Humans  are art making creatures. From the evocative hunting depictions of our  ancient ancestors to modern dance, humans have reacted to their  environment by painting, singing, dancing, writing, and recording the  things they encounter. In this week’s assignment, you will be asked to  select an artifact to analyze. Make sure that you choose something that  really resonates with you, but also make sure that you would not mind  sharing it with the members of the class. Understand that this is an  academic workspace, and select an image, poem, or song that you would be  comfortable sending to the entire class. You are free to select any  object that is shareable electronically with your classmates.

 

Evaluating a work of art requires some distance  from the piece. You will be asked to analyze the artifact that you  select and to describe why the piece was selected. Please choose  something that you would not mind others critiquing. For example, if you  select a painting that your sister painted, you might not want to have  someone write that they didn’t like the subject or style. Make sure that  you are comfortable with the piece being viewed and analyzed by other  members of the class.

In this Assignment you  will identify and analyze an artifact of your choice. The resources used  in the Week 2 Notes and Readings are just a few of the options for  types of media you might select as meaningful to you.

To prepare for the Assignment:

• Read the Reading Images and Texts document in this week’s Learning Resources.
• Select an artifact, something that is important to you or resonates  with you in some way. Make certain you have a way to share the artifact  electronically. You can save the website/link to the artifact if you  found it online or take a photo or scan the artifact.
• Use the Artifact Analysis Worksheet to evaluate your artifact.
• Use the Academic Writing Expectations (AWE) Checklist to guide your  writing for each question on the worksheet. Even when you are filling  in a worksheet, you should be considering the AWE guidelines.

Assignment Directions:

By Day 5

Submit the Artifact Analysis Worksheet.

As adult learners, you are likely to be employed, and many of you also have families. Attending college is not a decision that you made in complete isolation. Your choice will impact many parts of your life, and as adults, reflecting on how you will reprioritize can be a painful topic. How will you make room, in an already busy life, for your new role as a student?

Learning is an emotional process if you are doing it right. Reading about the sometimes painful, often inspirational lives and thoughts of other humans will stretch your mind and your heart. When you are really learning in the Humanities, you find yourself wanting to talk about your class to other people in your life. For adults gaining an authentic education, it can sometimes stretch you in directions you do not like. Sometimes, the ideas you are exposed to in your classroom might cause you to make real time decisions in your life. Finding a space where you can learn with the fewest distractions possible is important.

You must be proactive and thoughtful in limiting distractions and managing your time. Where you work, and how you define your time can help. Keep in mind that you might be in your classroom while working, at the library, or for some of you, on a mobile device. Even if your space is just the right side of the couch with a laptop perched on the end, turn off your TV, and make sure that you are fully focused on the task at hand.

This week you will consider your personal work space, your “seat” in your Walden courses. You will consider the possible distractions in your work space and assess your time management needs. With a focus on your educational goals, you will switch into “academic mode” where writing style and academic requirements might differ from what you do at work or in other parts of your life. Walden’s Writing Center uses a variety of technology supports can provide guidance, review, and feedback as you begin your journey as a Walden student. The

Week 2 Notes and Readings

will provide insights into the technology’s “dark side” that you might not have considered in the past.

Learning Objectives

Students will:

Compare and contrast how humans manage time and space in virtual and non-virtual contexts

Identify how to apply time management techniques in virtual context

Systematically evaluate how humans use images to create virtual presence

Plan to acquire the supports needed for your success

Apply academic/professional writing skills

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Alternate Universe; Second Life is emerging as a powerful new medium for social interactions of all sorts, from romance to making money. It may be the internet’s next big thing

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Authors: Jessica Bennett and Malcolm Beith

Date: July 30, 2007

From: Newsweek International

Publisher: Newsweek LLC

Document Type: Article

Length: 2,763 words

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Byline: Jessica Bennett and Malcolm Beith

It’s 1 a.m., and the “Dublin” nightclub is packed. Women in trendy ball gowns and men in miniskirts dance to Bon Jovi. Simon Stevens spins his wheelchair across the room, then leaps up and starts dancing, a move he can execute only here in Second Life, a 3-D virtual world that Stevens roams on his PC screen, using an avatar–a graphic rendering of himself, liberated from his cerebral palsy. “I flourish in Second Life,” says the 33-year-old, who heads a disability-consulting firm called Enable Enterprises, out of his home in England. “It’s no game–it’s a serious tool.”

Rhonda Lillie and Paul Hawkins live thousands of miles apart–she in California, he in Wales–and until this week, had never met face to face. But they’ve been dating for more than two years–in Second Life. The detachment of meeting through their avatars allowed them to open up to one another in a way they might never have done in the real world. “We felt like we could go in and really be ourselves,” Lillie says.

Anshe Chung is a virtual land baroness with a real-life fortune. The woman behind the Anshe avatar is Ailin Graef, a former language teacher living near Frankfurt, Germany. Three years ago she started buying and developing virtual land in Second Life to see whether its virtual economy could sustain a real life. Turns out it can: Chung became Second Life’s first millionaire in 2006. Her business, Anshe Chung Studios, with a staff of 60, buys virtual property and builds homes or other structures that it rents or sells to other denizens of Second Life.

When San Francisco software developer Philip Rosedale dreamed up the idea for Second Life in 1998, he never imagined that it might have such an impact on the world at large. Just as Google sexed up the way we search, and Instant Messaging altered the way we interact, Second Life is fast becoming the next red-hot tool on the Internet.

The numbers tell the story. Rosedale launched Second Life in 2001, but it got off to a slow start, reaching only 1.5 million registered users in 2006. In the past year, membership has soared to more than 8 million users–2 million having signed on in the last two months alone. This hypergrowth, driven mainly by word of mouth, is now attracting competitors. South Korea’s Cyworld started out as a social-networking site, but has evolved into a two-dimensional equivalent of Second Life, claiming 20 million registered users from Asia to Latin America. Richard Branson’s Virgin recently announced plans to create its own 3-D community called A World of My Own. By 2011, four of every five people who use the Internet will actively participate in Second Life or some similar medium, according to Gartner Research, which recently did a study looking at the investment potential of virtual worlds. If Gartner is to be believed (and it is one of the most respected research firms in the field) this means 1.6 billion–out of a total 2 billion Internet users–will have found new lives online.

The power of Second Life lies in its utility for the gamut of human activities. It’s a potent medium for socializing–it provides people with a way to express, explore and experiment with identity, vent their frustrations, reveal alter egos. The likes of MySpace and Facebook have already created online communities, but they lack the three-dimensional potential for interaction that Second Life provides. The people who are coming to this online universe aren’t just socializing, however. They’re also doing business, collaborating on research, teaching courses, dating and even having sex. More than 45 multinational companies, including the likes of American Apparel, IBM, General Motors and Dell are beginning to use the medium for customer service, sales and marketing. Many people are coupling the Second Life chat technology with Skype, the popular audio Internet software, so they can talk out loud while interacting inside the virtual world. Or they use live streaming video to talk and see each other in real life (sitting in front of a computer screen), as well as through their avatars inside Second Life. “The unique thing about Second Life is that it’s immersive,” says Michael Rowe, head of IBM’s digital convergence team. “There’s a huge opportunity here, just as in the early days of the Internet.”

