Chapter One "Economy"

Summary:

Thoreau opens his book by stating that it was written while he lived alone in the woods, in a house he built himself, on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. The book is a response to questions his townsmen have asked about his life at Walden, and as such, will focus on Thoreau himself and his experiences. Having seen other young men who have inherited farms enslaved and made a machine by the obligations of property, Thoreau sought to escape their plight through his life at Walden. He wanted to discover "what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life."

The narrator disputes the wisdom of old people, most of whom have not truly "tried life," and the value of tradition. A life lived doing what most consider "good" would in his eyes be wasted. Living "primitive or frontier life" will allow him to discover what he calls "necessary of life" ­ for humans, food, shelter, clothing, and fuel, the latter three which he argues are not fundamental necessities, because the sun can provide warmth enough in some climates. Riches and possessions are responsible for the degeneration of the human spirit, and Thoreau addresses his words about their destructive power specifically to the discontented "mass of men" who complain of their lots in life.

Thoreau then recounts the cherished enterprises of his life, focusing on his joy in anticipating "Nature herself!" while working in various odd jobs out of doors. He compares his experience, realizing that the town would not vote him an allowance for his contributions to that of an Indian, who offered baskets he had woven for sale to a local lawyer and found that he had not made it worth the man's while to buy from him. Therefore, Thoreau decided to go immediately to Walden Pond, without saving money first, to reflect privately without outside distraction. In order to do so, he found his strict business habits, which require personal oversight of every detail no matter what the business, to be indispensable.

Eschewing public preoccupation with fashionable clothing, which he considers to be "false skin," Thoreau expresses his surprise that something as noble as patched clothing should be so publicly abhorred and notes his tailoress's surprise when he asked for a suit of plain and simple clothing. He finds this ridiculous when he considers fickle public propensity's to laugh at old fashions and devotedly seek new fashions, and expresses his belief that the factory system is only a way to make corporations rich and not to "well and honestly" clothe people.

Shelter has become a "necessary of life," though it has not always been; Thoreau reflects on examples of seemingly instinctual seeking of shelter, as by children entering caves and Indians building wigwams. In considering building a house that would not become an elaborate trap for him, Thoreau took inspiration from a six foot by three foot box he saw by the railroad, in which a man could sleep comfortably and compares it to an $800 house in town for which an unmarried laborer would have to save for ten to fifteen years to purchase. Most farmers in his town have inherited their farms and mortgages that go with them and are thus trapped in their slaving to pay for their houses. Others are "needlessly poor" because they compare their homes to those of rich people rather than to what is necessary. Comparing the rich to pharaohs who spent their lives building their tombs, Thoreau wishes people could live with the simplicity of the Indians in their wigwams or the early American settlers who built dugouts in hillsides.

In March 1845, Thoreau himself bought an axe and went to the woods near Walden Pond to cut down pines for timber. In these "pleasant spring days," as the ice of the pond melted and birds sang, he continued cutting wood for the house he would build. He compares a half-frozen snake he saw to men who remain in their "primitive and low condition" because they haven't been aroused by spring to rise to a "higher and more ethereal life." He becomes a friend of the pines, eating his bread-and-butter lunch in pitch-coated hands, while reading the newspaper at noon. By mid-April, he has framed his house. For $4.25, he has also purchased the shanty of James Collins, an Irish laborer, for boards which he transports to his hillside, in which he digs a cellar. In early May, a few friends help him raise his house, and after that, he boarded and roofed it. He moved in on the fourth of July, built the chimney in the fall, baking his bread on an open fire outside before then.

Thoreau suggests that if men built their own homes, as birds build their own nests, "the poetic faculty would be universally developed." The profession of architect he finds to be an unnecessary division of labor, for it is natural for a man to build his own house and allows him to think for himself. The appearance of a man's house would mean something if he made it himself and put his spirit in it; without his spirit, it is only a coffin.

By winter, Thoreau had a "tightly shinged and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fire-place opposite," all for a cost that totals $28.12 _ -- a lifelong dwelling, Thoreau boasts, in an era when a man would pay $25 to $100 for rent and less than the cost of a student's room at Cambridge College ($30 a year). Students would have more real wisdom if they built their own houses and tried the experiment of living rather than studying it from afar. Thoreau remarks on his own surprise at realizing he had studied navigation in college when he would have learned more if he had gone out once in the harbor. Likewise, students in college are taught political economy rather than the economy of living and thus put their fathers in debt.

"Modern improvements," Thoreau says, are illusions. A telegraph across the Atlantic would only aid in the transmission of gossip. A railroad around the world "is equivalent to grading the surface of the planet." These improvements are only comparatively good; it would have been better to dig in the dirt.

Before finishing his house, Thoreau planted two and half acres with beans, potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips. From the eleven acres he had purchased, Thoreau used deadwood from the woods, driftwood from the pond, and stumps from his vegetable patch for fuel. After paying for a team and a man to help plow the field, Thoreau ended up making $8.71 _ by selling those vegetables he didn't eat himself. The next year, he spaded only a third of an acre and realized if he grew only what he would eat, he could get by spending odd hours on it without needing oxen. Farmers, he believes, are less free than oxen. It is the oxen who have the biggest building in town, and Thoreau wishes there were as many halls for free worship or free speech.

From doing odd jobs as a surveyor, carpenter, and day-laborer in Concord, Thoreau made $13.34 during the year, spent $8.74 on food over eight months to supplement what he grew, and with the costs of clothing, his house, farmland, and oil, spent $61.9 _. From day labor and selling his produce over two years, he made $36.78 total, leaving him with a balance of $25.21 _, which is about what he had to begin with.

Through his experience of two years at Walden, Thoreau realized how simply and easily he could eat ­ sometimes just boiling a wild herb called purslane for his dinner or some ears of corn. Even yeast for his bread, which he made of his own grain, and salt for seasoning he ultimately found to be unnecessary luxuries. Therefore, he could avoid "all trade and barter" except to get clothing and fuel. He offers his "experiment" eating only vegetables to those who believed it wouldn't be possible to survive that way.

Thoreau made some of his own furniture and got the rest for free from people's attics ­ all together he had a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. Excessive amounts of furniture, Thoreau also sees as a sort of trap, which should be burned as the Mucclasse Indians do annually with their possessions, instead of an opportunity for increasing possessions, as when a dead man's furniture is auctioned off to his neighbors.

Thoreau worked for five years supporting himself by his own labor and found that he could support himself working only six weeks a year, giving himself plenty of time for study and thought. Previously, he had tried schoolteaching and trade but was unsuccessful. He values freedom above all else and found being a day laborer was the most independent occupation. He urges everyone to pursue his own particular way of living and not his parents' or neighbors'. Furthermore, he expresses his preference for the solitary life and his belief that most cooperation is superficial and only possible if a man has faith and does not depend on the ways of his community.

In response to his townsmen who have criticized his solitary way of life for excluding philanthropy, Thoreau says he cannot forsake his calling to do "good" for society even if it meant he could save the universe from annihilation and says that he is suspicious of those who attempt to do "good" for him, for it is unnatural and often hypocritical. As for the poor, he believes their problem is not necessarily a lack of possessions ­ since he has shown he can live without them ­ but a lack of "taste," in deciding how to spend the money they have.

In conclusion, Thoreau wishes for some straightforward praise of the gift of life, rather than overblown praise and cursing of God and urges people not to endeavor be "overseers of the poor" but instead "worthies of the world." He ends by referencing the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, who compares the cypress, the only tree called azad, or free, because it bears no fruit, to religious independents, who are always flourishing ­ "if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress."

Analysis

Thoreau's classical education is very much in evidence in the first chapter of Walden. He uses a multitude of classical allusions to mythological figures, comparing his neighbors' endless work to the labors of Hercules or personifying the dawn in the form of goddess Aurora. From the breadth of his references -- from Sir Walter Raleigh to Indian folktales to Eastern philosphy -- it is evident that Thoreau is an intellectually well-rounded man. This is somewhat ironic because of Thoreau's critical attitude towards education. He criticizes universities for teaching students about life when they would learn more by living life and says that young men often run their fathers into debt by reading Adams Smith's economy. Nonetheless, despite his criticism of Harvard for having considered him a student of navigation when he had never even taken a boat out on the harbor, Thoreau makes extensive use of his education through the literary, historical, and philosphical references which abound in this chapter.

One noteworthy thing that sets Thoreau's system of referents apart from other American writers that proceeded him is his reliance on Eastern philosophy as a means of considering the divine. As an inhabitant of Puritan-influence Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard, where men trained for both the Congregational and Unitarian ministry, Thoreau was quite familiar with conventional Western religious tradition. By the mid-nineteenth century, Puritan Congregational dogma and its adherence to Calvinist doctrine, had ceased to hold a monopoly on religious life in Massachusetts. The more recently formed Unitarian Church, in contrast to the Puritans, held that God could only be understood rationally and apprehended through the five senses.

Thoreau's friend and townsman Ralph Waldo Emerson, in creating the Transcendalist movement, sought to bring a more immediate and personal connection with the divine back into spiritual life. In shaping his own particular form of Transcendentalism, Thoreau went beyond Emerson -- who saw nature as a symbol of the divine -- and claimed that the divine could be found and experienced directly through nature. Thus, his references to "Hindoo," Arab, and Chinese texts provide Thoreau with an alternate system of meaning, very different from the Christian tradition, in which man is a part of nature and in which man can connect with the divine through nature. The story to which Thoreau refers to in the last paragraph of the chapter from an Arab text, the Gulistan of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, emphasizes this link between man and nature in its comparison of a cypress tree, seen as free because it bears no fruit, to the "azad," or free man. Additionally, Thoreau's use of a foreign language provides a symbolic means of breaking with tradition. He is creating new meanings and realities by using new language.

One recurring theme and image throughout this chapter is that of the slave. Repeatedly, Thoreau makes reference to men trapped and enslaved by their employment or possessions. Images like that of the poor man carrying all his possessions on his back or the wagonloads of furniture which look poor even when they belong to a rich man repeat throughout the chapter and illustrate Thoreau's emphasis on economy through simplicity. The image of the slave was particularly powerful in Thoreau's time, when the debate about slavery in the South was continually escalating and during which the abolitionist movement was powerful in Massachusetts. Thoreau's suggestion that people stop arguing about Southern slavery and consider how a Northern man enslaves himself is primarily a rhetorical move, meant to emphasize the spiritual enslavement all people face and not to de-emphasize the horrors of slavery. Thoreau, in fact, would go on to write an abolitionist tract and to speak out in defense of John Brown.

The dawning of the Industrial Revolution influenced Thoreau's opinions regarding society and civilization. Another theme that recurs throughout this chapter is that of the contrast between simple, "primitive" ways of life and the modern day-to-day life of Concord. Indians, Egyptians, Sandwich Islanders, and at times, even the Irish all at times appear as representations of a new version of the noble savage. On a pragmatic level, Thoreau uses them as examples of those able to live only with the "necessaries of life" and uses the ability to go without clothing, or furniture, or elaborate shelter as an example for those of his townsmen who are enslaved by theirs and feel them to be a necessity. Thus, Thoreau attempts to combat the negative influences of the Industrial revolution -- such as factory-produced clothing or houses built and designed by architects, neither of which have a meaningful connection to an owner who did not engage in their creation -- by absenting himself from society and thus discovering apart from influences and values that are not his own.

