The Walden Experiment
(For the background to this post, click here.)
On Independence Day, 1845, a few days before his twenty-eighth birthday, Henry Thoreau left his town of Concord, Massachusetts, and went to live alone in the woods, on the shores of Walden Pond, a mile from any neighbour. He there built himself a modest cabin and for two years and two months earned a simple living by the labor of his own hands. He also wrote, among other things, his autobiographical masterpiece, Walden (subtitled, Life in the Woods), which gives an account of his two year stay. This is, with little doubt, the greatest statement ever made on the living strategy variously known as ‘voluntary simplicity,’ ‘simple living,’ or ‘downshifting.’[2]
In the second chapter of Walden, entitled ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,’ Thoreau offers us an explanation for his exit from conventional society: ‘I went the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what they had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.’[2] He ‘did not wish to live what was not life,’ he tells us, ‘living is so dear;’ nor did he wish to ‘practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.’[3]
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life,… to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness out of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it was sublime, to know it by experience.[4]
Elsewhere he said that his purpose in going to Walden Pond was to ‘transact some private business with the fewest obstacles.’[5] In one sense, this ‘private business’ was simply to write in solitude, close to Nature and away from modern distractions.[6] In another sense, though closely related to the first, his ‘private business’ was to solve, or at least better understand, the economic problem of how to live poetically in a world of scarce resources. Perhaps, Thoreau had decided, the best path was to reduce his material wants and live a simple life. He thought that ‘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.’[7] Simplicity of life was to be his means to the elevation of purpose.
Thoreau had come to suspect that, ‘If your trade is with the Celestial Empire,’ [8] – by which he meant, ‘If your concerns are “higher” than merely getting and spending,’ – then very little is actually needed to live well and to be free, provided life is approached with the right attitude. ‘Simplify, simplify,’[9] was to be his refrain. A modest shelter from the elements should be fixture enough. Old clothes will do, will they not? ‘Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.’[10] Most importantly, ‘keep your accounts on your thumbnail.’[11]
This, in essence, was the ‘method’ Thoreau put to the test at Walden Pond, by living simply and rejecting the division of labor. As far as possible he secured his own food, by growing beans, peas, corn, turnips, and potatoes, and occasionally fishing in the pond. He cut down some local trees and built himself a house with but one small room, and made some basic furniture. It was not much, but it was enough. And just enough was plenty. He did not wish to be chained to the economy, so he practiced self-reliance; he did not wish to be slave to artificial material desires, so he practiced self-discipline; and he did not wish to live what was not life, so he practiced self-culture. In short, he practiced what I am calling ‘alternative economics.’
The economic significance of Thoreau’s ‘life in the woods’ can only be understood if we always keep in mind what he was trying to accomplish there. As noted above, Thoreau wanted to be a writer in the Transcendentalist sense, a poet not just of words but of his life; which is to say, he wanted to infuse his everyday affairs with his highest goals and yield to ‘all the impulses of the soul.’[12] By 1845, however, it had become clear to this Transcendentalist that his ‘private business’ was not likely to procure him even a moderate allowance in the market. ‘For a long time,’ he noted, ‘I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains.’[13] Indeed, we have seen that Thoreau, in the eight years between his graduation from Harvard and his excursion to the pond, struggled in vain to find an occupation which would not conflict with the activities that yielded his poems and essays.[14] His options, it seemed, were either to make some compromises and pursue a different vocation – that is, to do something for which there was much more demand in the market – or else somehow find a way to become much less dependent on the market. In the following parable, which I will quote at length due to the centrality of the point it expresses, Thoreau neatly captures the essence both of his economic situation and his response to it:
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off – that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed – he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.[15]