The medium sucks people in. A recent Dutch study found that 57 percent of Second Lifers spend more than 18 hours a week there, and 33 percent spend more than 30 hours a week. On a typical day, customers spend $1 million buying virtual clothes, cars, houses and other goods for their avatars, and total sales within this virtual economy are now growing at an annual rate of 10 percent. As a result, the money flowing through Second Life has attracted the attention of the U.S. tax authorities, who are currently investigating profits made in online businesses. And as it has evolved, those with ill intentions have apparently discovered Second Life, too. FBI agents are investigating possible gambling operations, and the German TV news program “Report Mainz” recently revealed allegations of child abuse in the virtual world. (Adults were purportedly using their avatars to have sex with the avatars of minors; they were expelled.)

Back in 1998, Rosedale simply hoped to create a vivid three-dimensional landscape in which graphic designers could create likenesses of their real-world ambitions–houses, cars, forests, anything one might find in a virtual game like EverQuest or World of Warcraft. Except Rosedale’s creation wouldn’t be a game: Second Life had no rules, no levels, no dragons to slay. It was open-ended, a digital landscape without regulations (much like the Internet in its early days). It was created on software that operates across multiple servers–a grid system that could easily grow to accommodate a large, far-flung community. A user in Germany could easily partner with a peer in Mexico to form their own mini-community inside Second Life, based on common interests–architectural designs, whatever. “It’s basically Tom Friedman’s flat world,” says Philip Evans, an economist at Boston Consulting Group who studies the industry. “It’s the globalization of the virtual world.”

At first, it was a world with no rules. Rosedale’s company, Linden Lab, oversaw the allotments of server space, which translates into virtual real estate, but imposed no controls over what went on inside the Garden of Eden it had created. A user’s representation in Second Life–his avatar–would be bound by no social constraints. And anything could be built, as long as you could write good enough code. The first pioneers–graphic designers, for the most part–simply set up display spaces for their technological projects. Then small communities with common ideas and visions–much like an artistic community, say, in the real world–sprang up. Since then, cities have grown, with urban amenities from stores to clubs. Upon arrival, users are given the PC commands that enable them to move around (walk, run, fly), dress their avatar and communicate with others.

Newcomers agree to a list of several do’s and don’ts, but within the communities they form, residents can impose their own codes of conduct. That laissez-faire attitude seems unsustainable–as Second Life expands, eventually Linden Lab will have to figure out a way to deal with the darker elements. In one of the first troublesome incidents, residents reported last year that “gangs” were forcing avatars out of public spaces. Rosedale declined to intervene, saying his hope was that residents would organize to police their own communities. They are currently doing so successfully, with rare exceptions like the recent alleged child-abuse incident.

For the moment, the social freedom is one of Second Life’s big draws. One can teleport to a nightclub like Dublin, find a pristine beach on which to relax or start looking for business opportunities right away. Crowded urban streets are lined with clothing stores, car lots, supermarkets and nightclubs. Real estate is the hot moneymaking market, with “islands”– private invitation-only plots of Second Life land–selling for as much as $1,650.

Real-world entrepreneurs and businesses sense the opportunity. With its large, densely settled population, which allows for division of labor, and citizens universally armed with ownership rights and the tools to produce just about anything, Second Life is in some ways the ideal free market. Consider 40-year-old Peter Lokke. Toiling away as a department manager at a Pathmark supermarket, the New York native had dreamed of opening his own design business, but “never pushed myself to get into it professionally.” Two and a half years ago, a friend urged him to chase his goals in Second Life. So Lokke paid $230 to Linden Lab to buy a 375-square-meter plot of Second Life land, and opened up his own clothing shop.

Today his avatar–a woman, incidentally–earns nearly $300 a day selling clothing he designs for users to drag and drop onto their avatars–twice what Lokke earned at the supermarket. As for the clothes, he can make “infinite copies of anything.” Once he’s designed a T shirt, he can make millions of replicas at no additional cost. “My supply is limitless,” he says. “There’s no bottom line. The costs are only what I pay Linden Lab.”

Linden Lab’s “no control” policy allows for any income made inside Second Life (the virtual world’s currency is the Linden dollar) to be cashed out through the company into U.S. dollars–even deposited directly into your checking account (at an exchange that has remained fairly stable at about 270 Linden dollars per U.S. dollar). A product created in Second Life can also be sold outside it–on eBay, for example, a private island was recently listed for $1,395.

And unlike, say, Sony, which owns the rights to anything created in EverQuest, Linden Lab has relinquished all intellectual-property rights to creations in its world, spurring entrepreneurship. Roughly 90 percent of Second Life’s content is created by the users themselves–Linden Lab built the basic architecture, like “Orientation Island,” where users first create their avatar and learn about Second Life. Indeed, the barriers to entry and to commerce are so low, it is hard to imagine a more ideal business environment for entrepreneurs, which may prove to be the biggest driver of Second Life’s growth. Lokke is so hooked, he says, “I’d rather panhandle on the street than leave Second Life.”

A kind of alternate global economy is emerging in Second Life. Linden Lab keeps information on transactions within the virtual world to itself, but economists who study it closely forecast that by the end of the year users will have spent 125 billion Linden dollars in Second Life (about $460 million). About 5 billion Linden dollars were changed (through the official currency exchange, the LindeX) into $19 million in 2006. So far this year, they’ve converted $37 million, much of it earned in virtual-world transactions.

The multinational companies are using Second Life in a different way: some are holding staff meetings where avatars representing employees can discuss ideas via instant message, e-mail or Skype, in a souped-up virtual office. Others are using it to connect to customers. For instance, IBM is working with clients like Sears and Circuit City to enhance the shopping experience: adviser avatars can walk customers through models of, say, televisions, and actually show them how the product might fit in the living room. The 3-D, real-time experience also allows multiple customers, who might not be together in the real world, to communicate while shopping. A husband and wife on separate business trips can pick out a new couch “together,” discussing the dimensions, color and material in real time. “Second Life allows you to strike up a natural conversation that you can’t do on a two-dimensional Web site,” says IBM’s Rowe.

With face-to-face interaction on the decline in offices–where it’s easier to e-mail or videoconference than schedule a live meeting–and companies increasingly use the Web for everything from distribution to customer service, a virtual world offers the potential to form relationships that are far more personal than online forms or e-mail. Nissan, for instance, lets customers talk to salespeople and even “test-drive” its new Sentra on a virtual driving track in Second Life. The Dutch bank ABN AMRO has financial advisers available as avatars.

That communication potential also makes Second Life attractive as an educational and research tool. Architecture professor Terry Beaubois began teaching a Montana State University course in Second Life two years ago, remotely from his California home. Now at MSU full time, he meets with classes each week out of “University Island,” a mock campus that his students designed and built, with classrooms, workshops and an oceanside gallery where they display their work. Rather than using paper sketches and cardboard models, they build interactive replicas of real buildings and neighborhood-development projects, adhering to proper structure, gravity and physics. The texture of these structures, though certainly animated, is detailed to the point where even a reporter can find herself lost in the arches and hallways of a virtual workshop.

