiting town, giving talks to the interested villagers, and he enjoyed visiting his friends and family for a bit of food and mental stimulation.
Okay, it was not a great feat of endurance and isolation what Thoreau attempted, but regardless of that and perhaps precisely because of that, he has some interesting insights to share.
Thoreau lived simply as a demonstration that hard work is overrated and real wealth comes from freedom. He very pointainly points out that the various labourers around him work much harder than him, earn more money than him, but also spent more money than him and therefore need to work harder than him again. By rejecting the circular mill of work and consumption, Thoreau crafts a life in which he has the freedom to spend the time how he likes. He can spent hours on the lake fishing, he can read and discuss with his friends, there is nothing stopping him. He only needs to tend his garden for a few hours a day.
“Moreover, I did not need to eat much because I did not work much, and my food cost only a pittance; but because he started on tea and coffee and butter and milk and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them; when he had worked a lot, he had to eat a lot again to restore his physical strength.”
This exactly the opposite of what Cicero’s advice around money would be: never adjust your expenses to your income, but only adjust your income to your expenses. I just realised that you can interpret that in both directions actually. I probably says a lot about me that I’ve always interpet it as an advice to generate a lot of money.
Some other great quotes to pull on this topic by Thoreau:
- “I have found that the most serious objection to prolonged heavy work is that it forced me to eat and drink heavily as well.”
- “Why do people worry so much? He who does not eat does not have to work.”
After working with his hands for five years, Thoreau realises that he only needs to work for six weeks to fund his life for an entire year. To me this was greatly inspiring. It made me think of the Freegan Christians I ran into recently, they seemed to life a pretty chill life while rejecting the concept of money. A sober life has intrigued me for a while, I’m in the middle of Lent as I’m writing this review and it makes me reflect. Still during Lent I get cravings for foods I don’t need to consume. There is just no need for it. Of all the cool things in life, eating crappy, non-utilitarian food must be pretty low on the list. So from that regard, Thoreau inspired me to live more soberly and to revert my energy at cool things!
“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.”
Another crazy dig at his ideological opponents. I love it.
Thoreau continues his arguments against work and for freedom with his reflections on property. In his eyes, the working class is burdened with owning their expensive houses. They require mortgages and upkeep, which are shackles that keep the people tied to their work and their miserable lives.
“Most luxury, and much of the so-called comfort, is not only not indispensable, but is decidedly an obstacle that stands in the way of the elevation of mankind.”
“If people were to build their homes with their own hands and simply provide decent food for themselves and their families, would poetic gifts perhaps be developed generally, just as birds sing everywhere when they are so busy? But alas! We act like cowbirds and cuckoos, who lay their eggs in nests built by other birds, and who do not cheer up a single passerby with their calls and their unmusical sounds.”
“Most farmers of Concord have toiled for twenty, thirty, or forty years to become the full owners of their farms, which they usually inherited heavily encumbered, or otherwise bought with borrowed money – so that we can now consider a third of all their toil as the cost of their houses – but most have not yet paid them off.”
“Beneath the most magnificent house in the city, a cellar can still be found where their carrots, potatoes, and onions are stored as of old, and long after the structure has disappeared, posterity still finds traces of it in the ground. The house is still a kind of vestibule to a den.”
“I am certain that theft and robbery would be unknown if all people lived as simply as I did back then. They only take place in communities where some have more than enough while others do not have enough.”
And finally an other great quote that shows of Thoreau’s passion and his vicious pen:
“As for the pyramids, there is nothing so astonishing as the fact that so many people could be so humiliated that they spent their lives building a tomb for an ambitious fool; it would have been wiser and more manly if they had drowned him in the Nile and then fed his corpse to the dogs.”
It’s little quips like that that gave me a bit of joy whilst reading the book. Because I have to be honest: it was a drag to get through the book. There is a huge amount of fluff and weird side notes that don’t seem to bear any value. It’s telling that I only managed to finish this book on my second attempt. My first attempt was two years ago, where I had to stop at 35%.
So what makes me dread this book so much? There’s several reasons. Firstly, can tell that Thoreau tried his best to make his experience in the woods spiritually worthwhile. The crux is in the word ’tried’, he really wanted all to have meaning. It seems to me as if he had several pre-conceived notions that he intended to discuss in this book and that his escape into the forrest was mostly deployed to add more gravitas behind his words.
It’s difficult to highlight some specific examples the fluff, because they often manifest in long boring paragraphs that make you wonder what the point of them is.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed Thoreau’s reflections on food, fashion, work, and ownership. Here are some fun example on his view on fashion:
- “All clothing, apart from a human being, is pitiful or grotesque. Only the serious gaze emanating from that attire and the sincere life lived within it restrain our laughter and sanctify the traditional dress of any people whatsoever.”