Before moving on to consider this ‘study’ of Thoreau’s in some detail, the fruits of which are his alternative economics, I wish to take a moment to ensure that Thoreau is not misunderstood on one very important point. Whatever his neighbours may have thought, Thoreau’s venture into the woods was not an attempt to escape reality or to escape what may have been his duties. On the contrary, he knew it to be a journey toward reality and an undertaking to meet his duties; in particular, the duty to take his deepest aspirations seriously. ‘As I preferred some things to others,’ he wrote, ‘and especially valued my freedom, … I did not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption [to their ‘proper pursuits’] to acquire these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I relinquish to them the pursuit.’[16] Thoreau was clearly terrified of falling into the ruts of tradition and conformity, of compromising his dreams and wasting life in the pursuit of trivial luxuries, as he saw so many of his contemporaries doing and which he considered to be ‘not so sad as foolish.’[17] He knew that he would not be able to pluck life’s ‘finer fruits’ if he devoted too much of his time to the ‘coarse labors of life,’ and so he set about lowering his denominator, reducing his needs.[18] Thoreau’s experiment with simplicity, then, was not a renunciation of life, but an affirmation of it. He found the gift of life to be glorious, and for that reason was ‘anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it to on to [his] stick; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.’[19] To this passage he added: ‘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.’[20]
Thoreau wanted to live without dead time, and he went to Walden Pond to learn how to achieve this; or, at least, to see if it were possible. As a matter of principle, it seemed, he would not accept any division of his day between lower and higher aims, between ordinary and poetic experience. This is what it means to live efficiently, to live economically, in Thoreau’s sense. This is a very different approach, it must be said, to that of mainstream economic thought, which generally assumes that to live efficiently or act economically means ‘maximizing wealth,’[21] evaluated in terms of dollars. And thus Thoreau’s economics are ‘alternative’ in the sense that economic success is measured not with such yardsticks as productive labour (e.g. Adam Smith) or money (e.g. Richard Posner), but with the yardstick of a life lived well, a life lived deliberately. Admittedly, this may be more difficult to quantify than money or labour, but only with this alternative yardstick in mind can we understand what Thoreau meant when he stated, ‘I have always endeavoured to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man,’[22] and why he thought that ‘Walden Pond would be a good place for business.’[23] His business was not to make money but to become a ‘Transcendental Capitalist’[24] who trades with the ‘Celestial Empire.’ The following passage exemplifies Thoreau’s radically unconventional conception of ‘good business:’
Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath [in the pond], I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and the hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun’s falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been.[25]
To the people of Concord, ‘this was sheer idleness… no doubt.’[26] But Thoreau was sure that ‘if the birds and flowers had tried [him] by their standard, [he] should not have been found wanting.’[27] As he was to write in his journal, ‘If it is not poetic, it is not life but death we get.’[28]
In the above passages about ‘business,’ and indeed throughout Walden at every opportunity, Thoreau conveys the joys of a ‘higher and more ethereal life,’[29] a ‘spiritual view of things,’[30] with the language of economics and commerce. He does this to provoke us, to unsettle us in our judgments of life, by parodying conventional means of evaluation, by making outrageous comparisons, and by mocking those who measure things in life ‘by the… dollar only.’[31] Stanley Cavell, in his celebrated study, The Senses of Walden, talks of how Thoreau employs a ‘maze’ of economic terms, including ‘money,… profit and loss, rich and poor, cost and expense, borrow and pay, owe and own, business, commerce, enterprises, ventures, affairs, capital, price, amount, improvement, bargain, employment, inheritance, bankruptcy, work, trade, labor, idle, spend, waste, allowance, fortune, gain, earn, afford, possession, change, settling, living, interest, prospects, means, terms.’[32] And as another commentator notes, Thoreau uses this vast imagery ‘to expose the insidious control exerted over our lives by the economic system of profit and loss which we so easily take for granted,… to demonstrate how overwhelmingly our vision of life is dominated by commercial values.’[33] Put otherwise, Thoreau tries to help us escape the capitalist semantics that have infiltrated our vocabulary and which have come to shape the way we see the world and our place in it. His strategy is to use familiar economic concepts in unfamiliar, even shocking, ways. This strategy is epitomized by his claim that there were days at the pond, ‘when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I have stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valuable part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or at the teacher’s desk.’[34]
By defining ‘the cost of a thing’ as ‘the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it,’[35] Thoreau inverts the values of conventional economics, making life – instead of the dollar-value of commodities – the highest good. Life, he suggests, consists of a limited amount of time, energy, and attention, which may be conserved, saved, spent, employed, stolen, squandered, or hoarded – just like property.[36] This inverted value-system forms the basis of Thoreau’s alternative economics.