Some detect a thread of egotism in Thoreau's work, especially in this chapter, because of his constant references to himself and his observations. In reading it, we must remember that Thoreau's books began primarily as a series of journals he kept for himself. What's more, he addresses this narrow focus at the start of the chapter by noting that it is necessitated by the narrowness of his experience. It is also important to remember that Thoreau attempts life at Walden as an experiment and does not promote it as an example to necessarily be mimicked by others. Rather, he urges others to follow the example of his aims, to seek to know themselves, not to simply follow his behavior. At the start of the book, he makes it known that he is publishing it in response his townsmen have asked about his life in the woods. Though his book is well-known today, his thoughts and behavior were quite radical for his time, directly confronting and questioning the cherished traditions of New England and American life and seeking answers on a wholly different plane of meaning.

Chapter Two "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"

Summary:

Thoreau speaks of how he has often imagined any spot he sees as the site of a house and imagined purchasing all the farms in his area, about which he knew so much his friends considered him to be a real estate agent. He has gone so far as to imagine where he would place orchards and pastures, what trees to keep and to cut, and what different seasons would be like in each house. Once, he almost bought the Hollowell place but the owner's wife convinced him not to sell it at the last minute. The owner offered Thoreau ten dollars to make up for it, but he did not accept it, reasoning he was freer with the ten cents he had and no farm.

Most farmers fail to understand what poet's get from farms. Thoreau was attracted to the Hollowell farm because of its seclusion, its proximity to a river, its dilapidated condition, and fields of hollow apple trees. He wanted to buy it before the owner fixed it up and ruined it -- "for I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted, if I could only afford to let it alone." Though he's always grown a garden and had seeds ready for a farm, he thinks being tied down to a farm is tantamount to being in jail. He is more pleased to consider the place than to own it.

In describing his experience at Walden, Thoreau says he will condense two years into one for convenience. He reminds the reader he is not writing "an ode to dejection" but is "brag[ging] as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up."

By coincidence, Thoreau moved into his house on July 4, 1845, and found it fit to entertain a god or goddess. Before that, the only "house" he had owned was a boat, now gone, and a tent, rolled up in his garret. He has the outdoors air in his house and birds as neighbors. The house is above a pond a mile and a half south of Concord village, in woods between Concord and Lincoln. The house is so low, he can only see the opposite shore of the pond from it, but from up on a hill over the lake, where some trees have been cut down, he can see green hills nearby, further ones tinged with blue, and blue mountains distant in the northwest. From his door, Thoreau can only see a pasture, but it is enough for his imagination, which allows him to live in all different places in history and the universe.

A "worshipper of Aurora," Thoreau rises at dawn and swims in the pond. The morning reminds him of heroic ages and encourages him to truly awaken. He attributes men's lack of intellectual exertion and poetic or divine life to "drowsiness" that few can shake. "To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake." Thoreau believes we should endeavor to be awake because in doing so, we can create the "atmosphere ... through which we look" and make life beautiful.

Thoreau says, "I went to the woods to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I coudl not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." He wants to know life's true meanness or true sublimeness and give a true account of it, not be like men who live in uncertainty about the meaning of life. Here, he urges "Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!," telling people to simplify their affairs and arguing that so-called "improvements" like railroads, which make life too fast and superficial. Here, with a play on words, he compares the "sleepers" on the railroad to the men who work on it, who are "sleepers" because they are not awake enough to appreciate life.

Thoreau wonders why people need to live with such hurry. He thinks that if he rang the bell for a fire in town, people would come rushing from miles around, not to save the burning property but really to watch the fire. Thoreau also sees no point in reading the newspaper, in which the same stories are told time and again with new details, and considers it gossip. He says he has never gotten anything worth the postage from the post office either.

Men should observe only reality, which is far more fabulous than the illusions they think are truth. Instead of perceiving unhurried, men give in to the illusion of routine and habit. New Englanders lead "mean lives" because their "vision does not penetrate the surface of things." If they were to truly describe any building in the town, no one would recognize it. Rather than thinking the truth is somewhere far away and distant in time, recognize that "God himself culminates in the present moment."

Thoreau urges everyone to "spend one day deliberately as Nature" and to push through all outer appearance and poetry and philosophy and religion all the way down to the hard ground of reality, to find out if it is life or death and really feel it. Considering the shortness of time in the course of eternity, he regrets the way his intellect has separated him from reality and hopes his instinct will lead him to it.

Analysis:

Thoreau reaches deep into the Transcendentalist philosophy in this chapter. In making such bold pronouncements, he is wise to shy from being deadly serious. In a sentence which in some editions appears as an epigraph before the text of the book, he emphasizes he is not writing "an ode to dejection" but instead crowing like a rooster to wake his neighbors up. In doing so, and in criticizing their accepted and unquestioned ways of living, he employees a dry humor, characterized by understatement, as when he says, "nothing new ever does happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted."

The juxtaposition presented in the title of the chapter, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," provides an excellent clue as to Thoreau's philosophy. For him, the physical circumstances of life an intrinsically and inescapably tied to a person's spiritual life. The appearance of his cabin, its size and furniture, even its placement on the shore of the pond all contribute to his spiritual awakening. Because of this connection between one's physical and spiritual life, Thoreau's retreat to the shore of Walden Pond is necessary; and it is because of this that he urges his townsmen to likewise reconsider their physical circumstances.

Thoreau's emphasis on the dawn in this chapter continues the theme of rebirth established in the first chapter. In that chapter, he described a snake, left "torpid" by the cold of the winter and only gradually awakening as the weather thawed. That snake was a symbol for the "sleeping" men who are likewise unaware of their surroundings and immobile in combating the chains of routine and tradition. It is noteworthy that Thoreau begins building his house, the physical counterpart to his spiritual awakening, in the winter, and does not move into until summer, when nature and his spiritual self is in full life. Both here and in the first chapter, Thoreau appeals to Aurora, goddess of the dawn. The dawning of the day comes to be a metaphor for the dawning of spiritual enlightenment and self-knowledge.

Sight is also another theme in this chapter. Thoreau compares the views from the lakeside hill and from the front of his cabin. From the hill, he can see all the way to the mountains in the northwest. From his cabin, his only physical vista is a pasture but with his imagination, he can see to the furthest reaches of history and the universe. Thus, it is important to emphasize that Thoreau's "reality" is not a historical or factual concept. The illusions of which he speaks are not creations of his imagination. Rather, he considers things like religion and philosophy to be illusory because they limit and distort a person's immediate experience of himself in the world.

The theme of sleep plays an important role here. Thoreau elevates the word sleeper to a symbol, comparing men who labor without thinking to the pieces of iron that gird a railroad. This use of sleep and awakeness as a spiritual metaphor has a long history, especially in the writings of New England. The Great Awakening, of course, was the name given to the Puritan religious resurgence of the late seventeenth century. Thoreau here attempts to rewrite and undo that awakening, to free New Englanders from the shackles of thought forged by traditional religion and to awaken them to a more spiritually fulfilling reality.

Chapter Three "Reading"

Summary:

Thoreau believes that if men were more deliberate in choosing their pursuits, they would all become students and observers, because that is in their nature. When he reads an ancient philosopher, it is as if no time has passed, because truth is immortal.

He finds Walden a better place to read than a university. During his first summer, he didn't have much time to read because he was busy planting his bean crop, but he kept the Iliad on the table and sometimes flipped through it. The thought of having time to read it in the future sustained him. He also read a few shallow travel books but afterwards felt ashamed of having done so.

Even with the many translations of heroic and ancient epics, modern man is still placed at a great distance from the language of ancient times. Thoreau believes it is worth learning even a few words of an ancient language as a means of inspiration to transcend everyday life. The classics, "the noblest recorded thoughts of man," must be read deliberately.

There is a difference between spoken language, "the mother tongue," which is brutish and unconsciously learned, and written language, which Thoreau calls "the father tongue," which must be learned with maturity. Even at the time in which the classics were written, many of the common men who spoke the language in which they were written would not have truly understood them. Now only a few scholars do. Just as the orator speaks to the few people in the mob who truly understand him, the writer speaks to the few people across time who do.

Thoreau finds it fitting that Alexander the Great carried the Iliad with him in a "precious casket" because books are more universal than all other works of art. They can continually be translated and "breathed from all human lips" and are therefore "the work of art nearest to life itself." That is why they are kept in every cottage and are read by rich men striving for the "inaccessible circles of intellect and genius" when they retire.

Only the great poets ­ and not the majority of mankind ­ can truly read and understand the works of the great poets. Most great books "have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically." Most people learn to read only for convenience. They feel satisfied with one great book, the Bible, and then waste their minds with "easy reading" ­ mindless reading of novels and other unoriginal tales that Thoreau compares to a four-year-old with a copy of Cinderella.

Most of the so-called educated men in Concord don't even read the classics of English literature. They are like a French-Canadian woodchopper Thoreau knows who reads a French paper to keep up his knowledge of French ­ only these college-educated people read English papers to keep up their English. Most men don't even know that sacred scriptures of other traditions than the Judeo-Christian exist and so forego great insight and knowledge. Thoreau wishes to know more educated men than these and compares having a copy of Plato's Dialogues on the shelf but not reading it to having a neighbor he never sees or hears him speak. "We are under-bred and low-bread and illiterate," he concludes.

There are probably books that would speak directly to these people's condition and explain and reveal miracles to them if they would read them. The village of Concord provides well for the education of children but accept for a Lyceum that is open in the winter, does nothing for the education of adults. Thoreau wishes to seethe village become a university, with the elder inhabitants as the fellows. He wishes to see the village take up the role nobility did as patron of the arts in Europe but people see spending money on something far more important as farmers and trade as utopian.

The town has spend seventeen thousand dollars on a townhouse, but Thoreau thinks that the hundred and twenty-five dollars spend on the Lyceum each winter to be its best investment. Nineteenth century New England has the ability to choose not to be provincial ­ to skip the building of one bridge and force people to walk further to get around and have the ability to "throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us."

Analysis:

In this chapter, Thoreau introduces the theme of immortality through literature. At first, he suggests the immortality of ideas and ideals ­ of truth ­ through literature. However, his invocation of individual writers, particularly Homer, author of the Iliad, immortalizes the human being in print. Thus, Thoreau implies the possibility of immortality for himself. If Homer can be made to live again when his words are read aloud, perhaps Thoreau can gain a degree immortality through his published words. In the nineteenth-century, traditional Christian beliefs regarding the afterlife had begun to crumble ­ especially for people like Thoreau, who had sought alternate paths to spirituality. Faced with the death of his brother, Thoreau would have had to evaluate his own mortality and beliefs regarding life after death. Therefore, Walden is in part an attempt to immortalize himself through writing.

The final lines of Thoreau's reflections on reading have a counterpart in "Dover Beach," a poem by English poet Matthew Arnold, published in 1851, three years before Walden. Arnold too references classical writers ­ particularly Sophocles ­ in his lamentation of the loneliness born of a loss of faith, concluding, "And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night." For writers in the Victorian age, the loss of (Christian) faith provoked severe questioning of the individual's place in the universe. Both Arnold and Thoreau seek to align themselves with classical writers as a means of reestablishing stable roles for themselves in a changing, and seemingly chaotic, society. Whereas Arnold simply laments the growing darkness and confusion brought about by ignorance, Thoreau is more optimistic in proposing a solution to it ­ reading.

Metaphors of stars and astronomy are prevalent in this chapter. Stars, in antiquity, were symbols of the unknown and of divinity. There are also eternal and unreachable. Thus, they provide an apt symbol for classic literature, which Thoreau perceives as elevated above the common world and possessing a meaning unattainable by the masses. Twice, Thoreau suggests the "great poets" who can really understand the meaning of this literature are astronomers, with the ability to accurately interpret the stars, while the common people are astrologers, who recognize some meaning in the stars but project false meanings onto them.