- “We know few men, but many coats and trousers. Put your newest shirt on a scarecrow and stand beside it in your old shirt; who would not then salute the scarecrow?”
Furthermore, I take issue with people’s praise of Thoreau’s descriptions of nature. To me, they feel fabricated, ‘geknutseld’ I would say in Dutch. He really wants to say something beautiful, so he decided to write something beautiful. It seems to me as if he already had the ideas he talks about before he went into the forrest, but he just wanted to use his experience to put more gravitas behind his words. That is such different approach than how the writing of for example Ann Shepard feels to me. Her writing comes across as natural, written down without any preconceived notions. She lived her entire live in the mountains and she has distilled the beauty she encountered into beautiful phrases that just seem to have appeared to her.
I’m not saying she didn’t edit, re-write and think about her writing - not at all. I’m saying she wrote something down because it appeared to her, whereas Thoreau wrote something down because he wanted to write something down. I think Schopenhauer makes some sort of distinction between those two.
“To begin with, there are two kinds of writers: those who write because they have something to say, and those who write for the sake of writing itself. The former have had thoughts or experiences that they consider worth telling; the latter need money and write for that very reason—for money. They think in order to be able to write. One recognizes them by the fact that they stretch out their thoughts as long as possible, dare to write down half-truthful, crooked, forced, or vague thoughts, and usually prefer the semi-darkness, so that they appear to be what they are not, causing their writing to lack decisiveness and clarity. One notices, then, immediately that they write to fill the paper; sometimes one can even catch our best writers doing this, for example in a few places in Lessing’s Dramaturgie and even in some novels by Jean Paul. As soon as one notices this, one must throw the book away, for time is precious.”
Quote by Schopenhauer - On Women ("Er is geen vrouw die deugt")
Besides the poor writing and the high dosis of nonsense in this book, some nice one-liners and interesting insights appear.
Thoreau has good things to say about work vs play, about property and ownership, the quest for knowledge and an honest, true life.
I loved his little rants, the humour he sneaks into his writing. There are some fabulous one-liners in here. Perhaps that’s the power of the book, the one-liners.
Perhaps that’s also why it’s still popular nowadays. I doubt many people read it. Maybe people start it, but I doubt a lot of people finish it. It took me two tries myself. I’m glad I tried a second time, because it does get better towards the end. The final chapter is perhaps the best, and the addition of ‘Civil Disobedience’ is great.
It’s remarkable to read about his disdain to control and power structures such as the government, but also the concept of work and how it is approached in the 19th century. Nowadays, these structures of control have grown vastly. The freedom Thoreau had is hard to find nowadays. To randomly build a house in a forrest? Impossible! What about building codes and environmental laws? The threshold costs of living have also grown exorbitantly: taxes, insurances, rent, everything. There’s so much more to take care of nowadays, that some sort of income is inevitable. You need to be able to pay. There is no escaping the control.
But fortunately even for that’s okay, just work to cover the bases. You don’t need anything else:
“Only superfluous things can be bought from superfluous wealth.”
“If your possibilities are limited by poverty, if, for example, you cannot buy books and newspapers, you are limited to the experiences of the greatest, vital significance; you are then forced to cling to the material that yields the most sugar and the most starch. That is living to the bone, where it is sweetest.”
Of course there are ways, and reading about Thoreau’s thoughts of self-reliance and deviance against control are definitely inspiring.
- I believe that we must be human beings first and foremost, and only then subjects.
- It is not desirable to cherish as much respect for the law as for that which is good. The only obligation I may rightly take upon myself is always to do what I consider right.
- The law has never made people a bit more just; and even people inclined to do good are daily made instruments of injustice by their reverence for the law.
- It has been said often enough, and rightly so, that a group has no conscience; but a group consisting of conscientious people is a group with a conscience.
List of great one-liners:
- “My shortcomings and inconsistencies do not detract from the truth of my exposition.”
- "I would not talk so much about myself if there were someone else I had known just as well."
- "As for the rest of my readers, those passages that apply to them will appeal to them. I trust that no one stretches the seams when putting on the coat, for it might be of use to whomever it fits."
- "Often the poor man is not so much cold and hungry as dirty, ragged, and coarse. That is partly his taste, and not only his misfortune."
- "Every other day I strolled to the village to hear some gossip that circulates there incessantly and goes either by mouth to mouth or from newspaper to newspaper and which, taken in homeopathic doses, were in their own way as refreshing as the rustling of leaves or the croaking of frogs."
- "But alas! Developing an Irishman is something that must be undertaken with a sort of moral dredge."
- "The philosopher has said: ‘One man can take away the general of an army of three divisions and sow confusion; you cannot take away the thoughts of the most miserable and vulgar man.’"