I went to the woods because I wished
to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life . . . and
not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Summary
Thoreau recalls the several places where he nearly settled
before selecting Walden Pond, all of them estates on a rather large
scale. He quotes the Roman philosopher Cato’s warning that it is
best to consider buying a farm very carefully before signing the
papers. He had been interested in the nearby Hollowell farm, despite
the many improvements that needed to be made there, but, before
a deed could be drawn, the owner’s wife unexpectedly decided she
wanted to keep the farm. Consequently, Thoreau gave up his claim
on the property. Even though he had been prepared to farm a large
tract, Thoreau realizes that this outcome may have been for the
best. Forced to simplify his life, he concludes that it is best
“as long as possible” to “live free and uncommitted.” Thoreau takes
to the woods, dreaming of an existence free of obligations and full
of leisure. He proudly announces that he resides far from the post
office and all the constraining social relationships the mail system
represents. Ironically, this renunciation of legal deeds provides
him with true ownership, paraphrasing a poet to the effect that
“I am monarch of all I survey.”
Thoreau’s delight in his new building project at Walden
is more than merely the pride of a first-time homeowner; it is a
grandly philosophic achievement in his mind, a symbol of his conquest
of being. When Thoreau first moves into his dwelling on Independence Day,
it gives him a proud sense of being a god on Olympus, even though
the house still lacks a chimney and plastering. He claims that a
paradise fit for gods is available everywhere, if one can perceive
it: “Olympus is but the outside of the earth every where.” Taking
an optimistic view, he declares that his poorly insulated walls
give his interior the benefit of fresh air on summer nights. He
justifies its lack of carved ornament by declaring that it is better
to carve “the very atmosphere” one thinks and feels in, in an artistry
of the soul. It is for him an almost immaterial, heavenly house,
“as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers.” He
prefers to reside here, sitting on his own humble wooden chair,
than in some distant corner of the universe, “behind the constellation
of Cassiopeia’s Chair.” He is free from time as well as from matter,
announcing grandiosely that time is a river in which he goes fishing.
He does not view himself as the slave of time; rather he makes it
seem as though he is choosing to participate in the flow of time
whenever and however he chooses, like a god living in eternity.
He concludes on a sermonizing note, urging all of us to sludge through
our existence until we hit rock bottom and can gauge truth on what
he terms our “Realometer,” our means of measuring the reality of
things
Analysis
The title of this chapter combines a practical topic of
residence (“Where I Lived”) with what is probably the deepest philosophical topic
of all, the meaning of life (“What I Lived For”). Thoreau thus reminds
us again that he is neither practical do-it-yourself aficionado
nor erudite philosopher, but a mixture of both at once, attending
to matters of everyday existence and to questions
of final meaning and purpose. This chapter pulls away from the bookkeeping
lists and details about expenditures on nails and door hinges, and
opens up onto the more transcendent vista of how it all matters, containing
less how-to advice and much more philosophical meditation and grandiose
universalizing assertion. It is here that we see the full influence
of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Thoreau’s project. Emersonian self-reliance
is not just a matter of supporting oneself financially (as many
people believe) but a much loftier doctrine about the active role
that every soul plays in its experience of reality. Reality for
Emerson was not a set of objective facts in which we are plunked
down, but rather an emanation of our minds and souls that create
the world around ourselves every day.
Thoreau’s building of a house on Walden Pond is, for him,
a miniature re-enactment of God’s creation of the world. He describes
its placement in the cosmos, in a region viewed by the astronomers,
just as God created a world within the void of space. He says outright that
he resides in his home as if on Mount Olympus, home of the gods.
He claims a divine freedom from the flow of time, describing himself
as fishing in its river. Thoreau’s point in all this divine talk
is not to inflate his own personality to godlike heights but rather
to insist on everyone’s divine ability to create a world. Our capacity
to choose reality is evident in his metaphor of the “Realometer,”
a spin-off of the Nilometer, a device used to measure the depth
of the river Nile. Thoreau urges us to wade through the muck that
constitutes our everyday lives until we come to a firm place “which
we can call Reality, and say, This is.” The stamp of existence we
give to our vision of reality—“This is”—evokes God’s simple language
in the creation story of Genesis: “Let there be. . . .” And the
mere fact that Thoreau imagines that one can choose to
call one thing reality and another thing not provides the spiritual
freedom that was central to Emerson’s Transcendentalist thought.
When we create and claim this reality, all the other “news” of the
world shrinks immediately to insignificance, as Thoreau illustrates
in his mocking parody of newspapers reporting a cow run over by
the Western Railway. He opines that the last important bit of news
to come out of England was about the revolution of 1649,
almost two centuries earlier. The only current events that matter
to the transcendent mind are itself and its place in the cosmos.
Summary
One of the many delightful pursuits in which Thoreau is
able to indulge, having renounced a big job and a big mortgage,
is reading. He has grand claims for the benefits of reading, which
he compares, following ancient Egyptian or Hindu philosophers, to
“raising the veil from the statue of divinity.” Whether or not Thoreau
is ironic in such monumental reflections about books is open to
debate, but it is certain that reading is one of his chief pastimes
in the solitude of the woods, especially after the main construction
work is done. During the busy days of homebuilding, he says he kept
Homer’s Iliad on his table throughout the summer,
but only glanced at it now and then. But now that he has moved in
not just to his handmade shack, but into the full ownership of reality
described in the preceding chapter, reading has a new importance.
Thoreau praises the ability to read the ancient classics in the
original Greek and Latin, disdaining the translations offered by
the “modern cheap” press. Indeed he goes so far as to assert that
Homer has never yet been published in English—at least not in any
way that does justice to Homer’s achievement. Thoreau emphasizes
the work of reading, just as he stresses the work of farming and
home-owning; he compares the great reader to an athlete who has
subjected himself to long training and regular exercise. He gives
an almost mystical importance to the printed word. The grandeur
of oratory does not impress him as much as the achievements of a
written book. He says it is no wonder that Alexander the Great carried
a copy of the Iliad around with him on his military
campaigns.
Thoreau also urges us to read widely, gently mocking those
who limit their reading to the Bible, and to read great things,
not the popular entertainment books found in the library. Thoreau
gradually extends his criticism of cheap reading to a criticism
of the dominant culture of Concord, which deprives even the local
gifted minds access to great thought. Despite the much-lauded progress
of modern society in technology and transportation, he says real progress—that
of the mind and soul—is being forgotten. He reproaches his townsmen
for believing that the ancient Hebrews were the only people in the
world to have had a Holy Scripture, ignoring the sacred writings
of others, like the Hindus. Thoreau complains the townspeople spend
more on any body ailment than they do on mental malnourishment;
he calls out, like an angry prophet, for more public spending on
education. He says, “New England can hire all the wise men in the
world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and
not be provincial at all.” Thoreau implicitly blames the local class
system for encouraging fine breeding in noblemen but neglecting
the task of ennobling the broader population. He thus calls out
for an aristocratic democracy: “[i]nstead of noblemen, let us have
noble villages of men.”