In making this assertion about great literature and the common reader, Thoreau risks charges of elitism. Without stating it, he implies that he understands great literature ­ and therefore by his logic must be a "great poet" ­ when his townsmen do not. According to later developments in literary criticism, such as Deconstructionism, which suggests there is no single stable meaning in a text, the "astrologers" who find their own meanings in the classics may be making as valuable readings of the classics as the "astronomers" who understand their "true" meaning. (Of course, it is quite possible that Thoreau would perceive these developments in literary criticism as evidence of growing ignorance in so-called intellectual circles.) However, it is very important to remember that Thoreau ultimately suggests that increased education of adults and more "deliberate and reserved" reading would allow all people to connect with the classics and thus become enlightened.

Another metaphor Thoreau employs in this chapter is that of "the veil." "The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity," Thoreau says, "and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon a fresh a glory as he did." The idea of a veil of ignorance that exists between human perceptions of the world and between divine truth have their origins in St. Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 13: "For now we see as through a glass darkly but then face to face." For Paul, as an early Christian theologian, true and clear sight would only come when the resurrected soul came into contact with God after death. Thoreau, coming from Puritan New England, would of course be familiar with Paul's words. However, in the Unitarian belief system, human beings could only perceive the divine through their senses. Thoreau, as a Transcendentalist, suggests a more spiritual, immediate ability to recognize and connect with the divine, not intellectually but emotionally, through reading the classics.

Chapter Four "Sounds"

Summary:

Thoreau reminds the reader that focusing only on books neglects a more universal language. It is important to always be alert and to see all of life. That first summer at Walden, Thoreau didn't read books and he was not always occupied hoeing his beans. Some days, he would sit on his doorstep from dawn till noon, amid the trees and the birds, always smiling and answering their trills with chuckles. This taught him about contemplation, valued by Eastern philosophers. He lived in the moment and though his townsmen would have thought him idle, he was living as naturally as the birds and flowers.

He found every aspect of his life to be a "pleasant pastime" and promises that if people pay close enough attention to what they are doing, they will never be bored. On days when he cleaned his house, Thoreau enjoyed getting up early, putting all his furniture outside, and scrubbing the floor with sand from the beach, finishing by the time the townspeople woke up in the morning. He was happy to see his furniture outside among plants and animals, like a part of nature.

Thoreau now describes the location of his house, on the side of a hill overlooking the pond at the edge of the woods, and the plants which surround it -- sand-cherry, whose "scarcely palatable" berries he tasted in May and sumach, whose berries grew so heavy in August that they broke the plant's limbs. On one afternoon, he sits at his window, watching a hawk, pigeons, and a mink in the woods. He can also hear the train on the Fitchburg Railroad, located a hundred yards south of his cabin, next to the pond. He uses its tracks to walk to the village.

Summer and winter, Thoreau can hear the locomotive whistle and he imagines it making merchants' announcements about their goods. He compares the train to a comet and suggests that men have so harnessed nature in making it they are almost a "new race" worthy of inhabiting the earth. In an extended metaphor, he talks about the "iron horse," awakened early in the morning and flying about the country even until midnight. Its actions are amazing and unwearied but not at all heroic. The railroad has so influenced life in the towns that people measure time by the train's coming and going, and life goes on at a faster speed than before, "railroad-fashion." Thoreau describes man's creation of the railroad as "a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside."

There is bravery and enterprise to be found in commerce. Writing on the morning of a snowstorm, Thoreau says he is more affected by the men who work despite the weather and long hours than by men in battle at Buena Vista. Smelling the goods from distant parts on the freight train as it goes past, Thoreau is made to feel like a citizen of the world. He smells and sees sails, who rips tell stories of storms at sea, that will be made into paper; rags of all different types of cloth that will become paper of one color on which "true" stories will be advertised; salt fish, "the strong New England and commercial scent;" Spanish cowhides, with tails still intact, to be made into glue; and molasses and brandy on its way to Vermont. From the opposite direction, coming down from the Green Mountains, are carloads of cattle and sheep, which makes Thoreau imagine sheepdogs barking back in the mountains, looking for them.

When the train passes, he is once again alone. On some Sundays, he hears church bells from surrounding towns, depending on which way the wind is blowing, made magical by their passage through the woods. In the evenings, he sometimes hears cows or once, boys whose singing sounded like a cow, which Thoreau liked because it connected them to nature. At almost exactly seven thirty every evening in the summer, the whippoorwills would sing for half an hour. Later in the night, the screech owls, whom Thoreau likens to ghosts of humans lamenting their deaths, cry, as do the hooting owls, whose melancholy "hoo" reminds Thoreau of ghouls but nonetheless is pleasant to his ears. Owls, he says, should do the "idiotic and maniacal hooting for men."

Late at night, he hears distant wagons going over bridges, baying dogs, perhaps another cow, and along Walden's "Stygian lake," bullfrogs, whom he imagines passing a cup in a medieval banquet under the surface of the lake, bellowing "troonk." Though he never heard a cock's crow from his cabin, he suggests that the rooster (whom he calls "cockerel") be naturalized, so that his call would call everyone to awakeness. But in his cabin, Thoreau had no "domestic sounds," no roosters, cats, dogs, or even rats in the walls. Instead, his sounds are squirrels, whippoorwills, owls, loons, and foxes. Instead, nature reaches right up to his door. He doesn't have to worry about digging a path through the front yard in a snowstorm because he has "no front yard,--and no path to the civilized world!"

Analysis

In his first chapter, Thoreau proposed to explore his connection to nature and to portray human beings as part of a continuum of nature, rather than a separate, dominating force they were thought to be during the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. In this chapter, Thoreau contrasts two disparate views of humankind through his description of the sounds he hears in the forest. While the passing of the locomotive is just as regular as the sunrise in Thoreau's world at Walden, the juxtaposition of these two daily occurrences illustrates the inescapable effects of the Industrial Revolution on the natural world.

Thoreau uses hyperbole in his descriptions of the locomotive, likening it to a mythological dragon or winged horse, and calling it heroic. His effusive and overblown descriptions of the locomotive are deliberately excessive. They serve to parody his nineteenth-century contemporaries who worship technological progress, like those people he says profess to do everything "railroad-fashion." In saying that these people have created fate in the form of the railroad, Thoreau is not praising them. Rather, he is illustrating the irony in their actions -- in creating the railroad as a way to make their lives easier, people have created something which ultimately controls them.

In contrast with the railroad, Thoreau depicts the sounds which emanate from nature. That he is "more alone than ever" after the railroad passes by is not a bad thing. Thoreau, in his recorded observations of nature, proves the proposition he makes at the beginning of the chapter -- that intelligent people can avoid boredom by close attention to their environment and actions. Just by listening closely to the changing wrought on them by the woods through which they pass, Thoreau can turn the echo of church bells into magic. He uses simile -- "as the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest" -- and personification -- "the natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence" -- to emphasize the strength of the link between himself, as a human being, and nature.

Thoreau's embrace of nature and criticism of the influences of human technology must not be read as a whole-sale dismissal of human culture and civilization. One of his most creative original moves in these two chapters, as in Walden as a whole, is to link literature and nature as natural, noble phenomena. Though Thoreau spends much of the summer sitting on his doorstep, watching and listening to nature, rather than reading, he is not rejecting literature in doing so. Rather, keeping his eyes open to nature is the natural progression of the deliberate attention he pays to books. He makes allusions to classical mythology -- calling Walden Stygian, or like the river Styx, and naming the locomotive Atropos, the name of one of the three Fates -- and to English literature -- describing the screech owl's scream "Ben Jonsonian," a reference to seventeenth century poet Ben Jonson.

Chapter Five "Solitude"

Summary:

On one "delicious" evening, Thoreau walks along the shore of the pond. It is dark but in nature, "repose is never complete." Waves continue to dash against the shore and animals seek their prey. He returns home to find that a visitor has been there. He can usually tell a visitor has called by things left behind purposefully -- a bunch of flowers, for example -- or accidentally -- footprints or the scent of a pipe on the train tracks. From these things, he can often figure out their age, gender, or quality.

Since people usually have enough space around them, Thoreau asks, why does he have such a great deal of privacy -- several square miles of forest? His closest neighbor is a mile away, no house is visible from his. He finds it as solitary as the prairies and supposes he could be on another continent even, since he has a "little world" all to himself. No visitors ever stop by at night, except for some men who came in the spring to fish but left quickly. Thoreau supposes people are still a little afraid of the dark.

No one who lives in the midst of nature can be unhappy because there is companionship to be found in any natural object. Thoreau believes nothing nature does can make life a burden because he is a part of nature. If the rain makes him stay indoors, it is still good for his bean crops. If it rains so much his bean seeds rot, it is still good for the upland grass and thus good for him. He feels "favored by the gods" because he is never lonely. Only once, a few weeks after he moved to the woods, did he worry that being near to other people might be necessary for a happy life, but rain drops on his roof and all the other sounds of nature suddenly began to seem friendly and kindred. He realized "no place could ever be strange to me again."

Thoreau has spent pleasant hours in his house during long rain storms in the spring or fall. While in the village, maids stand at the door with mops to keep the rain out, he feels save and dry in his little cabin. Eight years ago, a tall pine across the lake was struck with lightening, which made a spiral groove in it from top to bottom; Thoreau passed it the other day and looked at it with awe. Though some people say they think he would be lonely, especially on rainy or snowy days, Thoreau wants to remind them that the earth is just a point in space, an immeasurable distance from the inhabitants of any other star. Besides, "no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another." The wise man will not want to build his house near any store or building or fashionable location but in nature, "the perennial source of our life."

One night, Thoreau ran into a man he knew, who owned some "handsome property" driving his cattle to market. When the man asked how he could give up life's comforts, Thoreau told him honestly he liked it passably well. Material circumstances are just distractions in the process of "awakening." In nature, one is closest to divinity. Thoreau says he can chose whether or not to be effected by external events. He compares life to a play in which he plays a double role, as actor and as spectator, making friendships difficult in life.

Thoreau loves to be alone and often finds company tiring. Solitude has nothing to do with distance. A student while studying or farmer while chopping wood won't feel lonely; likewise, Thoreau is employed in his observations at Walden and is not alone. He thinks that people come into contact with each other too much and therefore lose respect for each other. They could see each other less frequently and maintain important communications. A man dying in the forest of famine and exhaustion collapsed at the foot of the tree and hallucinated people around him. In recognizing that nature can provide society, Thoreau can likewise have companionship. He is not any more lonely than the lake or the loon in it or a plant or insect.

Sometimes in the winter, Thoreau says, an old settler who some say dug Walden Pond and others believe to be dead, visits him and tells him stories. He loves this friend even though he keeps himself a secret. Likewise an old woman "invisible to most persons" has an herb garden which he visits, where she tells him fairy tales and the origins of every fable. Nature, to Thoreau, is innocent and beneficent, with a sympathy to humankind. There is no good reason he shouldn't talk with the earth since he is part of it himself.

The medicine that will keep people well isn't the "quack vials" sold out of wagons but "our great-grandmother Nature's." Morning air should be bottled and sold in shops but it would go bad before noon. Thoreau doesn't worship Hygeia (the goddess of health) but Hebe, cup-bearer to Jupiter, "who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth."

