Having provided an example of how his life became fresh and vitally alive, the narrator turns to his readers and asks why they continue to live as drably as they do. He wonders why men persist in living "meanly, like ants" when life can be a joyful celebration. He complains that "our life is frittered away by detail," and that most men's personalities are uncomfortably split into many opposing parts. Holding up his own example of spiritual wholeness, he offers his readers the remedy for spiritual disintegration that he discovered and announced in "Economy": "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand. . . . Simplify, simplify." Moreover, he declares that we should push aside all of the trivialities of life and immediately get down to the real, genuine concerns of life. For example, we should quit wasting our time reading the worthless, repetitive gossip that fills the daily newspapers and seek out the real truths of existence.
The narrator was able to do this, and we watch him as he continues his "burrowing" toward truth; "I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts." As Walden progresses, we shall see the spiritual riches that he "mined" from living at Walden Pond.
