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HENRY DAVID THOREAU [1817–1862]

Where I Lived, and
What I Lived For

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 and raised in Concord, Massa-
chusetts, living there for most of his life. Along with Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Thoreau was one of the most important thinkers of his time
in America and is still widely read today. Walden (1854), the work for
which he is best known, is drawn from the journal he kept during his
two-year-long stay in a cabin on Walden Pond. In Walden, Thoreau ex-
plores his interests in naturalism, individualism, and self-sufficiency.
He is also remembered for his essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849), an
early, influential statement of this tactic of protest later practiced by
Mahatma Gandhi and, under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr.,
many in the civil rights movement.

“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” is taken from Walden. In it,
Thoreau makes the argument for his going to live in the woods.
Writing about Walden, scholars have pointed out that Thoreau was not
particularly deep in the woods and that he was regularly visited and
supplied with, among other things, pies. As you read, consider how
this influences your acceptance of what he has to say.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,
and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish
to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice res-
ignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck
out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put
to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to
drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved
to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it,
and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it
by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excur-
sion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about
it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily con-
cluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him
forever.”

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Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were
long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error
upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion
a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by de-
tail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers,
or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three,
and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a
dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this
chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quick-
sands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to
live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port
at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who
succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be neces-
sary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other
things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made of up
petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German
cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with
all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all exter-
nal and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establish-
ment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by
luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim,
as the million households in the lands; and the only cure for it, as for
them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of
life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essen-
tial that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a
telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they
do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little
uncertain. If we do not get our sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days
and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve
them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall
we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our busi-
ness, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides
upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the
railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are
laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly
over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a
new lot is laid down and run over, so that, if some have the pleasure of
riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when
they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary
sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the
cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am
glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the

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sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they
may sometimes get up again.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are deter-
mined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time
saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-
morrow. As for work, we haven’t any of any consequence. We have the
Saint Vitus’ dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should
only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without
setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of
Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his ex-
cuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might al-
most say, but would foresake all and follow that sound, not mainly to
save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much
more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set
it on fire — or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as
handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a man
takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his
head and asks, “What’s the news?” as if the rest of mankind had stood his
sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless
for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have
dreamed. After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the break-
fast. “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere
on this globe” — and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has
had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never
dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave
of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that
there are very few important communications made through it. To speak
critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life — I
wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage. The penny-
post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a
man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest.
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If
we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one
house burned, or one vessel wrecked or one steamboat blown up, or one
cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot
of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need read of another. One is
enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a
myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is
called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their
tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I
hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the
last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the es-

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tablishment were broken by the pressure — news which I seriously think
a ready wit might write a twelvemonth, or twelve years, beforehand with
sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw
in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada,
from time to time in the right proportions — they may have changed the
names a little since I saw the papers — and serve up a bullfight when
other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good
an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct
and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers; and as for England,
almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revo-
lution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an av-
erage year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your
speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who
rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in for-
eign parts, a French revolution not excepted.

What news! how much more important to know what that is which
was never old! “Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a
man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messen-
ger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is
your master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master
desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the
end of them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked:
What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!” The preacher, in-
stead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end
of the week — for Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and
not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one — with this one other
draggle-tail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, “Pause!
Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?”

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundless truths, while reality
is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow
themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we
know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and
poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and
wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent
and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the
shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing
the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men
establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere,
which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play
life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to
live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is,
by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that “there was a king’s son,

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who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a
forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to
belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father’s
ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the
misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be
a prince. So soul,” continues the Hindoo philosopher, “from the circum-
stances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth
is revealed to it by some holy teacher and then it knows itself to be
Brahme.” I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean
life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of
things. We think that that is which appears to be. If a man should walk
through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would the
“Milldam” go to? If he should give us an account of the realities he be-
held there, we should not recognize the place in his description. Look at
the meetinghouse, or a courthouse, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-
house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they
would all go to pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth re-
mote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before
Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true
and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and
here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be
more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend
at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and
drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and
obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow,
the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The
poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his
posterity at least could accomplish it.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off
the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.
Let us rise early and fast, or breakfast, gently and without perturbation;
let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children
cry — determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and
go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible
rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows.
Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is downhill.
With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another
way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till
it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will
consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves and
work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opin-
ion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that al-
luvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New

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York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through po-
etry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and
rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake;
and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a
place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamppost safely,
or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages
might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered
from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact,
you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter,
and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and
so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we
crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our
throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about
our business.

Time is but the stream I go afishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I
see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides
away but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose
bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first let-
ter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise
as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its
way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my
hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best fac-
ulties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ
for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and
with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that
the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and
thin rising vapors, I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

[1854]

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