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91 Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

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 quicksands 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 necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and

reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German

Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary for-

ever 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 ex-

ternal and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown

establishment, 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 land; 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 es-

sential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and

talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, with-

out 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 out 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

90 Walden

worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical

hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry informa-

tion as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this

might be done.

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 practise resignation, 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 excursion. 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

concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God

and enjoy him forever.”

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 detail. 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

WALDEN HENRY D. THOREAU

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The Library shows real editions with their publishers’ covers: Walden (Vintage Classics, 2017) · Meditations (Modern Library) · Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) · The Design of Everyday Things (Basic Books, 2013) · Cosmos (Ballantine Books, 2013) · Sapiens (Vintage, 2015) · Silent Spring (Mariner Books, 2002). Cover designs belong to their publishers.