A 29-year-old with no internet figured it out!
In 1845, a self-isolated and bright young New Englander used insight, hyperbole, and humor to warn us about the treacherous path we were on.
“Simplify, simplify…resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
― Henry David Thoreau
“Walden is infinitely more antagonistic to the dominant pattern of our civilization than it was to the relatively pastoral America…leaving aside inquiries into Thoreau’s perverse psychology or into the peculiar reasons why he particularly rejected the American dream of success—tells us of some Eden of the soul in which at least one American held off the pressures of materiality and mediocracy.”— Perry Miller, American historian, 1960.
What a mess we’ve made!
Widespread devastation of nature, radical climate change, heinous overconsumption by many, jacked up risk of nuclear war, dumbing down of the intellect, pandemic social and political strife, and preternatural population growth (six or seven times more people today than in 1845).
Of course, Henry David Thoreau had no clue as to what the world would look like in 2022. He lived before the telephone, and well before the automobile, the computer, and our demanding smart phones. Yet Thoreau was remarkably prescient about society’s misdirection. A major change in mental attitude, he insisted, was in order.
In his young head, Henry David spoke to the remedies, if not the prognosis (“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth”).
All quotes below are Thoreau’s. I hope you’ll enjoy this selection. He often wrote in long, complex paragraphs, but fashioned cutting one liners.
Embrace simplicity, live! (The Earth exhorts us, and will soon insist.)
“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.”
“What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?”
“It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day…When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. ”
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
Hyperbole
“There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once, — for the root is faith, — I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails.”
“I could sometimes eat a fried rat with good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have drunk water for so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater’s heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.”
“I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools.”
“For my part, I could easily do without the post office.”
Scale down—or die!
“Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place…most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive.”
“The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.”
“Every New Englander might easily raise all his own bread-stuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them.”
“But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as will enable you to do without these [things], and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”
The ultimate scale downer
“I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that they should look in…A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.”
Rebel!
“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
“The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.”
“One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler’s, I was seized and put into jail, because I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of the State which buys and sells men, women, and children…It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run ‘amok’ against society; but I preferred that society should run ‘amok’ against me, it being the desparate party.”
“The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.”
“While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally.”
“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”
Be Awake!
“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
“What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?”
“After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what—how—when—where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and to daylight.”
No substitute for Nature
“Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and decaying trees, the thunder cloud and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”
“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”
“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”
Heavy-handed men
“When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape-vines had run over the trees next to the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass…But since I left those shores the wood choppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will no more be rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent hence-forth. How can you expect the birds to sing when the groves are cut down?…An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water-fowl, and that there were many eagles about it.”
Limits to growth
“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up.”
How did he manage to get it right?
Thoreau took serious time to think and reflect, and was comfortable in doing so. Nature released him of encumbrances. He socialized but not overly, and had way fewer distractions than we have today. Could New England spawn someone like Henry David today?
Of course, it helped greatly that Thoreau was an astute observer of people, of their strengths, tendencies, and weaknesses. And an insightful observer of wildlife and Nature, that taught him about life’s basic needs and universal joys. He also had a stable family of modest means (his father had a local pencil factory, and his mother rented out parts of their home), a solid education (being sharp enough to attend Harvard College), not to mention a remarkable mentor in local friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.
People would do well to read, and re-read, his writings. They would be better off. Yet, at this late hour, is there any hope that society as a whole would pause for a moment and pay heed?
“I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
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The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer—Henry David Thoreau
When I taught Walden, students invariably loved it. Great book and I love its final paragraph, which is also yours. He was definitely, in many ways, a morning person. His last paragraph is very hopeful, and refers to a bug that emerged from wood that had been made into a kitchen table. It’s the old story of metamorphosis, the caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, the egg into an emerging insect. Maybe that’s why my students loved Walden—its faith that we can change and appreciate nature rather than exploit it. Good job, Tony!!
Apparently he was a cat enthusiast! Great essay and collection of pertinent quotes by HDT.