The idea has caught on. Although Beaubois’s colleagues questioned his decision to teach through what they called a “computer game,” he’s now head of MSU’s Creative Research Lab and has the backing of the university’s president (who has an avatar of his own). And more than 250 universities, including Harvard and MIT, now operate distance-learning programs in Second Life. Students meet in virtual classrooms to discuss history and political science. Teachers give virtual presentations, and lead virtual field trips. Guest lecturers visit from all over the world.

At the University of California, Davis, psychiatrist Peter Yellowlees has set up virtual simulations to show students what happens in a schizophrenic episode. Students can walk through a replica of his psychiatric ward, analyzing terrifying voices and eerie laughs, and can even see simulated schizophrenic hallucinations. Many students find the images disturbing, but Second Life helps them comprehend the “lived experience” of patients who “constantly complain” that doctors don’t understand them, says Yellowlees.

True to the unofficial Second Life mantra–by the people, for the people–patients themselves are utilizing that clinical potential, too. “Brigadoon,” for instance, is a Second Life island inhabited by a group of adults who suffer from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism characterized by awkward, eccentric and obsessive behavior. Asperger’s patients have trouble interacting socially and don’t perceive things that should come naturally–how to introduce themselves or strike up a conversation, for instance. But in Second Life, these patients are learning to interact in ways that would be terrifying for them in real life. One sufferer has re-created a favorite restaurant, where the group regularly meets. Gradually, they are leaving their private island to venture into the rest of Second Life, integrating into the larger community. “The one thing that really amazes me about Second Life is the way it empowers people,” says John Lester, the former Harvard Medical School researcher who set up the group (and now works for Linden Lab). “It frees them from the role of the biological device.”

Not everyone is convinced that Second Life is a good thing. Some critics are uneasy with the idea of people’s getting more and more of their social activity online. “No matter how you beef it up with little icons or fancy colors, [virtual worlds] don’t have the nuance of face-to-face interaction,” says Oxford University’s Susan Greenfield, who heads the U.K.’s Institute for the Future of the Mind. It all depends, of course, on whether you see Second Life’s taking the place of ordinary social interaction or supplementing it, or as just another kind of diversion–like “the 21st-century version of the novel,” says Greenfield.

For diehard inhabitants, Second Life is a novel they won’t put down soon. Elizabeth Ward, who suffers from reflex sympathetic dystrophy–a severe and chronic pain disorder that now keeps her at home–says “the interaction goes one step further than anything that could be achieved online.” Ward, who lives with her husband, a software engineer, in Rhode Island, says her disability can make life “frustrating and lonely,” but Second Life “has opened up another world.” It’s allowed her to continue working, to meet people, to visit her son, who lives in Nevada, and her best friend in India. She’s gone sky diving, ice-skating–even played an eight-piece violin concerto with a group of mermaids under the sea. “I told my husband when I first started, ‘I felt joy as I did when I was little, playing with paper dolls’,” Ward explains. “But now the paper dolls are virtual and can interact with real people.” Whether you think it’s a pale imitation of reality or a vivid world of the mind, it’s captivating the globe.

By Jessica Bennett and Malcolm Beith

Week 2 Notes and Readings

Last week, we explored how humanity is tied to technology. We make tools and reshape the world in order to make our lives more comfortable, safe, easy, and enjoyable. This week, we will explore some of the ideas about how and why we do this.

Many times people consider technology to be “cold” and impersonal. But in his classic book, Walden, Henry David Thoreau discussed how we can view almost everything humans do as a search for warmth. As you read the selection, consider these questions: What does Thoreau mean by “warmth”? How do the technologies you encounter help you feel warmer? Are there uses of technology that are really cold, and if so, what should we do about that?

Read: Walden, Chapter 1, by Henry David Thoreau

WHEN I WROTE the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.(1) I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.(2)

[2] I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

[3] I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders (3) as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins (4) sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders “until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach”;(5) or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars — even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules (6) were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus (7) to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

[4] I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt?(8) Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables (9) never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

[5] But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book,(10) laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha (11) created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them: —

Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,

Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.(12)

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way, —

“From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,

Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.”(13)

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

[6] Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requires — who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

[7] Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough,(14) called by the Latins æs alienum, another’s brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses;(15) lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell (16) of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

[8] I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination — what Wilberforce (17) is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions (18) against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

[9] The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

[10] When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism,(19) is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot,(20) and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors (21) said nothing about.

[11] One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with”; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.

[12] The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn,(22) “the wise Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman prætors have decided how often you may go into your neighbor’s land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor.”Hippocrates (23) has even left directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, “be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?”

[13] We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology! — I know of no reading of another’s experience so startling and informing as this would be.

[14] The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man — you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind — I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

[15] I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. Confucius (24) said, “To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men at length establish their lives on that basis.

[16] Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be troubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

[17] By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest or the mountain’s shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin,(25) the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, “to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting.” So, we are told, the New Hollander (26) goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According to Liebig,(27) man’s body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us — and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without — Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed.

[18] The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life.(28) Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as 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. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live — that is, keep comfortably warm — and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course à la mode.(29)

[19] Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men. But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?

[20] When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above? — for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which, though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they have perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season.

[21] I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live — if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers — and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not; — but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished.

[2] In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate.

[3] 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.

Note: Since Walden was published, readers have wondered about the hound, horse, and dove. An early reader questioned Thoreau, and he responsd, “Well, sir, I suppose we all have our losses.” Some have assumed that the horse, hound and dove are symbolic of specific losses, or of unfulfilled hopes or dreams, but it may be most useful just to understand them as symbols of personal loss.

[4] To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

[5] So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette (1) with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or 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.

[6] For a long time I was reporter to a journal,(2) of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.

[7] 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 and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.

[8] I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. 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.

[9] In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.

[10] Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off — that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed — he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

[11] Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy (3) or living anywhere else, but I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had already got. 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; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.

[12] I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire,(4) then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor,(5) will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time — often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore; — to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization — taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation; — charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier — there is the untold fate of La Prouse;(6) — universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno (7) and the Phoenicians (8) down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a man — such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret,(9) and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge.

[13] I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes (10) to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.

[14] As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer’s character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this — Who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a gentleman’s legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons,(11) there is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master’s premises with clothes on, but was easilyIda Laura Pfeiffer (1797-1858), quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer,(12) in her adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she “was now in a civilized country, where … people are judged of by their clothes.” Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. But they who yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless; a woman’s dress, at least, is never done. (Above: Ida Laura Pfeiffer (1797-1858), Austrian traveler and travel book author)

[15] A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet — if a hero ever has a valet — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.(13) Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.

[16] We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without.(14) Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?

[17] When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates,(15) and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “they” — “It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.” Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to bang the coat on? We worship not the Graces,(16) nor the Parcæ,(17) but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again; and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat is said to have been handed down to us by a mummy.

[18] On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other’s masquerade. Another HenryEvery generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin (18) be taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as becoming as purple.(19)

(left: King Henry VIII of England)

[19] The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires today. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.

