Key ideas: Published in 1924. “This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used. The order of things should be somewhat reversed: the seventh should be man’s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul.” (H. Thoreau)
When you know how to read, write and cipher, you Sill have a great many things to learn, for your family dreams of a more brilliant future for you than that of a Store- keeper. So you enter the Academy founded by the well-to-do for boys who want to become learned men. You must master Greek, Latin, French, plunge into the classics, and grind away till you are sixteen.
To follow the course at the Concord Academy and become better educated than your parents is all very fine, for Concord has so many ways of compensating you. But afterwards? These ambitious parents have conceived the bold project of sending their younger boy to college to learn what the Concord Academy cannot teach him. To leave Concord. . .
Ah, how desolate the Greek, the Latin, the French, this Stupendous human learning looks at the thought of all you must leave behind in order to fathom its mysteries! . . .
How heavy your heart is, at sixteen, Henry, with these early tender affedfions to which you are to bid an abrupt farewell as you set out for Harvard. . . you, the son of the little store-keeper, to serve your time in a department store of learning.
At the age of twenty the Student Henry Thoreau left the university with his bachelor’s degree. This was the recompense for four years passed away from Concord, four years save for the vacations and the time he had returned to spend with his family because of ill-health. As for this title, he may have given it its due—he was certainly not inclined to over-value it.
Upon entering college, he had left a village environment where equality was not a joke but a daily observance—left this environment to find himself, the child of small folk, suddenly thrown among the offspring of the fortunate ones of this world. In spite of the part-scholarship which they had obtained for him, his parents, his sister Helen, his aunts, in order to provide for the co£t of his Studies, had been obliged to deprive themselves.
At college also, to be sure, a kind of equality prevailed among the Students; but there it was an equality with a difference. He was a country boy among these wide-awake young men in whose eyes he was from the village indeed. Since his parents, his siSter, had been obliged to scant themselves to purchase his right to a share of learning, he was inclined to feel certain things a little differently from the way he would have felt them if he had been the son of a senator.
He was assigned to a little room on a top floor of the hive. This was natural enough. Natural too that the young men in the neighbouring rooms liked to kick up a shindy when he wanted to work. But it only made him react the more Strongly, and he dreamed.
This environment exhaled an odour that rather annoyed him, not so much because it had nothing in common with that of the new-mown hay of the Concord meadows but because it was the odour of an exclusive humanity, comfortably quartered in first-class state-rooms while the common passengers made shift as they could between decks. …
Among these sons of the well-to-do, future lawyers, future ministers, future diplomats, captains of industry, pillars of society, Henry felt out of his element. He was anything but in tune with them. …
Besides, he was decidedly rustic in his appearance, this oddly dressed scholarship-holder. He should have been dressed in black; it was the rule of the inftitution. The colleges see the world in black and he was here to adapt himself to their vision. But the only suit Henry had was a green one which his father had had made for him at great expense, and he was obliged to put it on every morning.
Sometimes, as he bent over a textbook, the meaning of the words he read was loff in the sound of the wind that came to him in guffs from the woods of Concord, and with a wild bound the fancy of the exile leaped over the wall and sprang towards those dear haunted spots. It required a great effort to recall the heart-sick fugitive and set himself to work again in the cell of that austere building.
At such moments as these, when he compared the quality of what he had left behind him and the cost of what he was acquiring, how could he help feeling in his bitterness that what he was missing was beyond price?
The only remedy was to bury himself in study. All his free time Henry passed in the library, in the company of the classics or the old English poets, from Chaucer to the Elizabethans, who spoke to his solitary heart, a habit that rendered him still more unsociable and so isolated him that he felt, in this buzzing community, as if he were doing penance in the desert. …
The hedgehog remained rolled up. It was as if he had something as precious as his life to safeguard and was protecting it fiercely. This Student in his little room on the top floor was not one of those creatures that people tame….
He had read enormously aside from the curriculum and his preparation for examinations. And he had learned how to express himself. His early prose exhibits that firmness which is only acquired through a certain quality of mind after much thought and the assiduous following of the old masters.
In some of his compositions and letters he reveals a surprising independence, that of a boy who sturdily believes in another civilization than that of the “civilized” and turns aside from the beaten roads to follow a road of his own where his instinct directs him better than the guide-posts.
Our Indian is more of a man than the inhabitant of a city. He lives as a man, he thinks as a man, he dies as a man. The latter, it is true, is learned. Learning is Art’s creature, but it is not essential to the perfed man; it cannot educate.