For more on Thoreau’s alternative economics, see below.
On clothing, click here.
On shelter, click here.
On food, click here.
On comforts, luxuries, and tools, click here.
On technology, click here.
On working hours, click here.
To read the first chapter of Walden, click here.
[1] Samuel Alexander (ed), Voluntary Simplicity: The Poetic Alternative to Consumer Culture (2009).
[2] Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walden’ in Carl Bode (ed), The Portable Thoreau (1982) 343.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid 343-4.
[5] Ibid 275.
[6] One of Thoreau’s motivations for going to Walden Pond was to write, ‘A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,’ which he did. See Carl Bode (ed), The Portable Thoreau (1982) 138-227.
[7] Thoreau, above n 2, 267.
[8] Ibid 275.
[9] Ibid 344.
[10] Ibid 344.
[11] Ibid 344.
[12] Henry David Thoreau, ‘The Service,’ quoted in Leo Stoller, After Walden (1957) 16.
[13] Thoreau, above n 2, 273.
[14] See Leo Stoller, After Walden (1957) 6-7. Stoller suggests that if Thoreau’s poems and essays had brought him money, the Walden Experiment may never have eventuated.
[15] Thoreau, above n 2, 274.
[16] Ibid 324.
[17] Ibid 275.
[18] It was Thomas Carlyle who once said, ‘The Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator.’ See Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1999) 145.
[19] Thoreau, above n 2, 272.
[20] Ibid.
[21] See generally, Richard A. Posner, The Economics of Justice (1981).
[22] Thoreau, above n 2, 275.
[23] Ibid 276.
[24] Judith Saunders, ‘Transcendental Capitalist at Walden,’ in Harold Bloom (ed), Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” (1987) 59.
[25] Thoreau, above n 2, 363.
[26] Ibid 364.
[27] Ibid 364.
[28] Henry David Thoreau, Journal (1962) 185.
[29] Thoreau, above n 2, 296.
[30] Ibid 400, 457.
[31] Ibid 483.
[32] Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (An Expanded ed, 1981) 88-9.
[33] Saunders, above n 24, 59-60.
[34] Thoreau, above n 2, 440.
[35] Ibid 286.
[36] Saunders, above n 24.
Hello. I typed in “Walden Experiment” to see what would come up this morning, and happened upon this site. I am a wife, mother of two, and full time special education teacher, but also a poet, student of literature, and believer in simple living. I typed in “Walden Experiment” because I’m contemplating quitting my job, though I am our family’s only income, and creating a simpler means of living for us. It’s crazy, and I contemplate it almost every Sunday afternoon. I even have a name for it, the “Sunday afternoon fantasies.” But there must be a way. I’m also a writer, self-publishing various things. We live in co-housing, and already live very simply. It’s Sunday now, and the fantasy is strong today. At least typing this on your site is something, an act, a step.
Hi Rhonda, keep dreaming and start planning. There isn’t much that is simple about living simply, especially in a consumer culture. So it requires much imaginative thought and activity to realise it. Furthermore, for me it’s more a process than a destination, and I wouldn’t think that “the simple life” happens overnight for many people. Sounds like your process of living simply is already well underway. All the best for your continuing journey. Step by step is the only way.
Thanks for dropping by.
Here’s part of my story of simplicity: http://simplicitycollective.com/deconstructing-the-shed-where-i-live-and-what-i-live-for