[20] I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English;(20) and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

(Continued in part C)

Notes

1. common name for a newspaper – back

2. probably Thoreau’s own personal journal – back

3. a curacy is the position of curate, who is a clergyman in charge of a parish, or is serving as an assistant in a parish – back

4. Massachusetts began trading with China in the 1780’s – back

5. Massachusetts seaport – back

6. Comte de La Pérouse (1741-1788) French navigator & explorer; he and his crew were lost at sea – back

7. Hanno – Carthaginian explorer, statesman, ca. 400 B.C. – back

8. eastern Mediterranean sailers of ancient Phoenicia, ca.1200 B.C. – back

9. allowances for container weight and waste or damage – back

10. St. Petersburg was built at the mouth of the Neva River – back

11. close fitting trousers worn by men in the 19th century – back

12. Ida Pfeiffer (1797-1858) Austrian writer, A Lady’s Voyage Around the World, about visits to Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Brazil, Tahiti, China, India, Baghdad, and Moscow – back

13. reference to the Bible, Matthew 9:17. In biblical times, “bottles” were made from animal skins, and carried by pack animals. Old skins became brittle, and if new wine was put into old skins, it would ferment, expand, and destroy the old skins. – back

14. plants that grow an annual layer of wood under the bark – back

15. in classical mythology, the three goddesses of destiny – back

16. in Greek mythology, three sister goddesses of charm and beauty – back

17. Roman name for the Fates, three Goddesses of Destiny and Fate – back

18. traditional Italian comic character – back

19. In medieval Europe, blue dyes were rare and expensive, and purple was reserved for the powerful and wealthy. – back

20. In the English Industrial Revolution, men and boys worked long hours, six or seven days a week, on tightly coordinated tasks paced by machinery. – back

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished.
[2] In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate.
[3] 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.

Note: Since Walden was published, readers have wondered about the hound, horse, and dove. An early reader questioned Thoreau, and he responsd, “Well, sir, I suppose we all have our losses.” Some have assumed that the horse, hound and dove are symbolic of specific losses, or of unfulfilled hopes or dreams, but it may be most useful just to understand them as symbols of personal loss.

[4] To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.
[5] So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette (1) with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or 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.
[6] For a long time I was reporter to a journal,(2) of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.
[7] 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 and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.
[8] I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. 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.
[9] In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.
[10] Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off — that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed — he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
[11] Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy (3) or living anywhere else, but I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had already got. 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; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.
[12] I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire,(4) then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor,(5) will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time — often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore; — to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization — taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation; — charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier — there is the untold fate of La Prouse;(6) — universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno (7) and the Phoenicians (8) down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a man — such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret,(9) and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge.
[13] I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes (10) to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.

[14] As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer’s character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this — Who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a gentleman’s legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons,(11) there is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master’s premises with clothes on, but was easilyIda Laura Pfeiffer (1797-1858), quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer,(12) in her adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she “was now in a civilized country, where … people are judged of by their clothes.” Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. But they who yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless; a woman’s dress, at least, is never done. (Above: Ida Laura Pfeiffer (1797-1858), Austrian traveler and travel book author)
[15] A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet — if a hero ever has a valet — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.(13) Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.

[16] We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without.(14) Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?
[17] When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates,(15) and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “they” — “It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.” Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to bang the coat on? We worship not the Graces,(16) nor the Parcæ,(17) but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again; and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat is said to have been handed down to us by a mummy.
[18] On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other’s masquerade. Another HenryEvery generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin (18) be taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as becoming as purple.(19)
(left: King Henry VIII of England)
[19] The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires today. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.
[20] I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English;(20) and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.
(Continued in part C)

Notes
1. common name for a newspaper – back
2. probably Thoreau’s own personal journal – back
3. a curacy is the position of curate, who is a clergyman in charge of a parish, or is serving as an assistant in a parish – back
4. Massachusetts began trading with China in the 1780’s – back
5. Massachusetts seaport – back
6. Comte de La Pérouse (1741-1788) French navigator & explorer; he and his crew were lost at sea – back
7. Hanno – Carthaginian explorer, statesman, ca. 400 B.C. – back
8. eastern Mediterranean sailers of ancient Phoenicia, ca.1200 B.C. – back
9. allowances for container weight and waste or damage – back
10. St. Petersburg was built at the mouth of the Neva River – back
11. close fitting trousers worn by men in the 19th century – back
12. Ida Pfeiffer (1797-1858) Austrian writer, A Lady’s Voyage Around the World, about visits to Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Brazil, Tahiti, China, India, Baghdad, and Moscow – back
13. reference to the Bible, Matthew 9:17. In biblical times, “bottles” were made from animal skins, and carried by pack animals. Old skins became brittle, and if new wine was put into old skins, it would ferment, expand, and destroy the old skins. – back
14. plants that grow an annual layer of wood under the bark – back
15. in classical mythology, the three goddesses of destiny – back
16. in Greek mythology, three sister goddesses of charm and beauty – back
17. Roman name for the Fates, three Goddesses of Destiny and Fate – back
18. traditional Italian comic character – back
19. In medieval Europe, blue dyes were rare and expensive, and purple was reserved for the powerful and wealthy. – back
20. In the English Industrial Revolution, men and boys worked long hours, six or seven days a week, on tightly coordinated tasks paced by machinery. – back
If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished.
[2] In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate.
[3] 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.

Note: Since Walden was published, readers have wondered about the hound, horse, and dove. An early reader questioned Thoreau, and he responsd, “Well, sir, I suppose we all have our losses.” Some have assumed that the horse, hound and dove are symbolic of specific losses, or of unfulfilled hopes or dreams, but it may be most useful just to understand them as symbols of personal loss.

[4] To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.
[5] So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette (1) with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or 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.
[6] For a long time I was reporter to a journal,(2) of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.
[7] 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 and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.
[8] I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. 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.
[9] In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.
[10] Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off — that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed — he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
[11] Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy (3) or living anywhere else, but I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had already got. 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; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.
[12] I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire,(4) then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor,(5) will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time — often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore; — to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization — taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation; — charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier — there is the untold fate of La Prouse;(6) — universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno (7) and the Phoenicians (8) down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a man — such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret,(9) and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge.
[13] I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes (10) to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.

[14] As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer’s character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this — Who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a gentleman’s legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons,(11) there is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master’s premises with clothes on, but was easilyIda Laura Pfeiffer (1797-1858), quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer,(12) in her adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she “was now in a civilized country, where … people are judged of by their clothes.” Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. But they who yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless; a woman’s dress, at least, is never done. (Above: Ida Laura Pfeiffer (1797-1858), Austrian traveler and travel book author)
[15] A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet — if a hero ever has a valet — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.(13) Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.