Words of a solitary in the midd of the crowd, written in a temple of knowledge with the accent of faith and the pungency of revolt.
At eighteen, he does not fear to make an apology for extremism, denouncing half-way solutions, the herd-spirit, the fear of being singular, the cowardice that follows the fashion and makes men “mere tools in the hands of others.”
And at the moment when he leaves Harvard, he attacks in his Commencement oration the spirit of lucre, the cur-spirit, with a vivacity, a conviction that slightly oversteps the tone of university controversy:
Could one examine this beehive of ours from an observatory among the stars, he would perceive an unwonted degree of bustle in these later ages. . . Where he found one man to admire with him his fair dwelling-place, the ninety and nine would be scraping together a little of the gilded dud upon its surface. . .
This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used. The order of things should be somewhat reversed: the seventh should be man’s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul. . .
All this knowledge which he had acquired in his four years of probation in the fadory he measured with a lucid glance. An untutored fellow with the right quality could put in its place all the science of the colleges.
A flash of the most everyday reality was enough to expose the poverty of a culture that formed such ignorant beings, such paupers in the face of life: little gentlemen with white hands who came there to be confirmed in the pale tradition of their class,“ to Study chemistry and not learn how [one’s bread] is made. . .”
Since he had come back, his family had observed a certain change in his replies, his attitude, his judgments. This decisive tone of their Henry and his radical views on the world were a little disturbing to those good people who had scraped together their dollars to send him off to college but had never possessed themselves an ounce of rebelliousness. So that was what they taught at Harvard? Insubordination?
His aunts could hardly believe their ears; their nephew, expressing himself in this condemnatory fashion?….
In this month of August, 1837, a boy of twenty returned home who had mastered everything that college had to offer, in the books and outside the books.
And now the problem was to earn his bread. The “ old joke of a diploma ” might help him juft the same in finding a livelihood.
Since his final return to Concord, his father had undertaken a new business. He was manufacturing pencils. After the grocery and the odd-jobbing, this was a ftep up…
It was the immemorial Christian custom to inculcate sound principles upon the young by means of the rod. Henry, however, was not the flogging kind. He was going to talk to the young hopefuls as young hopefuls, appealing to their feelings as good boys. Everything went well or seemed to be going well; but there were eyes on the watch. These eyes saw what this innovation was leading to, the ruin of the moral foundations upon which Concord and the world rested.
The mader, this enemy of rods, had to reckon with the committee in charge of the school, one of whom was a certain Deacon… He or his like, it matters little: a guardian of the sound traditions. Whereupon His Morality the Deacon represented to the young master that his method was a menace to the discipline of the school. It was inadmissible.
Henry had been appointed to a fundion that included the ritual didribution of the rod to scholars who deserved it. There were always in a class scholars who deserved the rod. He did not see them. He was not carrying out his fundion.
Very well. Since flogging formed a part of the work ordained in exchange for a salary, that very day the master took at random and punished conscientiously six boys of whom one at least was never to know what had suddenly seized this gentle mader and was to cherish a bitter memory of him. . . So there, Henry has earned his money. And now, good-bye, Deacon, good-bye, all of you. Go and find another mader who will flog your school for you. . . Henry had been a teacher for fifteen days. The wheel had hardly been put in place before it had sprung off.
His father and mother lived in a house in the centre of the village: it was big enough for them to open a private school there. John and Henry would teach at home, free from all prying committees. They counted on finding pupils.
They did not count in vain. They had four already, and the promise of a fifth. Henry, urged to begin in June, had not waited for his brother’s arrival. As soon as the latter came he took over the direction of the school. Henry took charge of the Latin, Greek, French, physics and mathematics.
They were so successful that they were obliged to think of moving the school for the following year: their father’s house was no longer big enough to hold it….
Very strange, the method of the two brothers. They obtained discipline without punishment or threats. How did they manage this? All the deacons in New England might well ask. They interested their pupils, won them, attached them to themselves by a living bond, that between the man-child and the child-man. …
Every evening, before going to bed, he gathered together, worked over, expressed with the greatest exactness to a sure and discreet confidant the most secret impressions of the day. Since his return from Harvard he had formed the habit of this daily rendezvous with this other self who never betrayed him and would never bore him with complaints and expostulations but accepted everything…
The solitude of the college years had developed in him a natural tendency to examine himself—the taste for the inner dialogue. All the knowledge we acquire through study or the society of others will never compensate for our indifference where our own souls are concerned.
