It’s become one of the most misunderstood American literary classics: Walden, or Life in the Woods. The 1854 book has gained a reputation as a story about a man who turned his back on the world to live as a recluse in the wilderness. Not so.
Henry David Thoreau simply sought to live well during a time much like ours, when technology advanced faster in one generation than in previous centuries, when partisan politics divided the country, when automation removed the human element from work, and when a pandemic spread a mysterious lung disease. Amid all this, Thoreau retreated to Walden Pond to contemplate two questions: What really matters? And what doesn’t?
I can’t think of a better book for this moment. When people distill Walden down to a tattoo or bumper sticker, it’s usually its most famous line: “Simplify, simplify.” But it’s easy to miss what Thoreau simplified for. He didn’t simplify to have and to do less; he simplified to have and to do more of what mattered. To trade up, he pared down.
Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond was 10 feet by 15 feet—one door, two windows, a fireplace. To build the cabin, he recycled materials from a disassembled shanty. Inside, he had a bed, a table, a desk, a lamp, and three chairs. Add in some utensils and pans, and Thoreau brought a total of 24 things to the pond. “My greatest skill has been to want but little,” he wrote.
Scarcity was the point. Thoreau pared down to the basics to learn what added to his life and what subtracted from it. If he could spend the bare minimum on what he needed, he could work the bare minimum to afford it. Then he could devote more time to do what mattered to him: to write, study nature, advocate for abolitionism, and enjoy time with his family and neighbors.
“When [a person] has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities,” he wrote, “and that is, to adventure on life now.”
Thoreau spent just 26 months living at Walden Pond—the only time in his life he lived alone—before he returned to his regular life as a writer and land surveyor in Concord, Massachusetts. But it was his time at the pond that gave Thoreau the space to learn what he needed back in the real world: enough money, enough work, enough stuff. Or rather, just enough.
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