Bedtime Tale: Walden Chapter 1 Part 4

Enjoy this bedtime tale to help you drift off into a peaceful slumber. Tonight we read, Walden: Ch 1 Part 4, by Henry David Thoreau. Chapter One, Economy, describes Thoreau's embarking on a 2-year stay in the woods of Massachusetts by the Walden Pond. This audio is perfect for children or adults who want to relax, discover magic, or find adventure before a great night's sleep.

Transcript

Walden by Henry David Thoreau CHAPTER 1 ECONOMY PART 4 It may be guessed that I reduced almost the whole advantage of holding this property as a fund and store against the future.

So far as the individual is concerned,

Mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses.

But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself.

Nevertheless,

This points to an important distinction between the civilized man and the savage,

And,

No doubt,

They have designs on us for our benefit.

In making the life of a civilized people an institution,

In which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed,

In order to preserve and perfect that of the race.

But I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is as present obtained,

And to suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage.

What mean ye by saying that the poor ye have always with you,

Or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes,

And children's teeth are set on edge?

As I live,

Saith the Lord God,

Ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel.

Behold,

All souls are mine,

As the soul of the father.

So also the soul of the son is mine.

The soul that sinneth,

It shall die.

When I consider my neighbors,

The farmers of Concord,

Who are at least as well off as the other classes,

I find that for the most part they have been toiling twenty,

Thirty,

Or forty years,

That they may become the real owners of their farms,

Which commonly they have inherited with encumbrances,

Or else bought with hired money,

And we may regard one-third of that toil as the cost of their houses.

But commonly they have not paid for them yet.

It is true the encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm,

So that the farm itself becomes one great encumbrance,

And still a man is found to inherit it,

Being well acquainted with it,

As he says.

On applying to the assessors,

I am surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear.

If you would know the history of these homesteads,

Inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged.

The man who has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him.

I doubt if there are three such men in Concord.

What has been said of the merchants,

That a very large majority,

Even ninety-seven in a hundred,

Are sure to fail,

Is equally true of the farmers.

With regard to the merchants,

However,

One of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine failures,

But merely failures to fulfill their engagements,

Because it is inconvenient,

That is,

It is the moral character that breaks down.

But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter,

And suggests,

Besides,

That probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls,

But are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly.

Poverty is the springboard from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets.

But the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine.

Yet the Middlesex cattle show goes off here annually,

As if all the joints of the agricultural machine were suant.

The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself.

To get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle.

With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hairspring to catch comfort and independence,

And then,

As he turned away,

Got his own leg into it.

This is the reason he is poor,

And for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts,

Though surrounded by luxuries.

As Chapman sings,

The false society of men,

For earthly greatness all heavenly comforts rarifies to air.

And when the farmer has got his house,

He may not be the richer but the poorer for it,

And it be the house that has got him.

As I understand it,

There was a valid objection urged by Mamas against the house when Minerva made that she had not made it movable,

By which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided.

And it may still be urged,

For our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them,

And the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves.

I know one or two families at least in this town who for nearly a generation have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the village,

But have not been able to accomplish it,

And only death will set them free.

Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements,

While civilization has been improving our houses,

It has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.

It has created palaces,

But it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

And if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's,

If he has employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely,

Why should he have a better dwelling than the former?

But how does the poor minority fare?

Perhaps it will be found that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the savage,

Others have been degraded below him.

The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another.

On the one side is the palace.

On the other are the almshouse and the silent poor.

The myriads who build the pyramids to be the tombs of the pharaohs were fed on garlic,

And it may be were not decently buried themselves.

The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night,

Perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam.

It is a mistake to suppose that,

In a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist,

The condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of the savages.

I refer to the degraded poor,

Not now to the degraded rich.

To know this I shall not need to look further than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads.

The last improvement in civilization,

Where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties,

And all winter with an open door,

For the sake of light,

Without any visible,

Unimaginable wood-pile,

And the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery,

And the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked.

It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished.

Such too,

To a greater or less extent,

Is the condition of the operatives of every domination in England,

Which is the great workhouse of the world,

Or I would refer you to Ireland,

Which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map.

Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian,

Or the South Sea Islander,

Or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man.

Yet I have no doubt that the people's rulers are as wise as the average or civilized rulers.

Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization.

I hardly need to refer now to the laborers in our southern states,

Who produce the staple exports of this country,

And are themselves a staple production of the South,

But to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is,

And are actually though needlessly poor all their lives,

Because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have,

As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him,

Or gradually leaving him off palm-leaf,

Hat-and-cap,

Or wood-chuck skin,

Complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown.

It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have,

Which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for.

Shall we always study to obtain more of these things,

And not sometimes to be content with less?

Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach,

By precept and example,

The necessity of the young man's providing a certain number of glow-shoes,

And umbrellas,

And empty guest-chambers for empty guests,

Before he dies?

Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arabs or the Indians?

When I think of the benefactors of the race,

Whom we have hypothesized as messengers from heaven,

Bearers of divine gifts to man,

I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels,

Any carload of fashionable furniture.

Or what if I were to allow,

Would it not be a singular allowance,

That our furniture should be more complex than the Arabs,

In proportion,

As we are morally and intellectually his superiors?

At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it,

And a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust-hole,

And not leave her morning's work undone.