This is a subjedt for Study that is worth all the pains you devote to it—a book that is of more importance for you to read than those that lie on your shelf. And this over and above the fact that when you have read it you will be prepared to understand other books and other men.
Henry was anxious to know where he Stood in relation to himself. An orderly man does not go to bed without making up his accounts.
Henry confided to his Journal his intimate thoughts, his discoveries of the day. He reckoned up his Stock. To what end? He would see later on. In the meantime, a man who was aware of what he possessed slipped, with his spirit at peace, into sheets that were as white as the page of to-morrow.
As naturally as they breathed or said their prayers his family had put on the harness in all docility and taken the road like good domestic animals who never dream that anything else exists in the universe than the shafts, the rack, the halter, the town-square and the Street-corners where one turns every day. Doesn’t this attradl you, this cab-horse’s life, with the certainty of a bag of oats at the end of the journey? With a beautiful plume on your head? With your diploma you could easily be the mailer’s horse.
Many thanks. This may very well be, as the doctors say, the good old wisdom of the ages, with an assured recompense in this world and the next, but for me it has a disagreeable taste.
If I listen to you and nibble the good oats now, I shall soon find myself grazing in the field and obliged to chew dry Stalks. No doubt about that.
I don’t propose to let your wisdom catch me. It is soft and subtle; it is so powerful because everyone, wherever he turns, not only breathes it in himself and is impregnated at its touch, but passes it on, willy-nilly, to the next fellow. It has its agents at work in the four quarters of the world.
To this marvellous wisdom, the crown of centuries of civilisation, Henry gives another name, fraud. It has made itself at home in the village as in the great city. And it has that smile because it knows it is universally accepted.
Henry smiles too, for he is thinking of another universe than that of the hay-merchants. What alienates him from their brotherhood is the ugliness of their existence, pure derision. His own seems to him true, fresh and full of unexpected things, lived in the quick beauty of every moment, demanding no other profit than itself. Munch away your life, then, good citizens of Concord, and permit me to live mine. …
I know what your society makes of a man by taming him. It will get along very well without my help. If it has held me for a short time, while I was groping my way, trying to get my bearings, you may be assured that this is over and done with. I have no desire to be a bad neighbour to you; you are very worthy members of this parish.
But don’t count on my aid in making your merry-go-round go. I have my own corn to grind. You say that in refusing to adapt myself to your rhythm I condemn myself to poverty. As you please; why not? He laughs bed who laughs lad. I am not afraid of my poverty. But I should have a terrible fear of what you call your respectability, your industry, your virtue, if I were ever threatened with having to share them. …
There are many fine formulas of this kind that pass like counters from hand to hand, from one shop to another, from father to son, while no one suspeds their true value.
“Make a living” is one of them. Do you mean, make a living and lose what makes it worth while?
Then make it, makers of money. We shall see in the end who is rich and who is poor. There is nothing the matter with your formulas. I shall take them and give them a good cleaning before I use them, for your hands have dulled them, soiled them. They will have to be bright and new for my poverty.
As a matter of fadt, this refradtory soul had early declared his position. Soon after his return from college, at twenty, he had refused to pay the church-tax of the parish and officially separated himself from it with a written declaration in which no deacon caught a hint of humour:
Know all men by these presents that I Henry Thoreau do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.
This was plain and precise. Take that, clerk of the parish; put this disavowel away among your old papers, so it can bear witness in case there is need for it some day. The parish has carelessly counted one parishioner too many….
The following year, when he reached the age for voting, he openly refused to perform the elementary act of a good citizen of a great democratic Republic. …
His one ambition, and it is a great one, is to make the fineSt use of the marvellous gift that he has received—life. He has received it, he is sure of that, and he knows its value. He muSt find out how to employ his faculties, that is all. Perhaps he is deStined for some uncatalogued employment. He will see. But it must be an occupation that dispenses him from conniving with this world of universal huckstering. That’s settled.
Every line he has meditated in college, every one of his impressions since the time when he drove his parents’ cow to pasture, has confirmed him in the resolution to remain himself, cost what it may.
The passionate individualist is in rebellion against the power of the mass. But it has fascinated you, disturbed you; its magnetism has impressed you at the firSt contaft. A mob, undoubtedly….
Recall those crowds of immigrants you have seen passing, stopping for a day or two, pent up on a wharf, men, women, children, tattered but so very human, so real, washing their linen unconcernedly, cooking their dinner in the open air, whole families come from the four corners of the Old World to seek their fortunes in the hospitable West.
