Bedtime Tale: Walden Chapter 1 Part 6
Enjoy this bedtime tale to help you drift off into a peaceful slumber. Tonight I am reading, Walden: Ch 1 Part 6, 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 6 Before I finished my house,
Wishing to earn $10 or $12 by some honest and agreeable method in order to meet my unusual expenses,
I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil,
Near it chiefly with beans,
But also a small part with potatoes,
Corn,
Peas,
And turnips.
The whole lot contains 11 acres,
Mostly growing up to pines and hickories,
And was sold the preceding season for $8.
08 an acre.
One farmer said that it was good for nothing but to raise cheaping squirrels on.
I put no manure whatever on this land,
Not being the owner,
But merely a squatter and not expecting to cultivate so much again,
And I did not quite hoe it all at once.
I got out several cords of stumps and plowing,
Which supplied me with fuel for a long time,
And left small circles of virgin mold,
Easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of the beans there.
The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood behind my house,
And the driftwood from the pond,
Have supplied the remainder of my fuel.
I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the plowing,
Though I held the plow myself.
My farm outgoes for the first season were,
For implements,
Seed work,
Etc.
,
$14.
72.
The seed corn was given to me.
This never costs anything to speak of,
Unless you plant more than enough.
I got twelve bushels of beans and eighteen bushels of potatoes,
Besides some peas and sweet corn.
The yellow corn and turnips were too late to come to anything.
My whole income from the farm was,
Deducting the outgoes,
$23.
44,
$14.
72½.
They are left $8.
71½,
Besides produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made of,
The value of $4.
50.
That was the amount on hand much more than balancing a little grass which I did not raise.
All things considered,
That is,
Considering the importance of a man's soul,
And of today,
Notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment,
Nay,
Partly even because of the transient character,
I believe that that was doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year.
The next year I did better still,
For I spaded up all the land which I required,
About a third of an acre,
And I learned from the experience of both years,
Not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on husbandry,
Arthur Young among the rest,
That if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised,
And raise no more than he ate,
And not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things,
He would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground,
And that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plow it,
And to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old,
And he could do all this necessary farm work as it were with his left hand,
At odd hours in the summer,
And thus he would not be tied to an ox,
Or horse,
Or cow,
Or pig,
As the present.
I desire to speak impartially on this point,
And as one not interested in the success or failure of the present economical and social arrangements,
I was more independent than any farmer in Concord,
For I was not anchored to a house or farm,
But could follow the bent of my genius,
Which is a very crooked one every moment.
Besides being better off than they are already,
If my house had been burned or my crops had failed,
I should have been nearly as well off as before.
I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds,
As herds are the keepers of men.
The former are so much the freer.
Men and oxen exchange work,
But if we consider necessary work only,
The oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage.
Their farm is so much the larger.
Man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks of haying,
And it is no boy's play.
Certainly no nation that lives simply in all respects,
That is,
No nation of philosophers,
Would commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals.
True,
There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers,
Nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.
However,
I should never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work he might do for me,
For fear I should become a horseman or a herdsman merely.
And if society seems to be the gainer by doing so,
We are certain that what is one man's gain is not another's loss,
And that the stable boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied.
Granted that some public works would not have been constructed without this aid,
And let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse,
Does it follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in this case?
When men begin to do not merely unnecessary or artistic,
But luxurious and idle work with their assistants,
It is inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen,
Or in other words,
Becomes the slaves of the strongest.
Man thus not only works for the animal within him,
But for the symbol of this.
He works for the animal without him.
Though we have many substantial houses of brick or stone,
The prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows the house.
This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen,
Cows,
And horses hereabouts,
And it is not behind hand in the public buildings,
But there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county.
It should not be by their architecture,
But why not even by their power of abstract thought,
That nations should seek to commemorate themselves?
How much more admirable the Bhagavad Gita than all the ruins of the East?
Towers and temples are the luxury of princes.
A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.
Genius is not a retainer to any emperor,
Nor is it material silver or gold or marble,
Except to a trifling extent.
To what end,
Pray,
Is so much stone hammered?
In Arcadia,
When I was there,
I did not see any hammering stone.
Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave.
What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?
One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.
I love better to see stones in place.
The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur,
More sensible as a rata stone wall that bounds an oddest man's field,
Than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered further from the true end of life.
The religion and civilization,
Which are barbaric and heathenish,
Build splendid temples,
But what you might call Christianity does not.
Most of the stone a nation hammers goes towards its tomb only.
It buries itself alive.
As for the pyramids,
There is nothing to wander at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby,
Whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile and then given his body to the dogs.
I might possibly invent some excuse for them and him,
But I have no time for it.
As for the religion and love of art of the builders,
It is much the same all over the world.
Whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the United States bank,
It costs more than it comes to.
The mainspring is vanity,
Assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter.
Mr.
Balcombe,
A promising young architect,
Designs it on the back of his Vitruvius with hard pencil and ruler,
And the job is led out to Dobson and Sons,
Stone cutters.
When the 30 centuries begin to look down on it,
Mankind begin to look up at it.
As for your high towers and monuments,
There was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China,
And he got so far that,
As he said,
He heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle.
But I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.
Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East,
To know who built them.
For my part,
I should like to know who in those days did not build them,
Who were above such trifling.
But to proceed with my statistics,
By surveying carpentry and day labor of various other kinds in the village in the meanwhile,
For I have as many traits as fingers,
I have earned $13.
34,
The expense of food for eight months,
Namely,
From July 4th to March 1st,
The time when these estimates were made,
Though I lived there more than two years,
Not counting potatoes,
A little green corn,
And some peas,
Which I had raised,
Nor considering the value of what was on hand at the last date,
Was.
Rice,
$1.
73,
The price was.
Rice,
$1.
73,
Molasses,
$1.
73,
Cheapest form of the saccharin,
Rye meal,
$1.
043,
Indian meal,
$0.
993,
Cheaper than rye,
Pork,
$0.
22.
All expenses of food for eight months were experiments which failed.
Flour,
$0.
88,
Costs more than the Indian meal,
Both money and trouble.
Sugar,
$0.
80,
Lard,
$0.
65,
Apples,
$0.
25,
Dried apple,
$0.
22,
Sweet potatoes,
$0.
10,
One pumpkin,
$0.
06,
One watermelon,
$0.
02,
And salt,
$0.
03.
Yes,
I did eat $8.
74,
All told,
But I should not thus unblushingly publish my guilt if I did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with myself,
And that their deeds would look no better in print,
If I did not publish my guilt,
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There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as,
If I think that I can live on vegetable food alone,
And to strike at the root of the matter at once.
For the root is faith.
I am accustomed to answers such that I can live on bored nails.
If they can't understand that,
They cannot understand much that I have to say.
For my part,
I am glad to hear of experiments of this kind being tried.
As that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard,
Raw corn of the ear,
Using his teeth for all mortar.
The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded.
The human race is interested in these experiments,
Though a few old women who are incapacitated for them,
Or who own their thirds in mills,
May be alarmed.
And this is the end of our story this evening.
Until next time,
Sweet dreams.
