The Simple Life
When I wrote the following pages, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbour, in a house I had built for myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labour of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
Men labour under a mistake. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it if not before.
But it is never too late to give up our prejudices. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. I have lived some thirty years and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from my seniors.
To many creatures, there is but one necessity of life—food. None of the brute creation require more than food and shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may be distributed under the several heads of food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. I find by my own experience a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of voluntary poverty.
Ideals
If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past it would probably astonish those who know nothing about it.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken, concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.
How many mornings, summer and winter, before any neighbour was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! So many autumn, aye, and winter days, spent outside the town trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it. At other times waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun.
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths. I looked after the wild stock of the town. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.
My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles.
House Building
When I consider my neighbours, the farmers of Concord, 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; and we may regard one-third of that toil as the cost of their houses. 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. The very simplicity and nakedness of men's life in the primitive ages imply that they left him still a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt as it were in the tent of this world. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten Heaven.
Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy, white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, having become better acquainted with it.
By the middle of April my house was framed and ready for raising. At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighbourliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my house. I began to occupy it on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain, but before boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the meantime out of doors on the ground, early in the morning. When it stormed before my bread was baked I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way.
The exact cost of my house, not counting the work, all of which was done by myself, was just over twenty-eight dollars. I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually.
Farming
Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars 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. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the ploughing, though I held the plough myself. My farm outgoes for the first season were, for employment, seed, work, etc., 14 dollars 72½ cents. I got twelve bushels of beans and eighteen bushels of potatoes, besides some peas and sweet corn. My whole income from the farm was 23 dollars 43 cents, a profit of 8 dollars 71½ cents, besides produce consumed.
The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land that 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, that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, 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 plough it, and he could do all his necessary farm work, as it were, with his left hand at odd hours in the summer.
My food for nearly two years was rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses and salt, and my drink water. I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food even in this latitude, and that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals and yet retain health and strength.
Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out of doors, but at last I found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable. I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, going back to the primitive days. Leaven, which some deem to be the soul of bread, I discovered was not indispensable.