Always the mob, observed with a diftruftful sympathy by a savage who will never admit that man can keep his quality as a man by mingling in the mob. Yes, but in this swarm of poor wretches, encamped on a wharf, among these playing, whining children, these mothers sitting on their bundles of clothing, has it not occurred to you as you observed them with the eye of an artift fascinated by this pidturesque parade, that there might be some Henry going West with his tools and his fortune and a soul as rich as your own or even greater?
In any case, your glances have scrutinized this horde on the march and recognized human faces in transit. And what remains to you from this must not be forgotten when you balance your accounts….
After various experiments, Henry, graduate of Harvard, son and grandson and great-grandson of merchants, has already made his choice. The lot he desires moSt, as the happiest and the freest, and the worthiest as well, is that of a day-labourer, who cuts off a slice of his time to sell, when he muSt, but takes good pains not to sell the whole loaf.
He knows that fifty days of work a year will be enough to pay for his keep, such as it is. And all the other days, six each week, will be for God and himself, for his own private affairs. …
The day-labourer who treasures his time escapes from the damnable routine of the salaried work that devours your soul. When you engage me, I shall do for you everything that a clever, skilful man who puts his heart into his work can do. But when your work is finished I shall go back to my own which requires no assistance….
Don’t worry, I shall not give you time enough to disgudt me. So take me for what I am worth, and you will have a workman who will treat you as he would like to have the other fellow treat him.
If you are industrious in your own way and not in the accepted fashion, you must not be surprised if you pass for a loafer. That is the way of things. In the eyes of the sober folk around you an inaptitude for business is the very mark of inferiority.
Think of it, an American who cares nothing about getting on. . . . What’s more, a Yankee, without the slightest relish for trading, who seems to be positively bent on remaining poor. . . . It’s preposterous, it’s even rather presumptuous.
It was Town-Meeting Day, a serious, ceremony in a democratic community and one at which every loyal citizen, proud of being a necessary unit, was expecfied to be on hand. Henry, who had no love for voting and debating, nor any pride in the exercise of his civic rights, did not feel that his presence was indispensable.
If he failed in his duty as a citizen and a unit, well, he could survive it. This little celebration was not for him. Let every man mind his own business. # Jail for not paying his poll-tax
The town constable places his hand on Henry’s shoulder and takes him off to jail. He has refused to pay his poll-tax. His intention in doing so was to protest against a power which protects the purchase, the sale, the practice of dealing in men, women and children, those colonial wares from Africa—and which, on the other hand, makes war on one of its neighbours in order to seize its territory.
To say “no” flatly to the tax-colledor is a much more serious matter than to refuse to pay the tax of a parish of which one is not a parishioner. It is revolt, disloyalty, the crime of treason, the perverse act of a bad citizen who disowns the institutions and the enterprises of his country. Off with his head!…
Sam [friend] owes it to himself and his father-in-law to be polite in return to Henry. His firSt remark is: “ I’ll pay your tax, Henry, if you’re hard up.” The pity is that Henry is by no means hard up and does not want money. The only thing he wants is to go to jail to meditate at leisure on the beauty of the institutions of his country. Walden is not propitious for this meditation; the hours there are too precious to be waSted in such unclean thoughts.
But in this beautiful Stone edifice, behind the Stout, bolted door, he is in a better position to think of his country, and its laws and law-makers, while he is held there between four firm walls, under the guard of a jailer-tax-colleCtor-ex-innkeeper who is going to sell him at auction perhaps like a mere negro for refusing to bow down to an enslaving and conquering State.….
While he is meditating in his dungeon, his good Aunt Maria hastens out after nightfall, concealing herself in a neckerchief to avoid scandal, and deposits the sum which the tax- colledor demands, plus the cods. All the serenity which his evening in prison has confirmed in this enemy of the laws vanishes at dawn when the jailer comes in and tells him of this transaction. The beautiful done building is to lodge him only for one night; he mud leave it.
Sam is very happy to set this sympathetic boarder free, but the latter is furious at finding himself betrayed by his own people. Confound them! So he leaves. The village has become odious to him….
At the end of the third summer he abandoned the cabin to the squirrels. Why, exadly? Will those who know be good enough to tell him? He scarcely knows himself. Changing one’s dwelling-place is a vedige perhaps of the old migratory indind. Was he right or wrong in leaving? Did he have any reason to regret it? Vain quedions … He simply went away in 1847 as he had come in 1845. But aside from this?
Perhaps because it was better that an all too beautiful experience should be interrupted before habit dedroyed its freshness. Or merely because he could not resid the invitation of a great friend who begged his old right-hand man to come and live in his house again during his second voyage to Europe.