[16] We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without.(14) Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?
[17] When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates,(15) and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “they” — “It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.” Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to bang the coat on? We worship not the Graces,(16) nor the Parcæ,(17) but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again; and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat is said to have been handed down to us by a mummy.
[18] On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other’s masquerade. Another HenryEvery generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin (18) be taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as becoming as purple.(19)
(left: King Henry VIII of England)
[19] The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires today. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.
[20] I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English;(20) and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.
(Continued in part C)

Notes
1. common name for a newspaper – back
2. probably Thoreau’s own personal journal – back
3. a curacy is the position of curate, who is a clergyman in charge of a parish, or is serving as an assistant in a parish – back
4. Massachusetts began trading with China in the 1780’s – back
5. Massachusetts seaport – back
6. Comte de La Pérouse (1741-1788) French navigator & explorer; he and his crew were lost at sea – back
7. Hanno – Carthaginian explorer, statesman, ca. 400 B.C. – back
8. eastern Mediterranean sailers of ancient Phoenicia, ca.1200 B.C. – back
9. allowances for container weight and waste or damage – back
10. St. Petersburg was built at the mouth of the Neva River – back
11. close fitting trousers worn by men in the 19th century – back
12. Ida Pfeiffer (1797-1858) Austrian writer, A Lady’s Voyage Around the World, about visits to Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Brazil, Tahiti, China, India, Baghdad, and Moscow – back
13. reference to the Bible, Matthew 9:17. In biblical times, “bottles” were made from animal skins, and carried by pack animals. Old skins became brittle, and if new wine was put into old skins, it would ferment, expand, and destroy the old skins. – back
14. plants that grow an annual layer of wood under the bark – back
15. in classical mythology, the three goddesses of destiny – back
16. in Greek mythology, three sister goddesses of charm and beauty – back
17. Roman name for the Fates, three Goddesses of Destiny and Fate – back
18. traditional Italian comic character – back
19. In medieval Europe, blue dyes were rare and expensive, and purple was reserved for the powerful and wealthy. – back
20. In the English Industrial Revolution, men and boys worked long hours, six or seven days a week, on tightly coordinated tasks paced by machinery. – back

What the Luddites Really Fought Against

The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn’t really the enemy

King Ludd

Ludd, drawn here in 1812, was the fictitious leader of numerous real protests. (Granger Collection, New York)

By Richard Conniff

Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe

March 2011

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In an essay in 1984—at the dawn of the personal computer era—the novelist Thomas Pynchon wondered if it was “O.K. to be a Luddite,” meaning someone who opposes technological progress. A better question today is whether it’s even possible. Technology is everywhere, and a recent headline at an Internet hu-mor site perfectly captured how difficult it is to resist: “Luddite invents machine to destroy technology quicker.”

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Like all good satire, the mock headline comes perilously close to the truth. Modern Luddites do indeed invent “machines”—in the form of computer viruses, cyberworms and other malware—to disrupt the technologies that trouble them. (Recent targets of suspected sabotage include the London Stock Exchange and a nuclear power plant in Iran.) Even off-the-grid extremists find technology irresistible. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, attacked what he called the “industrial-technological system” with increasingly sophisticated mail bombs. Likewise, the cave-dwelling terrorist sometimes derided as “Osama bin Luddite” hijacked aviation technology to bring down skyscrapers.

For the rest of us, our uneasy protests against technology almost inevitably take technological form. We worry about whether violent computer games are warping our children, then decry them by tweet, text or Facebook post. We try to simplify our lives by shopping at the local farmers market—then haul our organic arugula home in a Prius. College students take out their earbuds to discuss how technology dominates their lives. But when a class ends, Loyola University of Chicago professor Steven E. Jones notes, their cellphones all come to life, screens glowing in front of their faces, “and they migrate across the lawns like giant schools of cyborg jellyfish.”

That’s when he turns on his phone, too.

The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and what being a modern one actually means.

Blogger Amanda Cobra, for instance, worries about being “a drinking Luddite” because she hasn’t yet mastered “infused” drinks. (Sorry, Amanda, real Luddites were clueless when it came to steeping vanilla beans in vodka. They drank—and sang about—“good ale that’s brown.”) And on Twitter, Wolfwhistle Amy thinks she’s a Luddite because she “cannot deal with heel heights” given in centimeters instead of inches. (Hmm. Some of the original Luddites were cross-dressers—more about that later—so maybe they would empathize.) People use the word now even to describe someone who is merely clumsy or forgetful about technology. (A British woman locked outside her house tweets her husband: “You stupid Luddite, turn on your bloody phone, i can’t get in!”)

The word “Luddite” is simultaneously a declaration of ineptitude and a badge of honor. So you can hurl Luddite curses at your cellphone or your spouse, but you can also sip a wine named Luddite (which has its own Web site:

www.luddite.co.za

). You can buy a guitar named the Super Luddite, which is electric and costs $7,400. Meanwhile, back at Twitter, SupermanHotMale Tim is understandably puzzled; he grunts to ninatypewriter, “What is Luddite?”

Almost certainly not what you think, Tim.

Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.

The Luddite disturbances started in circumstances at least superficially similar to our own. British working families at the start of the 19th century were enduring economic upheaval and widespread unemployment. A seemingly endless war against Napoleon’s France had brought “the hard pinch of poverty,” wrote Yorkshire historian Frank Peel, to homes “where it had hitherto been a stranger.” Food was scarce and rapidly becoming more costly. Then, on March 11, 1811, in Nottingham, a textile manufacturing center, British troops broke up a crowd of protesters demanding more work and better wages.

That night, angry workers smashed textile machinery in a nearby village. Similar attacks occurred nightly at first, then sporadically, and then in waves, eventually spreading across a 70-mile swath of northern England from Loughborough in the south to Wakefield in the north. Fearing a national movement, the government soon positioned thousands of soldiers to defend factories. Parliament passed a measure to make machine-breaking a capital offense.

But the Luddites were neither as organized nor as dangerous as authorities believed. They set some factories on fire, but mainly they confined themselves to breaking machines. In truth, they inflicted less violence than they encountered. In one of the bloodiest incidents, in April 1812, some 2,000 protesters mobbed a mill near Manchester. The owner ordered his men to fire into the crowd, killing at least 3 and wounding 18. Soldiers killed at least 5 more the next day.

Earlier that month, a crowd of about 150 protesters had exchanged gunfire with the defenders of a mill in Yorkshire, and two Luddites died. Soon, Luddites there retaliated by killing a mill owner, who in the thick of the protests had supposedly boasted that he would ride up to his britches in Luddite blood. Three Luddites were hanged for the murder; other courts, often under political pressure, sent many more to the gallows or to exile in Australia before the last such disturbance, in 1816.

One technology the Luddites commonly attacked was the stocking frame, a knitting machine first developed more than 200 years earlier by an Englishman named William Lee. Right from the start, concern that it would displace traditional hand-knitters had led Queen Elizabeth I to deny Lee a patent. Lee’s invention, with gradual improvements, helped the textile industry grow—and created many new jobs. But labor disputes caused sporadic outbreaks of violent resistance. Episodes of machine-breaking occurred in Britain from the 1760s onward, and in France during the 1789 revolution.

As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”

So if the Luddites weren’t attacking the technological foundations of industry, what made them so frightening to manufacturers? And what makes them so memorable even now? Credit on both counts goes largely to a phantom.

