Simplify, Simplify
“Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. . . . Simplify, simplify.”
—Henry David Thoreau
Teacher. Handyman. Surveyor. Naturalist. Ecologist. Abolitionist. Lecturer. Writer. Poet. Philosopher.
Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. He was Harvard educated, and a member of a group of New England writers and intellectuals known as the Transcendentalists, which included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and the Alcotts. The Transcendentalists, inspired by the nature writing of the Romantic movement and the idealism of the early 19th-century German philosophers, believed that “a divine principle dwells within every person” and that “spiritual seekers could read divine wisdom directly in nature” (Walls, p. 88).
An aspiring poet and essayist, Thoreau was an occasional contributor to The Dial, the small magazine conceived as the organ of the Transcendentalists. After spending his twenties teaching, tutoring, labouring, and working in the family pencil factory, he decided to devote himself entirely to his writing. Between periods spent in the household of his mentor Emerson, Thoreau, a bachelor, lived in his mother’s bustling Concord boarding house.
On the advice of his friend and fellow Transcendentalist Ellery Channing, Thoreau went to the woods to seek the solitude necessary for writing and “to live deliberately.” His removal from Concord to Walden Pond to conduct his experiment in intentional living was a radical act that drew the curiosity as well as the ire of his fellow Concordians. Ever the outsider, he felt more at ease in the company of his rough country neighbours than town society, in spite of his education.
“I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
He bought the boards of a shanty owned by an Irish navvy, and constructed a cabin, measuring 10' by 15', on land owned by Emerson on the shores of Walden Pond. The cabin contained a bed, a desk, a small table, and three chairs: “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” He planted beans, fished, and wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and started the book that would become Walden, a classic of American literature. “Sturdily and Spartan-like,” he lived there for two years, two months, and two days. Then he left to move back to Concord because he had “several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
In Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Thoreau compresses the two years, two months, and two days into a single year, describing the changing of the seasons; the pond and the flora and fauna that lived in and alongside it; village folk and country folk; his toil and tribulations; his philosophy.
Thoreau railed against the church, the state, and the corporation, his sentiments echoed in modern movements like the G20 protests and Occupy Wall Street. His hatred for the factory system and division of labour reverberated through William Morris, Gustav Stickley, and the Arts and Crafts movement. His belief that some land should be held in common for all to enjoy inspired John Muir, co-founder of the Sierra Club and father of the U.S. national parks system.
Thoreau‘s wide reading produced in Walden a unique admixture of Yankee practicality and Eastern mysticism. It is a book of common sense and uncommon wisdom. Dig deeper into any of the following and you will find Walden at its roots: nature conservation, ecology, and climate change activism; downshifting; slow, simple, and sustainable living; anti-consumerism and minimalism; and the tiny house movement.
In his later essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” also known as “Civil Disobedience,” which influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and his defence of abolitionist John Brown, Thoreau was the embodiment of Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
I first read Walden when I was nineteen years old. I fell in love with the poetry of the prose and copied quotations from it into a notebook. The idea of living simply captured my imagination but it is one thing to adopt a credo and another to live by it. As I reread his chapter titled “Economy,” I’m embarrassed to think how far I have strayed from his philosophy and the intentions of my younger self over the years. My current aspirations to a minimalist lifestyle are a correction to a time when I over-consumed.
“When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all . . . I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that to carry.”
I’m a city girl and like my creature comforts too much ever to rough it but I try to live lightly. When I moved into my previous apartment I was delighted to discover that the main room measured 10' by 15', the same size as Thoreau’s cabin. In addition there was a small bedroom, tiny bathroom, a deck, and a small storage closet, all together measuring under 300 square feet. I called it my “petite suite.” I lived there for 15 years less a month. It was enough but now I live in a somewhat larger place, though still small by most standards. My sister claims I live like a monk but I laugh and think, “compared to whom?”
In my book collection I see a common thread that I can trace back to Walden: books about the landscape, the garden, and the home; books about the Arts and Crafts movement; books by Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane, among the authors who have inherited the mantle of Thoreau. I once owned four separate editions of Walden. I still have two. What would Henry think?
Further reading:
Carl Bode (editor), The Portable Thoreau
Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life
E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered
Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity
Greg McKeown, Essentialism
Wood engraving by Michael McCurdy, from the beautiful Shambhala 150th anniversary edition of Walden