Analysis:

Once more, Thoreau's use of mythological allusions reveals the extend to which he was influenced by a classical education. For him, Aurora, Hygeia, and Hebe are useful as symbols for the properties they, as divinities, oversee. Thoreau's use of mythological figures is more creative than most because of his juxtaposition of them not with intellectual matters but with everyday, nineteenth-century life. Of Hebe, he says, "She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring." Thus, Thoreau's choice of Hebe over Hygeia provides a way for Thoreau to reformulate notions of health and nature with symbols familiar to a nineteenth-century educated audience.

Thoreau's use of nature metaphors in his descriptions of society and his use of social metaphors in his descriptions of nature deliberately blur the line between society and nature. For example, Thoreau writes, "The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert." In attempting how to explain how a person in the physical midst of civilized society might be more alone than he is, without human companionship, in the woods, Thoreau uses two images of nature -- the metaphor of the beehive, to represent the teaming social scene at the university, and the desert, as an image of physical solitude. Similarly, by giving human form to aspects of nature -- as with the old man and old women who tell him stories, really personifications of the nature which inspires him -- Thoreau destroys the notion that nature cannot provide companionship for a person.

Here, Thoreau is not rejecting society per se. It is important not to read him as a misanthrope. Rather, he seeks first to explain why he is not lonely while living "alone" in the woods, and second to argue for more meaningful connections between human beings. Instead of simply practicing artificial etiquette in our relations with others, we ought to abandon this pretence and only engage with others for "all important and hearty communications." Quality, not quantity, indeed.

Thus, this chapter is not about "solitude," at all, as the term in normally understood. Rather, it is about Thoreau's townsmen's misapprehensions regarding his solitude. Thoreau has shunned their company for what he calls a "more normal and natural society." He takes care to emphasize that all parts of nature -- the lake, bumble bees, the north star -- are companionship for him and that he is not lonesome. In refuting his neighbor's notion that he must be especially lonesome on rainy or snowy nights, Thoreau creates a hierarchy in which the intellect is higher than social contact. That, for him, it is an adequate replacement is evinced in his personifications of elements of nature -- the founder of Walden Pond or the elderly dame in the herb field -- through his imagination.

Thoreau's personification of nature marks his significant contribution to the Transcendentalist philosophy. For him, nature was not just a symbol of divinity; nature embodied divinity. (For this, some accused him of being an Animist.) Thoreau's invocation of the divine -- "the workman whose work we are" -- in this chapter refutes Unitarian notions of the divine as perceivable by the five senses. Thoreau quotes passages that instead describe God as all around but unperceived -- "identified with the substance of things, they cannot be separated from them"; "everywhere, above us, on our left, on our right, they environ us on all sides." Thus, Thoreau finds not only companionship but divine companionship from nature. At Walden, because he is with nature, he is not alone but is with God.

Within this personified portrayal of nature, Thoreau makes the noticeable move of gendering the figure of Nature as feminine. In part, this is a rejection of strict, patriarchal values. "Our great-grandmother" Nature is an alternative to "my or thy great-grandfather." Nature is a maternal figure, and in relation to her, Thoreau is alternately portrayed as a child and as a feminized figure." "I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself," he says. This strange liberty erases the strict boundaries of gender, time, and society.

Chapter Six "Visitors"

Summary:

Thoreau thinks he likes society as much as most people. At his cabin, he has three chairs: "one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." As many as thirty people have been in his house at one time, and then they've all stood up. Most houses are so big that it makes Thoreau imagine their inhabitants as "vermin which infest them." The small size of his house only bothers him when he wants to talk with a friend about big ideas, which take a great deal of space to speak about. Often, they will find themselves with chairs pushed up against opposite corners, speaking their big thoughts. Sometimes to communicate most intimately with other people, we need to be so far apart we can't hear each other speaking.

On nice summer days, Thoreau takes his guests outside to his "Œbest' room," the pine woods behind his house. If he has one guest, they share his "frugal meal." If twenty people come, out of politeness no one speaks of eating. Thoreau says he is deterred from visiting people who make a big show of feeding him. He recounts a story of Winslow, a Pilgrim leader at Plymouth, who went to visit Massasoit at his lodge. The Indians did not mention eating when the Pilgrims arrived, and in two nights, they only had one meal, some fish shared with the Indian villagers. Winslow complained in his written account of the journey about the lack of food, but Thoreau believes that the Indians, who had no other food to give them, could have done nothing else, since apologizing would have been worse.

Thoreau had more visitors while living in the woods than at any other time in his life, but fewer of these visitors came on trivial business, because of his distance from town. One morning, a twenty-eight year old French-Canadian woodchopper , who has been living in the US for twelve years, hoping to save money to buy a farm in Canada, visits him. This man, who was taught to pronounce Greek by a Catholic priest, reads Homer with Thoreau, who translates for him, but he has no real intellectual appreciation of it.

This man brings his lunch, often a woodchuck his dog has caught, with him into the woods, where he works. He enjoys his work, smiling as he chops trees, and sometimes amuses himself by firing salutes into the air with his pistol. He is a prime example of the "animal man" but the intellectual and spiritual components of his being are "slumbering." Thoreau attributes this to his education by priests who never awakened his consciousness but only educated him to the degree of trust and reverence found in a child. This man is "simple and naturally humble" and reverences the writer and the preacher. Thoreau sometimes finds his name written in the snow and asks if he thinks of writing down his thoughts, but the man says it would be too hard to decide what to put first and to worry about spelling at the same time.

Thoreau heard that a reformer asked him if the world wanted to be changed, but he said he liked it well enough. He doesn't know if the man is wise or ignorant. He likes to ask him about various reforms of the day to get his opinion. For example, when Thoreau asks if he could do without money, he describes how difficult it would be for him to buy needles and thread by mortgaging part of an ox. He can defend institutions better than a philosopher because his practical contact with them leads him to give the real reason they are necessary. He says he loves to talk, but when after not seeing him all summer, Thoreau asks if he's gotten any new ideas, he says if a man has work to do, it's all he can do to hold on to the ideas he already has. No matter what questions he asks, Thoreau cannot get the man to look at things spiritually. He only thinks of expediency, like an animal or like most men. However, Thoreau is interested in asking his opinion. Though little comes of it, he suggests that there are men of genius in the lower grades of life, who are as bottomless as Walden Pond.

Many travelers who come wanting to see inside Thoreau's house ask for a drink of water as an excuse. He gives them a dipper and sends them to the pond, out of which he drinks. At the beginning of April especially he has many visitors, including half-witted men from the almshouse. He engages them in intellectual conversations and finds them to be wiser than the overseers of the poor. One "simple-minded pauper" who visits tells Thoreau truthfully and simply that the Lord made him "deficient in intellect" and that it was "the Lord's will." He finds this man a "metaphysical puzzle" because his humility and sincerity seem to promise valuable intercourse. Other poor people come to visit, and Thoreau only requires his visitors "not actually be starving," because "objects of charity are not guests." One runaway slave comes and Thoreau helps send him north.

Thoreau notices that girls and boys and young women seemed happy in the woods. Men of business, including farmers, were all concerned about solitude and employment and distance. They and some women and young men were nosy and critical. Old people mostly worried about the danger his distance from the doctor put him in if he were sick or injured. Of them, Thoreau says that we're always in danger of dying but since we're all going to die, we have to run that risk. The most boring are the "self-styled reformers." However, most of his guests make him happy. They came to the woods from the village looking for a little freedom and he is eager to greet them.

Analysis:

Since his death at an early age, Thoreau has developed an unwarranted reputation as a hermit. From this chapter, "Visitors," it is clear that Thoreau did not retreat from Concord village life because of any misanthropic impulses. He emphasizes, first at the beginning and again at the end, of this chapter that he likes society as much as other people and that the majority of his visitors made him happy. However, the character and social position of the particular unwanted visitors ­ businessmen and farmers who question his mode of living, ministers who act as if they had a monopoly on the subject of God, and reformers who criticize his lack of "charity" ­ illustrate the reason such a negative reputation developed.

Thoreau is criticizing the patriarchal structure of nineteenth-century New England society. The guests who make him happy and to whom he give a voice are those who viewpoints were excluded from public life ­ a "halfwit," a Catholic immigrant, a runaway slave, women, and children. Thoreau's writing, like his actions in refusing to pay taxes which would support slavery (which would become the essay "Civil Disobedience"), were deliberately subversive ­ a means of revealing the fallacy of conventions accepted as natural and right in his world.

The halfwit whom Thoreau engages in a conversation about wit itself is a foil for the supposedly intellectual Concord citizens whom he seeks to criticize. "With respect to wit," he says, "I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole." The values Thoreau appears to value most in men are humbleness, sincerity, and truthfulness. The halfwit contrasts markedly with the supposedly intelligent and upstanding men of business who "said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, [though] it was obvious they did not." They are the men who can talk "cheek by jowel," without really hearing each other. Thoreau, in contrast, needs space to talk with anyone because he really endeavors to communicate with them.

The Canadian woodsman provides an ambivalent symbol in Thoreau's lexicon. On the one hand, he represents the absence of intellectual and spiritual life ­ and thus is a symbol for the majority of men Thoreau knows. Thoreau's difficulty in awakening this man's spirituality even through direct attention represents his (failed) attempts to do the same with the majority of his townsmen and readers of the book. On the other hand, the woodchopper represents the pure "animal spirit" of man and therefore proves Thoreau's arguments about man as part of nature. Thoreau admires the man's unselfconscious and honest response to life because, despite his difficulty in awakening his spirituality, it undoes accepted notions about the real location of genius. The genius slumbering in the Canadian gives Thoreau hope about the possibility of wakening genius in everyone ­ and thus undercuts the monopoly "upstanding" townsmen have on thoughts and ideas.

Chapter Seven "The Beanfield"

Summary:

The length of all of Thoreau's beans added together was seven miles and had to be hoed frequently. They attach him to the earth and growing them is his days work. He is aided by the dews, rain, and soil. His enemies are worms, cool days, and woodchucks, which have nibbled a quarter of an acre. On one night, as he plays his flute, he recalls visiting Walden at age four, when his family lived in Boston. The pine trees are still older than him and the johnswort which he saw then still grows. But the bean, corn, and potatoes now growing there are the result of his influence.

Thoreau has planted two and a half acres of beans in some land that was cleared fifteen years ago. He dug up some stumps but didn't use any fertilizer. But during his hoeing, he dug up arrow heads and realized that Indians had grown corn and beans there once and had somewhat exhausted the soil. Even though farmers say not to, Thoreau would get up early, while the dew was still on the leaves, and begin to weed and hoe his crops, working barefoot in the morning before the sun was too hot for his feet.

Because he didn't hire any people or animals to help him, he took longer than most people in his labor and thus got to know his crop better. Sometimes, travelers would drive by and see him constantly at work, and he might hear their gossip about him, planting beans and peas much later than most people, or be questioned by farmers about his lack of manure in the furrows. Thoreau sees his as "the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields" and his beans "returning to their wild and primitive state."

While he plants seeds, Thoreau listens to a brown thrasher sing "Drop it, drop it,--cover it up, cover it up,--pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." As he hoes, he digs up not just beans but the soil of ancient civilizations ­ stones burned in Indian fires and pottery and glass from more recent farmers. He notices the "kindredship of Nature" in the birds which fly above ­ a night-hawk which is the "aerial brother of the wave," hen-hawks soaring and descending like the embodiment of his thoughts, and a spotted salamander, a contemporary trace of Egypt.