For Henry Waldo’s house was like another home. He had spent two happy years there; he would be glad to spend another eight or ten months. During his day in the woods he had read to Waldo, under an oak on the bank of the river, some pages from the book he was preparing. He would be able to work in the Sage’s house. He intended to include in this book a piece on friendship that he would be able to write mod fitly under the roof of a perfed friend.
Henry examines his firft book, and he does not feel so very proud. He is the author of A Week on the Concord. It has been introduced to the public. What next? One muft sometimes have confidence in one’s fellow-men and place a figure before a line of zeros.
The poorer you are in Concord, the better you know your true wealth. It is all very clever to create happiness with a thousand coStly accessories, but to create happiness out of nothing, to be happiness yourself, is much more interesting, and happiness of this kind has quite a different quality. To have been born poor is a privilege too.
In the moSt authentic great man, no matter how magnificent and complete he is in appearance, never to have worn rags or gone without a meal, never to have been able to toss his dignified respe&ability to the winds, never to have known what hardship means is a lacuna that can never be filled up.
Think of that poor, great Goethe, too well brought up, as he said, to have had any intercourse in his childhood with the boys in the Streets. . . . Whatever you may say, the boy who has never set his bare, smarting feet on the hard ground has missed one of the beSt of gifts. He has not been judged worthy of experiencing the real savour of this world.
Henry has no inclination to make a profession of his poverty, to set himself up in the square for the admiration of connoisseurs. He saves it for himself because it keeps him warm, as a sheepskin coat warms a driver in winter. It has a ta&e that he likes and it helps him to keep up his good spirits.
Old Brown, what have you done to a man who had such a beautiful equanimity and such a disdain for the affairs of the world? What power is this within you that can arouse such a mad passion? You have thrown him into a pitiable State.
He is much less Strong than another fellow who lives in Brooklyn and whom your fate does not prevent from eating and sleeping. For this latter at leaSt a man who is going to be hanged for his crime does not blot out the universe; luckily for him, he remains the maSter of his serenity.
He is not like Henry, astonished at the sight of all these villagers, these good citizens who have the heart to go about their little affairs, as if nothing were burning their vitals. For him the whole life of the world seems to be in abeyance, as on the eve of a cataclysm.
Will it not rise in one mass to free this upright man and avenge his defeat? The wildness in Henry’s soul is boiling up, boiling over with rebellion; it runs to Harper’s Ferry and bars the exits of the Arsenal.
He must speak, and at once, dissociate himself from these wavering souls, these cowards, utter all his admiration for the criminal, while the latter is dill alive.
For they have condemned him hastily, in all the heat of public indignation, as an altogether special criminal. They have actually had to carry him into court on a stretcher because of his wounds, of which those in his head have made him half deaf. And they are waiting, from one day to another, to pronounce the sentence.
It is vain to tell Henry that he is mad, that he is almost alone in his opinion, for a man who, alone, rushes to the defence of a friend, marches surrounded by a whole army. To counsels of caution he replies as Old Brown replied at Pottawatomie. To hell with your caution, you skulkers.
Henry announced that he would speak the following Sunday, O&ober 30th
Henry announced that he would speak the following Sunday, O&ober 30th, in the vedry of the parish church. At the lad moment, when some advisers dill tried to dop him, he replied roughly: “I did not send to you for advice, but to announce that I am to speak.” And he spoke. The defence had succeeded in causing a post¬ ponement of the sentence, but there was no doubt what it would be.
Henry’s objed, however, was not to save Old Brown’s neck; it was merely to celebrate the beauty of his character and his act. Henry Thoreau, fool of nature and the beauty in man, as Hokusai in his Japan was the fool of drawing, was ready to maintain againd the whole world that John Brown, his friend, convided of high treason, was right, and this to the very foot of the gallows if they judged him worthy of being hanged also. That is what beauty means, that is what friendship means.
It does not consist in lending you half a dollar in case of need or an umbrella if it happens to rain. It consists in accepting blows of your own free will and bearing witness at any risk. In not letting go of your own kind if he has fallen into the hands of the enemy.
Henry spoke. His listeners were all ears. It was no philosophical ledture this time. There may have been a few Stifled growls in certain corners of the hall. But no one protested. It was as if his convidtion had Stirred that soft dough. When it was over, the few rabid people were no longer talking of the gallows for John Brown: they held their peace. The gen¬ eral impression was excellent. One good mark for Concord.