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Economy

WALDEN

and

ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

by Henry David Thoreau

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 Brahmins 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 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. 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

wood-lot! 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 quâ 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 _æs 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 offences; 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 any thing 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 any thing 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 plough 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 prætors 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, &c., 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 _à 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 nobler 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,