The guns which the town shoots off on "gala days" sound like a burst puff-ball to Thoreau. The hum of the people sounds to Thoreau like bees and he is relieve when they finally quiet down and return to "the Middlesex hive," now able to continue his hoeing in confidence that the liberties of Massachusetts are in safekeeping. The whole village sounds like "a vast bellows" when there are several bands playing, but sometimes a "noble and inspiring strain" reaches Thoreau inspire him to think about Palestine and marching crusaders. Though this was supposedly a "great" day, the sky looked the same to Thoreau.

From planting, hoeing, harvesting, threshing, picking over, selling, and eating them, Thoreau attempted to know beans. He hoed them from 5 AM till noon and became well acquainted with different species of weeds in his war against them. While some of his peers spend their summer days to fine arts, contemplation, or trade in distant locales, Thoreau was engaged in husbandry, which he found "a rare amusement," though it might have bored him if it had continued much longer. Though he didn't give them manure and didn't hoe them all at once, he was ultimately rewarded for his work. All in all, he spent $14.72 _ on supplies and made $23.44 selling his crops, leaving him with a profit of $8.71 _.

As a result of his experience, Thoreau advises planting the white bush bean about June 1 in rows 3' X 18" apart, watching out for worms, filling vacancies with new seeds, watching out for woodchucks which will eat the leaves, and above all, harvest as early as possible to avoid frost. Another summer, he says he will not plant beans and corn with so much industry but instead will see if these seeds of sincerity, truth, simplicit, faith, and innocene will grow with even less work in the same soil. However, several summers have gone by and the seeds ­ which he compares to the seeds of virtues ­ did not come up. Men generally are only as brave as their fathers have been.

In New England, men continue to plant and tend corn and beans just as the Indians taught them centuries ago. One day, he saw an old man digging holes for possibly the seventieth time in his life. Thoreau wonders why people worry so much about beans for seed and not about a new generation of men? We would be happy to see a man possessing those virtues he mentioned, but instead of cultivating them in people, we expect them to appear out of thin air.

Unlike the ancient civilizations, we have no festivals or ceremonies, other than cattle shows and Thanksgiving, that honor husbandry as a sacred art. People regard the soil as property now and work it for profit, regarding nature as a robber and degrading the character of the farmer. We forget that the sun shines down the same on cultivated fields and uncultivated nature the same. "In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden." The beans aren't just for him but for the woodchucks too; the seeds of the weeds are for the birds. The true husbandman will stop worrying, "relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also."

Analysis

Once again, Thorea references mythology and ancient civilization in his efforts to rethink and reform conventional New England thought about farming. Though Thoreau is associated with the Transcendental school, he differs from Transcendentalists like Emerson because his worldview was heavily influenced by a number of different religious and cultural traditions ­ particularly classical Greek history and mythology, Eastern religions, and the Native American way of life. Thoreau's rejection of the Industrial Revolution is not a Luddite anti-technology stance; rather, it is a rejection of the intellectual effects of new technology. Therefore, Thoreau does not simply embrace farming as a way of life because he rejects trade and the railroad. He in fact rejects the sort of farming that most Concord farmers practice ­ through which "the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives."

Again, Thoreau's goal is to establish the strength of the link between nature and human beings. Therefore, he anthropomorphizes the brown thrush, giving English words to its song. Likewise, he explores humankind's false anthropomorphization of Nature as a robber. Thoreau contrasts this view of Nature with his own personification of Nature as God. By alluding to mythological representations of Nature in divine form ­ as the "earth Mother" or "Ceres" ­ Thoreau argues for the historical precedents to his own particular Transcendentalist belief that nature is divine.

Thoreau likewise supports this notion of nature as divine with an example of metonymy. Thoreau writes, "The sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinctionŠ In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden." The sun, a part included in and associated with nature, represents nature in Thoreau's statements. Everything on the earth is included in the eyes of nature. "Only Heaven knows," Thoreau writes when speaking of raising his beans earlier in the chapter. Thus, Nature looks down on the earth and sees all just the traditionally understood God does.

In discussing his attempts to rescue his bean plants from weeds, Thoreau employs an extended metaphor of warfare. In doing so, he alludes one again to classical mythology, likening the weeds to "Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side." The trenches between the rows of beans are the trenches of war, and the beans themselves are rescued by Thoreau, who wields a hoe like a sword. This metaphor of war in nature contrasts with the village's demonstrations of bellicosity, shooting off cannons and guns on days of celebration. While a weed may seem to Thoreau to be "a lusty crest-waving Hector," the real guns of the town remind him only of "puff-balls." Repeatedly, Thoreau employs this metaphorical chiasmas, comparing an aspect nature to something in culture and a related aspect of culture to something in nature. In doing so, he continually emphasizes the unbreakable links between nature and culture ­ arguing that humans, despite their "civilization," are as much a part of nature as a weed or other plant.

In eliding the material and philosophical aspects of the world, Thoreau offers nature as a model for human life. Rather than attempt to incorporate aspects of nature into human commerce ­ looking at land as property for example ­ people should look at themselves as they do bean seeds, cultivating virtues in themselves with as much care as they grow their crops. Humankind's real fault, Thoreau suggests, is in seeing themselves as separate from the workings of nature, when in reality they would benefit from treating themselves as they do the earth the live on.

Chapter Eight "The Village"

Summary:

After hoeing or reading and writing in the morning, Thoreau would usually swim in the lake to wash either dirt or intellectual wrinkles from his person. Every day or two, he went to the village, to hear gossip, which "taken in homeopathic doses" was refreshing. He watched people in the village the way he watched birds and squirrels in the woods, observing their habits. The village was like "a great news room." Redding and Co.'s on State Street sold the essential food items and the necessary news and gossip to satisfy people's appetites. He frequently saw people sitting in the sun or leaning against a barn who were the first to hear and digest whatever gossip is in the wind.

The "vitals" of the town are the grocery, bar-room, post-office, and bank. The houses and streets are arranged such that a traveler has to run a gauntlet through all the inhabitants. The most expensive houses are closest to the center, so that their inhabitants can see and be seen the most. Travelers are tempted by signs hung out by the tavern, dry-good's store, jeweller's, barber's, shoemaker's, or tailors, or by the open invitation to call at the houses. Thoreau mostly escapes these dangers by proceeding deliberately to his goal. Sometimes, he visits houses, entering suddenly, without lingering, and after learning the news, leaving by the back gate to return to the woods.

He enjoyed leaving town late at night, leaving a bright room full "crew" of thoughts, "sailing" back through the dark woods. Often he had to look up at the openings between trees, feel the path with his feet, or feel between trees with his hands to get home. Sometimes he found himself at home not remembering or knowing how he found the way. When a visitor stayed till the evening, Thoreau would have to show him to a cart-path behind the house and remind him to be led by feet rather than eyes. He did so with two men who had been fishing one night but found out later they'd wandered around half the night during rain showers. He's heard of people getting lost in town streets in the dark and people from the outskirts of town staying in town over night.

It's a valuable experience, Thoreau says, to be lost in the woods at night. It's similar to but infinitely greater than when a person cannot tell his way on a well-known road during a snowstorm, because it looks just as unfamiliar to him as Siberia. Usually, we steer like pilots by well-known beacons. All you need is to be turned around once with your eyes shut to get lost to appreciate "the vastness and strangeness of nature." "Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."

One afternoon near the end of the summer, Thoreau went to town to get a shoe from the cobbler's and was thrown in jail. He had not paid a tax to the state "which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its sentate-house." Wherever a man goes, others will pursue him and try to force him to belong to their dirty institutions. He could have resisted and run "amok" against society but preferred that society run "amok" against him. The next day, he was released, got his shoe, and went back to the woods.

He was never bothered by any person but those who represented the state. He didn't have a lock on his door or windows, only on the desk which held his papers, even when he went to Maine for two weeks. But his house was respected. Travelers could rest by his fire, readers could read his few books, and the curious could even look in his closet and see what food he had. Though many people of every class came by, he never lost anything but a volume of Homer. He's certain that robbery would cease if people lived as he does. It only happens now because some people have more than they need and other's don't have enough.

Analysis:

Thoreau's actions while living at Walden illustrate his concern with purification and rebirth. He has already stated that he swam early every morning in the pond. These actions function as a sort of ritual baptism, representing a new beginning and connecting Thoreau physically with nature. Here, he speaks about the swims he took after working or reading in the morning. That refers to these swims as "bathing" illustrates that this action serves to symbolically clean and revive him. Thoreau himself seems to realize the symbolic nature of these baths, for he swims not only on days when he is covered in dust from his bean patch but also to "smooth out the last wrinkle which study had made." Thus, the afternoon is "absolutely free" not only from occupation but from worry or concern.

Once again, we see that Thoreau's cabin at Walden ­ and the woods themselves ­ function as a refuge, though an imperfect one. He is always happy to "return home" at night, whether from a friend's parlor, a lecture, or from jail. It is clear that "home" to Thoreau is not just his cabin. It is the woods, too ­ a place where Thoreau, unlike the villagers who will stay overnight in a friend's house in the center of town rather than venture to their own on the outskirts in the dark, is comfortable and able to function almost instinctually. He has symbolically become a part of the woods, knowing it so well that he need not think about it to find his way through the trees in the dark to his door.

Thoreau uses an extended metaphor of sailing to describe his progress through the woods and does so in a way that upsets expectations. For him, this sailing is not dangerous but "smooth sailing." Unlike Odysseus of his beloved Homer, Thoreau is never "cast away nor distressed in any weather." He finds Sirens to tempt him into danger not on these voyages through the woods but in the village. Like Odysseus, he is able to escape them and ultimately return home.

The village, then, is not home but rather is implicitly likened to the underworld. Thoreau alludes to the myth of Orpheus, who entered the underworld to reclaim his wife, and who combatted its dangers by playing his lute and keeping his mind on other things. The comparison such an allusion yields is not favorable for the village, which becomes tantamount to a hell-on-earth. Though it is not spoken directly, Thoreau's allusion to Orpheus, who ultimately lost his wife when he gave into temptation and looked back at her just as they were out of the underworld, suggests that Thoreau will not be able to fully and successfully escape village life.

Thoreau indeed makes such an explicit statement at the end of his chapter, when he talks of being imprisoned for not paying his taxes to a state that supports slavery. (Though Massachusetts was a free state, it was required by federal law to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and also benefited economically from the raw materials provided by the slave labor of the South, such as cotton used in Northern cloth factories.) That experience, of course, became the subject matter for the essay we now know as "Civil Disobedience. Walden Pond may be an intellectual refuge for Thoreau but only two miles from Concord, he cannot truly escape the demands of society.

There is a degree of sarcasm in Thoreau's opening statements about the village. He calls it refreshing and says he went every day or two but his actions in and opinions about actual visits to the village show that he does not really enjoy it. Rather, he feels as if he is running a gauntlet of gossipers as he walks down the town streets and generally leaves his friends' homes by the back door, rushing off to the woods so as not to be seen. However, Thoreau's ambivalence about civilized life is evident. He sees even the most basic aspects of village life ­ the barber, the dry goods store, the shoemaker ­ as temptation. Though he is able to ignore and eschew them, he must do so because the comforts of civilization provide easy alternatives ­ for himself and especially for his reader ­ to the deliberate, contemplative life he attempts to live.

This is one of Thoreau's most explicitly political chapters. He writes, though obliquely, about his opposition to slavery and to the night in jail that was earned by his civil disobedience. His preference that "society should run Œamok' against me, it being the desperate party" is his way of condemning the existing system, suggesting it does not follow the greater values which Thoreau recognizes and follows. Additionally, Thoreau is suggesting radical change, some of which seems by today's standards to coincide with socialist thought, in his argument that redistribution of property, so that everyone had what he needed, not to little or too much, would reduce crime. However, Thoreau is not suggesting new system of government but rather suggesting that his readers integrate the example provided by his experiment in living into their own lives.

