The Simple Life
In "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," Thoreau urges, "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." This passage is one of the most frequently quoted from all of Thoreau's writings. Throughout Walden, Thoreau devotes considerable attention to the subject of the simple life. In "Economy," he presents the details of his simple, efficient, self-reliant life at Walden Pond, calculating the costs of shelter, food, clothing, and other necessities to the half penny. He is so specific and precise that many readers have approached Walden as a manifesto of particular social, economic, and political points of view, in the process sometimes overlooking Thoreau's larger purpose in describing his life at the pond.
Thoreau emphasizes the crushing, numbing effect of materialism and commercialism on the individual's life. Property ownership and technological progress consume men before they have a chance to consider how they might live. The author encourages his contemporaries to be content with less materially. In "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," he tells how he himself came close to purchasing the Hollowell place (a Concord farm), but in the end did not. He thus remains able to enjoy the landscape without obligating himself and giving up his freedom. In "The Bean-Field," he laments the commercialization of agriculture, which has lost its archaic dignity. In "The Village," he exposes the at once comic and grotesque seductiveness of the shops on Concord's Mill Dam, and describes his own hasty escape from town. In "Baker Farm," he sketches the character of John Field, a poor man who regards as necessities tea, coffee, meat, and other dispensables that are obtained only at the cost of precluding higher life. Thoreau's own simple lifestyle contrasts throughout with the multiple, insistent expressions of society's materialism.
But never in Walden does Thoreau suggest that every man should move to Walden Pond, bake his own bread, and grow beans. His experiment in simplicity is but a means to the end of self-realization and spiritualization — not the end itself. He stresses that there may be as many ways of transcending worldly values as there are men. He writes in "Economy":
. . . I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.
There are other approaches than Thoreau's own to the dilemmas that society creates.
At the end of "The Pond in Winter," Thoreau provides a suggestive example of the translation of commercial enterprise into the spiritual realm. He writes of the shipment of Walden ice to Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta, enabling others to drink from his own spiritual well, while at Walden he immerses himself in the Bhagavad Gita. This perfect turning of the tables on materialism underscores that Thoreau's equation of the simple life with the spiritual quest is more subtle than a straightforward correspondence of the two.