Ned Ludd, also known as Captain, General or even King Ludd, first turned up as part of a Nottingham protest in November 1811, and was soon on the move from one industrial center to the next. This elusive leader clearly inspired the protesters. And his apparent command of unseen armies, drilling by night, also spooked the forces of law and order. Government agents made finding him a consuming goal. In one case, a militiaman reported spotting the dreaded general with “a pike in his hand, like a serjeant’s halbert,” and a face that was a ghostly unnatural white.

In fact, no such person existed. Ludd was a fiction concocted from an incident that supposedly had taken place 22 years earlier in the city of Leicester. According to the story, a young apprentice named Ludd or Ludham was working at a stocking frame when a superior admonished him for knitting too loosely. Ordered to “square his needles,” the enraged apprentice instead grabbed a hammer and flattened the entire mechanism. The story eventually made its way to Nottingham, where protesters turned Ned Ludd into their symbolic leader.

The Luddites, as they soon became known, were dead serious about their protests. But they were also making fun, dispatching officious-sounding letters that began, “Whereas by the Charter”…and ended “Ned Lud’s Office, Sherwood Forest.” Invoking the sly banditry of Nottinghamshire’s own Robin Hood suited their sense of social justice. The taunting, world-turned-upside-down character of their protests also led them to march in women’s clothes as “General Ludd’s wives.”

They did not invent a machine to destroy technology, but they knew how to use one. In Yorkshire, they attacked frames with massive sledgehammers they called “Great Enoch,” after a local blacksmith who had manufactured both the hammers and many of the machines they intended to destroy. “Enoch made them,” they declared, “Enoch shall break them.”

This knack for expressing anger with style and even swagger gave their cause a personality. Luddism stuck in the collective memory because it seemed larger than life. And their timing was right, coming at the start of what the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle later called “a mechanical age.”

People of the time recognized all the astonishing new benefits the Industrial Revolution conferred, but they also worried, as Carlyle put it in 1829, that technology was causing a “mighty change” in their “modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.” Over time, worry about that kind of change led people to transform the original Luddites into the heroic defenders of a pretechnological way of life. “The indignation of nineteenth-century producers,” the historian Edward Tenner has written, “has yielded to “the irritation of late-twentieth-century consumers.”

The original Luddites lived in an era of “reassuringly clear-cut targets—machines one could still destroy with a sledgehammer,” Loyola’s Jones writes in his 2006 book Against Technology, making them easy to romanticize. By contrast, our technology is as nebulous as “the cloud,” that Web-based limbo where our digital thoughts increasingly go to spend eternity. It’s as liquid as the chemical contaminants our infants suck down with their mothers’ milk and as ubiquitous as the genetically modified crops in our gas tanks and on our dinner plates. Technology is everywhere, knows all our thoughts and, in the words of the technology utopian Kevin Kelly, is even “a divine phenomenon that is a reflection of God.” Who are we to resist?

The original Luddites would answer that we are human. Getting past the myth and seeing their protest more clearly is a reminder that it’s possible to live well with technology—but only if we continually question the ways it shapes our lives. It’s about small things, like now and then cutting the cord, shutting down the smartphone and going out for a walk. But it needs to be about big things, too, like standing up against technologies that put money or convenience above other human values. If we don’t want to become, as Carlyle warned, “mechanical in head and in heart,” it may help, every now and then, to ask which of our modern machines General and Eliza Ludd would choose to break. And which they would use to break them.

What is virtual reality? The simplest explanation is that it is an alternative reality that humans create through technology.

With the advent of the Internet and advanced graphics technology, humans have recently created virtual realities within cyberspace (itself a virtual reality) that allows us to interact with other people in a constructed space through computers, without ever having to leave our own homes. So what are some of these technologies and “virtual realities” that we are creating?

Read: Why Millions are Living Virtual Lives Online.

Why Millions Are Living Virtual Lives Online

By Jessica Bennett On 7/29/07 at 8:00 PM EDT

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Tech & Science

It’s 1 a.m., and the “Dublin” nightclub is packed. Women in trendy ball gowns and men in miniskirts dance to Bon Jovi. Simon Stevens spins his wheelchair across the room, then leaps up and starts dancing, a move he can execute only here in Second Life, a 3-D virtual world that Stevens roams on his PC screen, using an avatar—a graphic rendering of himself, liberated from his cerebral palsy. “I flourish in Second Life,” says the 33-year-old, who heads a disability-consulting firm called Enable Enterprises, out of his home in England. “It’s no game—it’s a serious tool.”

Rhonda Lillie and Paul Hawkins live thousands of miles apart—she in California, he in Wales—and until this week, had never met face to face. But they’ve been dating for more than two years—in Second Life. The detachment of meeting through their avatars allowed them to open up to one another in a way they might never have done in the real world. “We felt like we could go in and really be ourselves,” Lillie says.

Anshe Chung is a virtual land baroness with a real-life fortune. The woman behind the Anshe avatar is Ailin Graef, a former language teacher living near Frankfurt, Germany. Three years ago she started buying and developing virtual land in Second Life to see whether its virtual economy could sustain a real life. Turns out it can: Chung became Second Life’s first millionaire in 2006. Her business, Anshe Chung Studios, with a staff of 60, buys virtual property and builds homes or other structures that it rents or sells to other denizens of Second Life.

When San Francisco software developer Philip Rosedale dreamed up the idea for Second Life in 1998, he never imagined that it might have such an impact on the world at large. Just as Google sexed up the way we search, and instant messaging altered the way we interact, Second Life is fast becoming the next red-hot tool on the Internet.

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The numbers tell the story. Rosedale launched Second Life in 2001, but it got off to a slow start, reaching only 1.5 million registered users in 2006. In the past year, membership has soared to more than 8 million users—2 million having signed on in the last two months alone. This hypergrowth, driven mainly by word of mouth, is now attracting competitors. South Korea’s Cyworld started out as a social-networking site, but has evolved into a two-dimensional equivalent of Second Life, claiming 20 million registered users from Asia to Latin America. Richard Branson’s Virgin recently announced plans to create its own 3-D community called A World of My Own. By 2011, four of every five people who use the Internet will actively participate in Second Life or some similar medium, according to Gartner Research, which recently did a study looking at the investment potential of virtual worlds. If Gartner is to be believed (and it is one of the most respected research firms in the field) this means 1.6 billion—out of a total 2 billion Internet users—will have found new lives online.

The power of Second Life lies in its utility for the gamut of human activities. It’s a potent medium for socializing—it provides people with a way to express, explore and experiment with identity, vent their frustrations, reveal alter egos. The likes of MySpace and Facebook have already created online communities, but they lack the three-dimensional potential for interaction that Second Life provides. The people who are coming to this online universe aren’t just socializing, however. They’re also doing business, collaborating on research, teaching courses, dating and even having sex. More than 45 multinational companies, including the likes of American Apparel, IBM, General Motors and Dell are beginning to use the medium for customer service, sales and marketing. Many people are coupling the Second Life chat technology with Skype, the popular audio Internet software, so they can talk out loud while interacting inside the virtual world. Or they use live streaming video to talk and see each other in real life (sitting in front of a computer screen), as well as through their avatars inside Second Life. “The unique thing about Second Life is that it’s immersive,” says Michael Rowe, head of IBM’s digital convergence team. “There’s a huge opportunity here, just as in the early days of the Internet.”