Chapter Nine "The Ponds"

Summary:

When he's had enough of people, Thoreau ventures westward to unfrequented parts of town and ate huckleberries and blueberries on Fair-Haven Hill. The only way to really taste huckleberries is by picking and eating them; those that are sold in Boston have lost their true taste. Sometimes, after finishing hoeing for the day, he joins a companion who has been fishing on the pond. One older man often uses Thoreau's doorstep to wind his lines. Thoreau sometimes sits at the opposite end of his boat in the pond, and since the man has lost his hearing, they don't talk. Sometimes the man hums a psalm, which pleases Thoreau more than a conversation. When he is alone in his boat, sometimes Thoreau hits the side of the boat with a paddle until the woods echo with the sound.

In warm evenings, he sits in his boat and plays the flute, as the perch swim nearby and the moon shines overhead. In the past, he had come to the pond with the friend and built a fire on the bank to attract pout. Sometimes, he returns from visiting in the village and fishes at midnight, listening to owls and foxes, anchored in the middle of the lake as perches and shiners swim around. His philosophizing would be suddenly interrupted by a pull on his line, connecting him again with nature, and he would draw up a horned pout.

The scenery of Walden is beautiful but humble. The pond is very clear, half a mile long and one and three-quarters of a mile around, in the middle of pine and oak woods and surrounded by hills 40-80 feet high in the southeast and 100-150 feet high in the east. All waters in Concord have two colors, one which depends on the weather when seen from a distance and the other, looking directly down from a boat. Walden, when one does so, looks blue and green at the same time, combining the sky and earth, though the green might be a combination of the blue sky and yellow sand. In the spring, when the ice has begun to melt, the water reflects even bluer than the sky.

The Concord River, looked down upon, looks black and gives a swimmer a yellow tint, but the water of Walden is so pure that it gives the swimmer's body an alabaster glow. The water is so clear that you can see to the bottom at 25-30 feet and watch schools of perch and shiners. One winter in the past, when he was cutting fishing holes in the ice, Thoreau tossed his axe at the ice and it fell in a hole. He could look down through the hole and see the axe swaying on the bottom. He ended up fishing it out using a long birch branch tied with a slip knot.

The pond is surrounded by flat white stones and except for a couple beaches is so steep that you could jump right into water over your head. There's no mud or weeds, except where nearby meadows have flooded. Where the stones leave off, there is sand on the bottom, and a little sediment from leaves that blow into the lake at the center. White Pond, two-and-a-half miles away in Nine Acre Corner, is similar, but no other ponds Thoreau knows have as "pure and well-like character" as Walden, which he supposes was already in existence when Adam and Eve were banished from Eden, to be admired by unremembered civilizations.

Thoreau was surprised to notice a path which surrounds the pond, sometimes straying from the shore, sometimes close, going up and down over hills. It's "as old probably as the race of man here," and is most noticeable when one stands in the middle of the frozen pond in the winter and sees the band of snow around the lake.

The pond rises and falls, though not regularly. Thoreau recounts his memories of the different levels it has been at during his life. As he writes in the summer of 1852, it is five feet higher than when he lived there, the same height it was thirty years ago. Flint's Pond, a mile to the east, rises and falls at the same rate Walden does. When the water is high, many of the shrubs and trees which have grown around the edges are killed, clearing the shore, which is the property not of the trees but of the lake. The trees try to stand by sending out roots from their stems up to four feet high, and blueberry bushes by the shore which don't usually bear fruit produce a crop when flooded.

People wonder how the stones have been placed so regularly around the pond, and some tell a story about Indians holding a pow-wow on a hill where the lake now is, during which they used so much profanity (which Thoreau says they never did) that the hill shook and sunk. Only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped. This doesn't conflict with the other story he heard about the ancient traveler who came with his diving rod and dug a well that became the pond. Some people think the stones are there because of the waves hitting the hill, but Thoreau has noticed such stones throughout the hill and that the steepest parts have the most stones. If the pond wasn't named after an English locale, perhaps it was first called "Walled-in Pond."

The pond is Thoreau's well. It has the best and coldest water in town. There is also spring water which tastes wonderful even when left for a long time. If a camper were to bury a bucket of water in the ground, he wouldn't need ice to keep it cold. Thoreau also lists the fish which have been caught in the pound, primarily pickerel, and their sizes. Frogs, tortises, muskrats, minks, and mud-turtles live there, as well as ducks, geese, whitebellied swallows, and peetweets. There are round piles of stones sunk in the pond but Thoreau can't guess their origin. The shore is irregular and beautiful with few signs that people have been there.

You can look at the reflection of the landscape in the lake and literally see the wind in the ripples it creates. The fish jumping to catch bugs also create ripples, as do the water-bugs which skim over the surface on calm days. In September or October, Walden is a perfect mirror. By November, the bugs are gone, and the surface is completely calm, reflecting somber colors of the weather, with some schools of perch still swimming around, and once, on December 5, the jumping of some perch made him think it was raining. An old man who used to visit the lake sixty years ago told Thoreau how he used to fish in a canoe made out of two hollowed-out white pine logs and look for a chest that a potter who'd lived during the Revolution had told him was sunk there, but as soon as he got sight of it, it would always disappear into deeper water. Thoreau likes the idea of the log canoe, much like an Indian one, once a tree on the lakeside and now sunk at the bottom. Thoreau himself has spent many pleasant afternoons since he was young floating in a boat on the lake.

Walden preserves its purity better than any men Thoreau has known. Even though trees have been cut down and the railroad runs nearby, the water is the same as Thoreau saw when young. He has changed while the pond remains perennially young. It is the creation of a brave, good man, who bequeathed it to Concord. Thoreau then writes some lines that call Walden the closest he can come to God and Heaven. He hopes that its serenity do some good for the engineer who passes it in the train.

Flint's Pond in Lincoln is a mile east of Walden and much larger, with more fish and not as pure. Walking there, Thoreau came across a mouldering boat, through which plants have pushed up, and he has also seen strange balls of weeds near the shore. He scoffs at the name of the pond, after some farmer, who never loved it, thought only of its money value, and never thanked God for making the pond. If we are going to name features of the landscape after men, it should at least be after noble men.

Finally, Goose Pond rounds out Thoreau's pond country. With the effect of the woodcutters and railroad on Walden, the most attractive pond in the area is White Pond, with the same pure water and stony shores as Walden. Thoreau, who used to gather sand there, used to see pitch pines growing in the midst of the lake, and recounts a description, from 1792, of a tall tree which grows in the middle of that lake. In the spring of 1849, Thoreau met a man who had pulled the tree out of the lake; it turned out the tree was in upside down, with its roots sticking up. Walden and White Ponds are far purer than humans. Nature has no human inhabitants who appreciate her.

Analysis:

In this chapter, Thoreau uses minute descriptions of nature ­ which would comprise the bulk of his later writing ­ to reveal his understanding of human spirituality and its connection to nature. Despite his difficulties elsewhere, in this chapter, Thoreau seems successful in integrating the dialectic he has established between spirit and nature. In describing his night-time fishing expeditions, he talks of fishing both in the physical lake and the air of philosophy at the same time. Through his connection with Walden, he is able to integrate, at least for a time, the spiritual and natural within himself.

One recurring motif throughout this chapter is the idea of purity. Walden, Thoreau believes, is superior to other ponds primarily because of the purity of its water ­ reflected in the water's color as well as in the sand under its surface. This emphasis on Walden's purity reveals Thoreau's fear of contamination ­ physical contamination, as with the railroad's proximity to the pond, as well as intellectual contamination, as when society attempts to entrap him into its injustices. Interestingly, this emphasis on the pond's purity, which reminds us of Thoreau's attempts to purify his spirit and rid himself of his animal nature, come at a time when he has begun to synthesize the spiritual world with the natural world.

Thoreau also emphasizes the divine nature of Walden, calling it, among other things, "God's drop," and speculating on its existence in Paradise. Thoreau has already established the pond as a mirror for himself. Therefore, transitively the divinity of the pond also reflects the divinity of the person. This is a particularly Transcendentalist move for Thoreau and one which extended Transcendentalist beliefs ­ divinity for him existed in nature, for there, far more than in people, true perfection and purity could be found.

Finally, Thoreau uses the metaphor of the eye to describe Walden ­ referring, for example to the color of its "iris." Such a move anthropomorphizes Walden, thus extending its power in Thoreau's life. Walden, dynamic and influential, has a profound impact upon Thoreau's ever changing consciousness. Aware that it can "see" or reflect him, Thoreau becomes profoundly aware of himself and thus effects a transformation of his owns spiritual interior.

Chapter Ten "Baker Farm"

Summary:

Instead of paying a visit to a scholar, Thoreau visits particular groves of trees ­ pines, beeches, black- and yellow-birches, elms, and helmlocks. He visits these "shrines" in summer and winter. One time, he stood surrounded by rainbow light in a rainbow's arch. Sometimes, when he walks, he sees a halo around his shadow, which makes him fancy he is a member of the elect. Benvenuto Cellini once wrote about seeing his shadow like this, and in minds like his, such a natural phenomenon is the basis for superstition.

One afternoon, on his way to go fishing in Fair-Haven, Thoreau passes through Pleasant Meadow, which is part of Baker Farm. It begins to rain, and he is forced to stand under a pine tree. When he finally wades into the water and casts out his line, the thunder and rain start once again, and he is forced to take refuge in a nearby hut, where he finds an Irishman named John Field living with his wife and many children, including an older son who works in the fields with him and a baby who seems unaware of its destitute circumstances. Thoreau crouches in the least leaky corner of the house with the family.

Field tells Thoreau how hard he works "bogging," turning up a farmer's meadow with a bog hoe, and Thoreau tries to explain that he lives in a "tight, light, and clean house" for far less money. Because he doesn't spend money on rent or on buying coffee, tea, milk, or meat, he can work far less than Field, who must work hard to buy the meat he needs to sustain such hard work. Field came to America so he could have access to such things, but the only free America is one where a man can decide to go without them.

Thoreau talks to Field "as if he were a philosopher," trying to tell him that his work wears out his boots and clothing and requires that he continue to work to buy new, while Thoreau wears simple, light clothing and by spending a few hours fishing and a few working, can afford anything he needs. So could the Fields if they lived simply. Field and his wife seem to be considering it, but "without arithmetic," they fail to see how it's possible. Field fishes sometimes, but he uses worms to catch shiners and uses the shiners to catch fish.

With the rain over and a rainbow in the sky, Thoreau begins to leave, first asking for a dish as an excuse to look at the well. It takes a long time to select a dish, go to the well, which has shallows, quicksands, a broken rope, and a lost bucket, and when the water comes, it has motes floating in it. Still, Thoreau drinks it in a show of hospitality. As he's leaving, Thoreau's rush to catch fish "seemed trivial to me who had been sent to school and college," but suddenly he seems to hear his "Good Genius" speaking to him, telling him to hunt and fish, rest by brooks and hearthsides, rise before dawn, visit lakes and be found at home at night ­ basically live his life as he has been living it at Walden ­ for "There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played."

Men are living like serfs through want of enterprise. Thoreau write some lines of poetry exulting Baker Farm and observes that most men come home at night and live the same day over and over when they should come home every day with adventures and new experiences. John Field, who has decided not to go bogging that afternoon after all, decides to fish with Thoreau but he only catches a few fish while Thoreau, in the same boat, catches many. He's trying to live by old country ways ­ catching perch with shiners ­ in this new country, as if he was born to be poor. He and his offspring will always be until they consciously change their lives.