Morning work,

By the blushes of aurora and the music of Memnon.

What should be man's morning work in this world?

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk,

But I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily,

When the furniture of my mind was all undusted still,

And I threw them out the window in disgust.

How then could I have furnished a house?

I would rather sit in the open air,

For no dust gathers on grass,

Unless where man has broken ground.

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow.

The traveller who stops at the best houses,

So-called,

Soon discover this,

For the publicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus,

And if he resigned himself to their tender mercies,

He would soon be completely emasculated.

I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience,

And it threatens,

Without attaining,

These to become no better than a modern drawing-room,

With its divins,

And ottomans,

And sunshades,

And a hundred other oriental things,

Which we are taking west with us,

Invented for the ladies of the harem,

And the effeminate natives of the celestial empire,

Which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

I would rather ride on earth in an ox-cart with the free circulation than go to heaven in a fancy car of an excursion train and breathe malaria all the way.

The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life,

In the primitive ages,

Imply this advantage at least,

That they left him still but a sojourner in nature.

When he was refreshed with food and sleep,

He contemplated his journey again.

He dwelt,

As it were,

In a tent in this world,

And was either threading the valleys,

Or crossing the plains,

Or climbing the mountaintops.

But lo,

Men have become the tools of their tools.

The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer,

And he who stand under a tree for shelter,

A housekeeper.

We now no longer camp as for a night,

But have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.

We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agriculture.

We have built for this world a family mansion,

And for the next,

A family tomb.

The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition.

But the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable,

And that higher state to be forgotten.

There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art,

If any had come down to us,

To stand for our lives,

Our houses and streets,

Furnished no proper pedestal for it.

There is not a nail to hang a picture on,

Nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint.

When I consider how our houses are built and paid for,

Or not paid for,

And their eternal economy managed and sustained,

I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gouges upon the mantelpiece,

And let him through into the cellar to some solid and honest though earthly foundation.

I cannot but perceive that this so-called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at,

And I do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it,

My attention being wholly occupied with the jump.

For I remember that the greatest genuine leap,

Due to human muscles alone on record,

Is that of certain wandering Arabs who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet on level ground.

Without factitious support,

Man is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance.

The first question which I am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is,

Who bolsters you?

Are you one of the ninety-seven who fail,

Or of the three who succeed?

Answer me these questions,

And then perhaps I may look at your baubles and find them ornamental.

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.

Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects,

The walls must be stripped,

And our lives must be stripped,

And beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation.

Now a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors,

Where there is no house and no housekeeper.

Old Johnson,

In his Wonder-Working Providence,

Speaking of the first settlers of this town with whom he was contemporary,

Tells us that they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some hillside,

And casting the soil aloft upon timber,

They make a smoky fire against the earth at the highest side.

They did not provide them houses,

Says he,

Till the earth,

By the Lord's blessing,

Brought forth bread to feed them,

And the first year's crop was so light that they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season.

The secretary of the province of New Netherland,

Writing in Dutch in 1650,

For the information of those who wished to take up land there,

States more particularly that those in New Netherland,

And especially in New England,

Who have no means to build farmhouses at first according wishes,

Dig a square pit in the ground,

Cellar fashion,

Six or seven feet deep,

As long and as broad as they think proper,

Case the earth inside with wood all round the wall,

And line the wood with bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth,

Floor this cellar with plank,

And wainscot it overhead for a ceiling,

Raise a roof of spars clear up,

And cover the spars with bark or green sods,

So that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire families for two,

Three,

And four years,

It being understood that partitions are run through those cellars,

Which are adopted to the size of the family.

The wealthy and principal men in New England,

In the beginning of the colonies,

Commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons.

Firstly,

In order not to waste time in building,

And not to want food the next season.

Secondly,

In order not to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from fatherland.

In the course of three or four years,

When the country became adapted to agriculture,

They built themselves handsome houses,

Spending on them several thousands.

In this course,

Which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at least,

As if their principal were to satisfy the more pressing wants first.

But are the more pressing wants satisfied now?

When I think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings,

I am deterred,

For so to speak,

The country is not yet adapted to human culture,

And we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did.

Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods,

But let our houses first be lined with beauty,

Where they come in contact with our lives,

Like the tenement of the shellfish,

And not overlaid with it.

But alas,

I have been inside one or two of them,

And know what they are lined with.

Though we are not so degenerate,

But that we might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins today,

It certainly is better to accept the advantages,

Though so dearly bought,

Which the invention and industry of mankind offer.

In such a neighborhood as this,

Boards and shingles,

Lime and bricks,

Are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves or whole logs or bark in sufficient quantities or even well-tempered clay or flat stones.

I speak understandably on this subject,

For I have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically and practically.

With a little more wit we might use these materials,

So as to become richer than the richest are now,

And make our civilization a blessing.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

But to make haste to my own experiment.

And that is the end of our story this evening.

Until next time,

Sweet dreams.

Reviews

As always, your soothing voice helped me fall into a restful sleep!
I need to contact Insight Timer as I was just notified that chapters 4 and 5 were published and they’ve been out for weeks (and I follow you too!) I’ve checked my settings and I have notifications on. 🤷🏼‍♀️ Technology….😂😂😂

Thank you Hilary! 💕💕