The medium sucks people in. A recent Dutch study found that 57 percent of Second Lifers spend more than 18 hours a week there, and 33 percent spend more than 30 hours a week. On a typical day, customers spend $1 million buying virtual clothes, cars, houses and other goods for their avatars, and total sales within this virtual economy are now growing at an annual rate of 10 percent. As a result, the money flowing through Second Life has attracted the attention of the U.S. tax authorities, who are currently investigating profits made in online businesses. And as it has evolved, those with ill intentions have apparently discovered Second Life, too. FBI agents are investigating possible gambling operations, and the German TV news program “Report Mainz” recently revealed allegations of child abuse in the virtual world. (Adults were purportedly using their avatars to have sex with the avatars of minors; they were expelled.)

Back in 1998, Rosedale simply hoped to create a vivid three-dimensional landscape in which graphic designers could create likenesses of their real-world ambitions—houses, cars, forests, anything one might find in a virtual game like EverQuest or World of Warcraft. Except Rosedale’s creation wouldn’t be a game: Second Life had no rules, no levels, no dragons to slay. It was open-ended, a digital landscape without regulations (much like the Internet in its early days). It was created on software that operates across multiple servers—a grid system that could easily grow to accommodate a large, far-flung community. A user in Germany could easily partner with a peer in Mexico to form their own mini-community inside Second Life, based on common interests—architectural designs, whatever. “It’s basically Tom Friedman’s flat world,” says Philip Evans, an economist at Boston Consulting Group who studies the industry. “It’s the globalization of the virtual world.”

At first, it was a world with no rules. Rosedale’s company, Linden Lab, oversaw the allotments of server space, which translates into virtual real estate, but imposed no controls over what went on inside the Garden of Eden it had created. A user’s representation in Second Life—his avatar—would be bound by no social constraints. And anything could be built, as long as you could write good enough code. The first pioneers—graphic designers, for the most part—simply set up display spaces for their technological projects. Then small communities with common ideas and visions—much like an artistic community, say, in the real world—sprang up. Since then, cities have grown, with urban amenities from stores to clubs. Upon arrival, users are given the PC commands that enable them to move around (walk, run, fly), dress their avatar and communicate with others.

Newcomers agree to a list of several do’s and don’ts, but within the communities they form, residents can impose their own codes of conduct. That laissez-faire attitude seems unsustainable—as Second Life expands, eventually Linden Lab will have to figure out a way to deal with the darker elements. In one of the first troublesome incidents, residents reported last year that “gangs” were forcing avatars out of public spaces. Rosedale declined to intervene, saying his hope was that residents would organize to police their own communities. They are currently doing so successfully, with rare exceptions like the recent alleged child-abuse incident.

For the moment, the social freedom is one of Second Life’s big draws. One can teleport to a nightclub like Dublin, find a pristine beach on which to relax or start looking for business opportunities right away. Crowded urban streets are lined with clothing stores, car lots, supermarkets and nightclubs. Real estate is the hot moneymaking market, with “islands”— private invitation-only plots of Second Life land—selling for as much as $1,650.

Real-world entrepreneurs and businesses sense the opportunity. With its large, densely settled population, which allows for division of labor, and citizens universally armed with ownership rights and the tools to produce just about anything, Second Life is in some ways the ideal free market. Consider 40-year-old Peter Lokke. Toiling away as a department manager at a Pathmark supermarket, the New York native had dreamed of opening his own design business, but “never pushed myself to get into it professionally.” Two and a half years ago, a friend urged him to chase his goals in Second Life. So Lokke paid $230 to Linden Lab to buy a 375-square-meter plot of Second Life land, and opened up his own clothing shop.

Today his avatar—a woman, incidentally—earns nearly $300 a day selling clothing he designs for users to drag and drop onto their avatars—twice what Lokke earned at the supermarket. As for the clothes, he can make “infinite copies of anything.” Once he’s designed a T shirt, he can make millions of replicas at no additional cost. “My supply is limitless,” he says. “There’s no bottom line. The costs are only what I pay Linden Lab.”

Linden Lab’s “no control” policy allows for any income made inside Second Life (the virtual world’s currency is the Linden dollar) to be cashed out through the company into U.S. dollars—even deposited directly into your checking account (at an exchange that has remained fairly stable at about 270 Linden dollars per U.S. dollar). A product created in Second Life can also be sold outside it—on eBay, for example, a private island was recently listed for $1,395.

And unlike, say, Sony, which owns the rights to anything created in EverQuest, Linden Lab has relinquished all intellectual-property rights to creations in its world, spurring entrepreneurship. Roughly 90 percent of Second Life’s content is created by the users themselves—Linden Lab built the basic architecture, like “Orientation Island,” where users first create their avatar and learn about Second Life. Indeed, the barriers to entry and to commerce are so low, it is hard to imagine a more ideal business environment for entrepreneurs, which may prove to be the biggest driver of Second Life’s growth. Lokke is so hooked, he says, “I’d rather panhandle on the street than leave Second Life.”

A kind of alternate global economy is emerging in Second Life. Linden Lab keeps information on transactions within the virtual world to itself, but economists who study it closely forecast that by the end of the year users will have spent 125 billion Linden dollars in Second Life (about $460 million). About 5 billion Linden dollars were changed (through the official currency exchange, the LindeX) into $19 million in 2006. So far this year, they’ve converted $37 million, much of it earned in virtual-world transactions.
The multinational companies are using Second Life in a different way: some are holding staff meetings where avatars representing employees can discuss ideas via instant message, e-mail or Skype, in a souped-up virtual office. Others are using it to connect to customers. For instance, IBM is working with clients like Sears and Circuit City to enhance the shopping experience: adviser avatars can walk customers through models of, say, televisions, and actually show them how the product might fit in the living room. The 3-D, real-time experience also allows multiple customers, who might not be together in the real world, to communicate while shopping. A husband and wife on separate business trips can pick out a new couch “together,” discussing the dimensions, color and material in real time. “Second Life allows you to strike up a natural conversation that you can’t do on a two-dimensional Web site,” says IBM’s Rowe.

With face-to-face interaction on the decline in offices—where it’s easier to e-mail or videoconference than schedule a live meeting—and companies increasingly use the Web for everything from distribution to customer service, a virtual world offers the potential to form relationships that are far more personal than online forms or e-mail. Nissan, for instance, lets customers talk to salespeople and even “test-drive” its new Sentra on a virtual driving track in Second Life. The Dutch bank ABN AMRO has financial advisers available as avatars.