Analysis

In this chapter, Thoreau draws upon the powerful and oft-used image of the rainbow. In traditional Christian literature, the rainbow (which appears to Noah in the Genesis after the flood) is a sign of God's covenant with mankind. Though Thoreau eschews Christian dogma, he draws upon the power of this association as a means of expressing his own spiritual fulfillment. As he stands in its arch, Thoreau describes the rainbow as "dazzling me as if I looked through colored crystal." This is a spiritual experience which transforms Thoreau's very perception of the nature which surrounds him. In its light he lives "like a dolphin" ­ a symbol of immortality ­ and in describing his experience this way, offers an alternate path to spiritual fulfillment to the traditional Christian beliefs of his fellow New Englanders. Rather, Thoreau achieves spiritual enlightenment and immortality through the direct experience of nature.

Additionally, Thoreau draws on secular myths in his description of his encounter of the rainbow. "It chanced that [he] stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's arch." This spot, according to Irish folktales where the leprechaun's pot of gold is hidden, is found by Thoreau almost by accident. In this way, he expresses nature's sympathy for him in its allowing him to inhabit such a space.

In a more humorous and mocking manner, Thoreau references spiritual matters when he describes seeing an inexplicable glow around his shadow, which makes him "fancy" he is one of the elect, or God's chosen. His off-handed and joking reference makes it clear that he is not serious and likewise makes apparent that he does not believe in the Puritan doctrine of the elect ­ a doctrine which formed the character of the American people and the very work ethic which Thoreau himself eschews.

Thoreau's joke that someone told him that Irishmen don't have a halo around their shadows displays the prejudices which existed in a nineteenth-century New England where the majority was of English descent. This comment also foreshadows Thoreau's perceptions of John Field, an Irishman who is unable to achieve the spiritual enlightenment that Thoreau cherishes. Additionally, Thoreau comments on Benvenuto Cellini's belief that the glow surrounding his shadow demonstrated God's favor, and opines that this is simply an example of "superstition" proceeding from an "excitable imagination." In this comment Thoreau's general suspicion of organized religion is mingled with a nineteenth-century prejudice against Roman Catholicism as based on superstition and spectacle.

John Field, the Irish "bogger," is likely a composite of many poor workers whom Thoreau met. His name, of course, is a symbol for his occupation. He works endlessly digging up fields for farmers. Being Irish, he is at the bottom of the social stratum and is therefore a more likely target for Thoreau's beliefs about simplifying life. Unlike a rich man, Field would have little to lose and much to gain by following Thoreau's example. Ultimately, he is "bogged" down by his limited conception of how to live his life. Unable to conceive of living differently than he does, he does things the hard and unproductive way ­ as Thoreau exemplifies metaphorically in Field's lengthy process of catching shiners with worms in order to use worms to catch fish. Such men are the motivation behind the publication of Thoreau's book.

Representations of the divine recur in this chapter when Thoreau's "Good Genius" seems to speak to him, quelling his worries that his way of life is trivial and urging him to live in nature as he has been doing. This voice is at once Thoreau's own and the imagined voice of God. In representing it so, Thoreau communicates his belief that the divine can be found by looking within and also illustrates the spiritual dimension to his choice of a life.

Chapter Eleven "Higher Laws"

Summary:

Walking home, Thoreau sees a woodchuck and has the urge to devour him raw. He finds dual instincts ­ toward spiritual life and toward primitive live ­ in himself. He attributes his occasional desire to live like an animal to the hunting he did as a child. Hunters and fishers get to know nature in a way travellers don't. Those who say Americans have fewer amusements than the English, because they don't play as many games are wrong, for all the boys his age hunted between ages 10 and 14.

Sometimes, he fishes, through necessity, at the pond and feels no real sympathy for the fish. He used to hunt, saying it was an interest in ornithology that inspired him, but he sold his gun before going to the woods, where he got to know the birds in a better way. He tells his friends to make their sons hunters, if possible "mighty" enough hunters that there ceases to be game big enough to please them. A boy who has never fired a gun has had his education neglected but is no more humane than others. In Thoreau's opinion, "no humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds it life by the same tenure that he does." Young men go forth into the forest as hunters and fishers and find themselves to be poets and naturalists instead. Parsons who hunt are paradoxes to Thoreau.

The only reason men and their sons seem to spend half a day at Walden is to fish but they are disappointed if they don't go home with a whole string of fish. Mostly the legislature ignores this practice and all men therefore pass through "the hunter stage of development." Recently, Thoreau has a loss of self-respect when fishing. It's a base instinct which he has lost but which would be reawakened if he were to go back to live in the woods. Mostly this is because fish make an unclean diet, with all the cleaning they need. There is an instinct against animal food, and any man who wants to preserve his poetic faculties should give up eating it. Larvae eat gluttonously; butterflies can survive on drops of honey.

Most men, if they had to prepare it themselves, would give up eating rich cooking. Man's carnivorous instincts are accomplished in a "miserable way" through the slaughter of animals. Thoreau is certain that it is the destiny of the human race to stop eating animals, just a tribes gave up cannibalism when they became civilized. Men should follow their inner genius, even if it means feeling bodily weak, to conform with higher principles, and they will be rewarded by life becoming "more elastic, more starry, more immortal."

Nonetheless, Thoreau could eat a fried rat if he had to. He drinks only water because he desires to be always sober, eschewing wine, coffee, and tea, even though they tempt him. He has objected to course labors because they led him to eat and drink coarsely. He has become less particular recently though, and this chapter represents his opinions rather than his practice. When a person "distinguishes the true savor of his food" and gets satisfaction from that has more to do with his mind than appetite, he can't be a glutton. The appetite, not the food, defiles the person.

Everything in life has a moral aspect, and "goodness is the only investment that never fails." We know there is an animal that exists inside of his which we can never truly escape. The other day Thoreau picked up the jaws of a hog and saw in its tusks an animal vigor that led to its success in life ­ different from spiritual vigor. The spirit can control the body and turn everything into purity and devotion. Purity ­ the loss of the animal inside ­ brings the person closer to the divine. All sensuality ­ overeating, drinking, promiscuity ­ are different forms of the same thing. People calls themselves Christian when they are no purer than "the heathen," even when they could learn to be purer through "heathen" religion.

Thoreau knows he risk speaking obscenely but finds it strange that there are matters of human nature considered improper to discuss and finds this to be a symptom of human degradation. "Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships." John Farmer sits in his door one September evening and hears a flute. He thinks of work but the flute awakens parts of his mind that are slumbering, asking him why he leads such a mean life when a glorious one is possible? He decides to practice austerity, to let his mind redeem his body and to treat himself with more respect.

Analysis:

Thoreau struggles throughout this chapter with the dialectic between man's animal and spiritual nature. In some ways, this understanding of the human being is reminiscent of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers' separation of human reason from animal instinct. For them, human beings differed from animals through their capacity for rational thought and action. Unlike these philosophers, however, Thoreau's struggle is further complicated by his understanding as the human as a part of nature. He cannot deny that human beings have primitive animalistic desires ­ as exemplified by his desire to consume a woodchuck raw. Therefore, his attempts to purify himself, through the denial of the animal parts of his nature, can never be completely successful. This dialectic is ultimately irresolvable.

The metaphor of the body as a temple, which Thoreau offers as man's true work near the end of the chapter, has Biblical origins. In 1 Corinthians 6:19, St. Paul wrote, "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own." Paul, like Thoreau, urged his readers to eschew bodily desires and needs in order to become purely spiritual beings. Thoreau takes Paul's words, which says the body is not man's but God's, to argue the opposite ­ that man's body is his own, a work created by him just as a sculptor creates a work of art. "We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones."

Thoreau's metaphor of the body as material for the artist juxtaposes strangely with his primarily symbolic perspective. In likening the sculptor's creation of art from clay to man's creation of art from his body, he denigrates the symbolic nature of the sculptor's work. This is odd, primarily because Thoreau himself is so heavily concerned with symbols. For example, his refusal to eat meat, coffee or tea, or salt and spices is primarily a symbolic statement. Vegetarianism, for him, is not an end in itself. A Puritan eating brown bread can be a glutton if he gives in to his base physical desire for it. Additionally, because Thoreau allies himself with animals as coexistent parts of nature, to eat them would be tantamount to cannibalism.

In his assertion that the human race is progressing to a state in which it will cease to eat animals, just as the progress of civilization previously led to the end of cannibalism, Thoreau imparts a theme of progress and evolution to this chapter. The human race represents the macrocosmic level. On the microcosmic level, an individual man will proceed from the stage of the "thoughtless boy," who through hunting and fishing becomes aquainted with nature; to the man who would not deign to kill an animal whose life is as tenuous as his; to a man who replaces his fishing and hunting with poetry and naturalism; to finally, the man who ceases to eat animal products in order to preserve his poetic faculties.

John Farmer, who like John Field, is a symbolic representation of all men of a certain class and occupation, provides the example of a man awakened in spirit. In "Economy," Thoreau has spoken about how most men's spiritual lives slumber. Here, he suggests that the animal life should slumber while the spiritual life revive. Farmer's realization, through overhearing flute music, that there is more to his life than his work illustrates Thoreau's belief that he can, through writing Walden, show his townsmen the possibility of exchanging their "mean" lives for "glorious" ones. The flute, of course, is the instrument that Thoreau plays at the pond, and this artistic creation, flute music, represents Thoreau's other artistic creation ­ the book Walden.

Chapter Twelve "Brute Neighbors"

Summary:

Thoreau opens the chapter with an imagined dialogue between Hermit and Poet. Hermit wonders what "the world" is doing and speculates on the sounds he hears, including the horn of the farmer calling the hands in to dinner and the rustle of a dog or lost pig running through the brush. Poet, meanwhile, stares at the clouds and asks Hermit to come fish with him. Hermit tells him to go dig worms while he finishes meditating, for in this wood, it is as hard to catch worms as fish. Alone, he loses track of his thoughts, having been close to "resolv[ing] into the essence of things." Poet comes back with thirteen worms as well as several undersized ones which do for small fry, and Hermit agrees to go off fishing with him, proposing the Concord River.

Why, Thoreau asks, do particular species fill the spaces in our lives they do? All animals are beasts of burden, carrying our thoughts. Mice of a different species which are found in the village live in Thoreau's house. One had its nest built under the house and as it gradually became accustomed to Thoreau, would run around his clothes, the sides of the wall, and around his dinner. He fed it a piece of cheese from his hand and watched it clean its face and paws before it walked away.

A phoebe (bird) lived in his shed and a robin in a nearby pine. In June, the partridge led her chicks by his house. When he approached, she gave the chicks a signal and they dispersed like a whirlwind, while she spun around to distract him. The chicks stay so still through instinct that Thoreau once picked one up and it remained crouching without trembling. Once, when he put a chick down on the leaves and it fell over, it stayed that way for ten minutes. The eyes of the partridges reflect an age-old intelligence, which no traveler or hunter can see. They are Thoreau's hens and chickens.

So many animals live secretly in woods near the town and only the hunter suspects them. There is a four-foot-long otter near Walden and raccoons behind Thoreau's house. At a brook near Brister Hill, which he would visit on summer afternoons to sit in the shade and get cold water from a well he'd dug in its spring, Thoreau saw a wood-cock and her brood. When she saw him, she signaled the young, who began dutifully marching away in a line, and pretended her wing was broken to distract him. If you sit still long enough in an attractive spot in the woods, all its inhabits will gradually exhibit themselves.

One day, near his woodpile, he observes a battle between red ants and black ants twice their size. The ants struggle, one-on-one and sometimes two red ants to one black ant, in silent deadly combat over the wood chips. He watches as a red ant continue to gnaw at the root of a black ant's feeler while dashed from side to side and as another red ant approaches the battle and leaps onto a black warrior already struggling with another red ant. This battle excites Thoreau more than if they were men, for it displays more heroism and greater numbers than any American battle. At the Battle of Concord, only two men, Davis and Hosmer, died, but all these ants are like Colonel Buttrick, "Fire! For God's sake fire!" Unlike the colonists who fought over a three cent tax on tea, Thoreau has no doubt the ants fight over an issue of principle. Taking a chip where two ants struggle into his house, he puts a tumbler over it and watches as they struggle for half an hour until the black ant has severed the other two ants' heads. Unfortunately, all his feelers and all but one leg are gone. Thoreau lets him out the window, and is excited all day, though he never learns who won the battle or the cause. He mentions examples from writing listing ant battles, and notes that this one took place "in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster's Fugitive Slave Bill."

Once, Thoreau saw a house cat walking by the pond and was surprised to see how natural it looked in the woods. Another time, while berrying, he met a while cat and her kittens, all of whom arched their backs and spit at him. Before he came the woods, he visited a farm who owned a "winged cat," who grew large wings of fur on her sides during the winter and shed them in the spring. Her owners gave him a pair of her wings to keep and he suggests that a winged cat would be an appropriate pet for a poet.

In the fall, the loons come, and ten hunters to every one loon arrive at the mill-dam to shoot them. Early in the morning, Thoreau would see them from afar in his boat and try to get close but they dived under the water. One October afternoon, he follows one around the pond but it dives so deep and stays under for so long, he can't predict where it will reemerge. Always, though, the bird laughs and howls when it surfaces, thus drawing attention to itself. One series of hollows is followed by rain and thinking the god of the loons is angry with him, Thoreau leaves the loon alone in the pond.

For hours in the fall, he watches ducks in the center of the pond, far from hunters. Sometimes they fly so high above the pond they must be able to see other lakes and rivers. Often when he thinks they have flown off, they land on a distant part of the pond. He can't imagine what safety from hunters they gain in the middle of Walden Pond, unless they love its water for the same reason he does.

Analysis:

The dialogue between Hermit and Poet that opens the chapter continues the dialectical internal conflict which consumes Thoreau. Hermit and Poet represent different parts of Thoreau, struggling to coexist. Hermit, Thoreau's spiritual side, desires only to philosophize but his thoughts, just when they are reaching their pinnacle, are disturbed by the Poet's desire to go fishing. Poet, in his desire to go fishing, represents the instinctual animal part of Thoreau which he attempts to shed. Nonetheless, Hermit cannot live without Poet. He has only a little brown bread left and must agree to fish if he is to survive. Nevertheless, these two elements of Thoreau's inner self coexist uneasily, each blocking the other from achieving its ultimate goals.

All of the animals in this chapter combine animal nature with a spiritual component. In his representations of them, we can see that Thoreau has not completely dismissed animals, despite his sentiments in the last chapter. Rather, he is entranced and inspired by nature, and his struggle to reconcile the spirituality he perceives to exist effortlessly within nature with the animal nature in human beings is ongoing.

The ants, for example, exemplify the untroubled coexistence of animal and spiritual. Clearly, their animal natures are at play as they gnaw and rip at each other. Yet, in their "battle," Thoreau perceives more nobility and valor than in the battles of the American Revolution. While human beings fight for materialistic reasons, animals, lacking material possessions or the understanding of them, can in Thoreau's logic only fight over principle. Thoreau's reference to the Fugitive Slave Act in his dating of the ant battle, further connects the example of the ants' valor to human conflict. Writing in the 1850s, Thoreau had come to believe that armed conflict was an appropriate means of resisting the injustice of slavery. Thus, for Thoreau, John Brown's conflict at Harper's Ferry was a human counterpart to the valiant ants.

Similarly, instinct to Thoreau is not necessarily a negative thing. In the partridge and woodcock chicks, who without fear follow their mothers' signal when an intruder approaches, Thoreau sees a kind of bravery in instinctual behavior. Additionally, the intelligence ­ as old as the woods themselves ­ which he sees reflected in the partridges' eyes and the unselfconscious behavior of the mouse suggest a spiritual dimension in animals.

The winged cat is yet another example of a hybrid, which Thoreau seeks to be in reconciling the dialectic between animal and spiritual natures. Referencing Greek mythology, he says she would be a fitting pet for a poet, who already has a winged horse, Pegasus. He speculates she might be the product of a union between a flying squirrel and cat, making her a physical hybrid as well as a hybrid of dual natures.

Nonetheless, Thoreau fails to ultimately reconcile within himself animal and spiritual natures. The loon, with its eerily human capacity for laughter and trickery and its animals abilities to transcend even the boundaries between bird and fish, easily achieves this position of liminality. But Thoreau in failing to capture the loon symbolically fails to capture this ability to cross boundaries and maintain internal contradictions in himself.

Chapter Thirteen "House-Warming"

Summary:

In October, Thoreau picks grapes in the river meadows and there sees the cranberries that will be thoughtlessly cultivated and sent as jams to Boston and New York. He also collected wild apples and chestnuts, which he finds in the chestnut woods in Lincoln, sometimes stealing opened nuts from squirrels and sometimes climbing and shaking trees, using it as a substitute for bread. He also discovers the ground nut, like a potato, once eaten by the Indians and now almost forgotten. If nature were to reign again in New England, the corn would go extinct and the ground nut would thrive.

By September 1, he sees a few maples across the pond turn red and watches the change of their color reflected in the pond from week to week. In October, wasps settle on the windows and walls of his house, never bothering him but frightening visitors. In November, he sits sometimes in the sun on the northeast side of the pond for warmth during the day.

In preparation for building his chimney, Thoreau "studies masonry" by chipping the mortar of of the used bricks he has bought. He makes his mortar with white sand from the beach and gradually builds his chimney, even using the bricks as a pillow at night when he has a poet visiting him. The chimney, an independent structure that could survive even a fire, is finished at the end of the summer.

By November, the pond had begun to cool. Thoreau the shadows made by the fire reflecting shadows on the knotty unplastered walls but ultimately plasters them for warmth. "All attractions of a house were concentrated in one room," and he enjoys it all. Sometimes, he dreams of an enormous one-room house, with unplastered beams and an enormous fire, where all possessions and inhabitants are visible to any who enter or pass through. A place where you can see the fire that cooks your dinner and oven that bakes your break would be better than most houses, where parlors and kitchens and workshops are so removed from each other that all life becomes metaphor; "dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly." Only two guests ever stayed in his small one-room house for a hasty pudding but many such puddings were made there.

He plastered the walls when the freezing weather began, bringing whiter sand from the opposite beach in a boat. He learned to admire the "economy and convenience" of plastering, creating a nice finish, and to see how "thirsty" his bricks were. At the same time, a small coat of ice had formed over the pond. Thoreau liked to lie stretched out over clear ice one inch thick and look down into the still water of the pond straight to the bottom. On mornings after it freezes, you can see a large number of bubbles pressed against the lower surface of the ice, reflecting your face. After a few warm days, the ice became discolored and the bubbles shifted. Thoreau cut out a block of ice to study and found that the ice had formed around the bubble, and realizes that the bubbles beneath the ice melt and rot it, making it "crack and whoop."

Once he finishes plastering, the winter begins and the wind starts howling. Geese come every night, bound for Mexico. In 1845, the pond freezes over completely on December 22, and the snow had covered the ground since November 25. All Thoreau does outside now is collect dead wood, of which the forest is full, and driftwood for his fire. He also hauls wooden raft, made by some Irish railroad workers and sunk in the earth for several years, across the ice of the pond and finds it burns beautifully. He grieves when any part of the forest is burned or cut down and thinks of the Romans who made an expiatory offering when cutting trees in a sacred grove.

Wood seems to have a value "more permanent and universal than gold." The cost of fuel wood in NY or Philadelphia is the same as the best wood in Paris, and the cost continues to rise in America. Everyone, Thoreau included, needs wood to heat them and cook food. He looks at his woodpile with affection, "warmed twice" but chopping stumps from his bean field, when chopping and when burning them. In previous years, he has gone "prospecting" for pine roots in the forest. He uses dried leaves from the forest, saved in his shed, for kindling and sometimes green hickory like wood-choppers use. Like the people in the village who light their fires, he announces he is awake to the Walden inhabitants from the smoke coming out of his chimney, a sentiment he echoes in lines of verse.

Sometimes, Thoreau left his fire burning when he took a walk but one day when splitting wood, he looked in to see that a spark had jumped onto the bed, burning a hole the size of his hand in the cover before he put it out. He sometimes lets it go out during the day because his low roof and the sun keep it warm. Moles nest in his cellar, like all animals who use their body heat to warm themselves after finding a "bed." Humans heat the air, making a perpetual summer, with light from windows and lamps, thus saving time for the fine arts. Still, when out in the "rudest blasts" for too long, Thoreau grows "torpid" and needs the warmth of his house to revive himself. The human race could easily be destroyed if the Great Snows were greater or Cold Fridays colder.

The next winter, he uses a cooking stove, which makes cooking cease to be poetic. It takes up room, scents the house, and conceals the fire, which always seemed to Thoreau to have a face. He recalls the words of a poet, addressing the flame, wondering why it is gone.

Analysis

Until this chapter, we have watched Thoreau experience the summer, a season of new life, at Walden. Now, as he endeavors to live out a harsh New England winter in a one-room cabin, he begins to face the real test of nature. As the months proceed, we can see nature's sympathies gradually waning. At first, during the fall harvest, Thoreau can readily find food to store up for the winter. In these activities, in which he encounters birds and squirrels doing the same, he is coming to embrace his animal nature through necessity.

Plastering is the first test of his ideals that nature puts to him. Thoreau prefers the look of his house before plastering its walls but is forced to do so by the cold winds. He admits that the house is more comfortable after he does so, but in plastering the walls, he has sacrificed the natural aspect of his wooden walls for the plaster of artificial Concord houses. It is no wonder then that Thoreau's fantasy of an enormous, unplastered one-room house occurs immediately after this. This fantasy house, in which all people and possessions share one big space, is a representation of Thoreau's ideal, in which all aspects of life can be integrated in a natural setting. Houses in town physically divide spiritual aspects of life with artificial barriers, separating rooms and people from each other.

The chimney that Thoreau builds ­ a structure that reaches toward the sky and which will outlast the house itself ­ represents his attempt to control his future and gain a degree of immortality. In building the chimney, he is metaphorically preparing himself for a long struggle. Just as the chimney, made with the very sand of nature's beach, will protect against nature's cold blasts, Thoreau seeks to build in himself a spiritual temple that can withstand the tests of his animal nature.

Winter imparts psychological as well as physical changes to Thoreau at Walden Pond. The pond, which until this chapter, has been the centerpiece of Thoreau's thoughts and his reason for building his cabin in that location. Now, the pond is frozen and can provide him little. No longer does he commune with and maintain a relationship with nature, as he has in the preceding chapters, but instead only ventures outside to obtain fuel ­ this despite the fact that in "Economy," he compared wood to rich food.

Now, with the reality of physical cold a factor in his way of life, Thoreau comes to see the value of a wood pile, which he looks on "with affection," and to find comfort in the universality of this need for wood ­ weather in lighting his fire at the same time