That communication potential also makes Second Life attractive as an educational and research tool. Architecture professor Terry Beaubois began teaching a Montana State University course in Second Life two years ago, remotely from his California home. Now at MSU full time, he meets with classes each week out of “University Island,” a mock campus that his students designed and built, with classrooms, workshops and an oceanside gallery where they display their work. Rather than using paper sketches and cardboard models, they build interactive replicas of real buildings and neighborhood-development projects, adhering to proper structure, gravity and physics. The texture of these structures, though certainly animated, is detailed to the point where even a reporter can find herself lost in the arches and hallways of a virtual workshop.
The idea has caught on. Although Beaubois’s colleagues questioned his decision to teach through what they called a “computer game,” he’s now head of MSU’s Creative Research Lab and has the backing of the university’s president (who has an avatar of his own). And more than 250 universities, including Harvard and MIT, now operate distance-learning programs in Second Life. Students meet in virtual classrooms to discuss history and political science. Teachers give virtual presentations, and lead virtual field trips. Guest lecturers visit from all over the world.
At the University of California, Davis, psychiatrist Peter Yellowlees has set up virtual simulations to show students what happens in a schizophrenic episode. Students can walk through a replica of his psychiatric ward, analyzing terrifying voices and eerie laughs, and can even see simulated schizophrenic hallucinations. Many students find the images disturbing, but Second Life helps them comprehend the “lived experience” of patients who “constantly complain” that doctors don’t understand them, says Yellowlees.

True to the unofficial Second Life mantra—by the people, for the people—patients themselves are utilizing that clinical potential, too. “Brigadoon,” for instance, is a Second Life island inhabited by a group of adults who suffer from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism characterized by awkward, eccentric and obsessive behavior. Asperger’s patients have trouble interacting socially and don’t perceive things that should come naturally—how to introduce themselves or strike up a conversation, for instance. But in Second Life, these patients are learning to interact in ways that would be terrifying for them in real life. One sufferer has re-created a favorite restaurant, where the group regularly meets. Gradually, they are leaving their private island to venture into the rest of Second Life, integrating into the larger community. “The one thing that really amazes me about Second Life is the way it empowers people,” says John Lester, the former Harvard Medical School researcher who set up the group (and now works for Linden Lab). “It frees them from the role of the biological device.”

Not everyone is convinced that Second Life is a good thing. Some critics are uneasy with the idea of people’s getting more and more of their social activity online. “No matter how you beef it up with little icons or fancy colors, [virtual worlds] don’t have the nuance of face-to-face interaction,” says Oxford University’s Susan Greenfield, who heads the U.K.’s Institute for the Future of the Mind. It all depends, of course, on whether you see Second Life’s taking the place of ordinary social interaction or supplementing it, or as just another kind of diversion—like “the 21st-century version of the novel,” says Greenfield.

For diehard inhabitants, Second Life is a novel they won’t put down soon. Elizabeth Ward, who suffers from reflex sympathetic dystrophy—a severe and chronic pain disorder that now keeps her at home—says “the interaction goes one step further than anything that could be achieved online.” Ward, who lives with her husband, a software engineer, in Rhode Island, says her disability can make life “frustrating and lonely,” but Second Life “has opened up another world.” It’s allowed her to continue working, to meet people, to visit her son, who lives in Nevada, and her best friend in India. She’s gone sky diving, ice-skating—even played an eight-piece violin concerto with a group of mermaids under the sea. “I told my husband when I first started, ‘I felt joy as I did when I was little, playing with paper dolls’,” Ward explains. “But now the paper dolls are virtual and can interact with real people.” Whether you think it’s a pale imitation of reality or a vivid world of the mind, it’s captivating the globe.

Academic Writing Expectations Checklist

The items checked off below are areas where you can improve. Click the links to access Writing Center resources:

· Sentence-level skills

sentence components Constructing complete and correct sentences. See an explanation of and how to avoid

sentence fragments and run-ons.

commonly misused words
Using and spelling words correctly. See a list of

punctuation Punctuating appropriately. See the different types of and their uses.

Grammarly tutorial Using Grammarly to catch further errors. See a .

Comments:

· Paragraph-level skills

paragraph basics Using paragraph breaks. See a description of .

topic sentences Focusing each paragraph on one central idea (rather than multiple ideas). See an explanation of how work.

Comments:

· Use of evidence

integrating evidence Using course learning resources. See examples of in a paper.

quotation marks Enclosing direct quotes in quotation marks. Read about the purpose of .

paraphrasing strategies. Paraphrasing (explaining in one’s own words) to avoid plagiarizing the source. See

Comments:

© 2014 Laureate Education, Inc.
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Artifact Analysis Worksheet

An artifact is something made by a human.

It can be a form of art or a form of self-expression that has meaning to you. It can be anything that a human conceived of as art and deliberately crafted.

For this assignment, you are being asked to share your artifact with your classmates. Please consider this as you select your artifact by choosing something you are comfortable sharing and avoiding potentially offensive material.

In the Learning Resources area, there is also a document on “reading” images and text. It includes many questions which can guide deeper analysis of your artifact.

Share your artifact or a link to your artifact in the space below. Include a description of the artifact and include research on the background of the artifact. For example, information about the artist involved. *** Make sure to cite your sources by including a list of any outsides sources of information you are using to answer this question. Remember, research is always a good thing as it shows effort.

What does this artifact mean to you? Please explain. To explore this, consider these additional questions: How has it inspired or moved you? Has this artifact helped make your life or the life of others better? How does it connect to your life or to the educational journey you are starting along with your classmates?

Many people have artifacts displayed in their home; for example, a certain painting on their wall. In a way, we’ll be creating a virtual gallery of artifacts by sharing our choices as a class in the Class DocSharing area. How does your artifact fit into our class gallery? How do you think your artifact communicates your life perspective to the class? How do you think others will interpret your choice of artifact?

Discuss in your own words, how technology has changed human art making and human art sharing. How do you, or could you, use technology in making your own art?

You will submit your completed worksheet as your Week 2 Assignment using the link at the bottom of the assignment page in the classroom. Additionally, for Week 3, you will post your artifact in the DocSharing area. You will find instructions about how to do this on the next page. Only post the artifact, not the completed worksheet. Again, you need to do both of these: Submit for Week 2 AND post to DocSharing for Week 3.

As stated above, you will be asked to share your artifact in the Class DocSharing area to use for the Week 3 Assignment 1.

To do this, click on the DocSharing link in the left-hand navigational window (red arrow below):

Then, click on the Class DocSharing area to enter this space.

From here, you will click “Create Blog Entry” on the top towards to the left:

Then fill in the appropriate information and hit Post Entry at the bottom right.

(Please do NOT post your entire worksheet- post only your artifact)

You should now see your entry. Sometimes a larger link or file will take a little longer to upload. So if you don’t see it immediately, give it a minute.

Make sure that your artifact is showing up properly. Some pictures will not copy and paste directly into the classroom. You’ll have to attach a file or document instead.

© 2014 Laureate Education, Inc.
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Time Management Tracking Table

Name: ___________________________________ Date: ____________________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Total

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Total

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

24

24

24

24

24

24

SUMMARY OF CURRENT ACTIVITIES

ACTIVITY

M

T

W

Th

F

S

Su

TOTAL

PERCENT

School Related

Class Online

Study, academic work

Networking, etc.

Total

Work and Travel

Family, etc.

Personal

Social and Entertainment

Boards, committees

Health

Self-care, eating, exercise, etc.

Sleeping

Other

Total Hours

24

168

100

© 2014 Laureate Education, Inc.
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