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Simplicity and Self-Reliance

38:36 recording · EN · 1 speaker

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Brief overview

Thoreau argues that simplicity, not luxury, frees a man: clothing, shelter and work should serve life itself.

  1. Luxury hinders rather than helpsHe calls most luxuries and many comforts positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind, and notes the wisest have lived more simply than the poor.
  2. Professing philosophy is not living itThere are professors of philosophy but not philosophers; the test is loving wisdom enough to live by its dictates, solving life's problems practically and not only theoretically.
  3. Judge the wearer, not the clothesA man considers not what is truly respectable but what is respected, so Thoreau warns against any enterprise that requires new clothes rather than a new wearer of clothes.
Executive Summary AI
  • Opening the second part of Walden's first chapter, Thoreau states that most luxuries and many so-called comforts are not merely dispensable but positive hindrances, and that the ancient philosophers of China, India, Persia and Greece were poorest outwardly and richest inwardly.
  • He distinguishes professing from living, saying there are nowadays professors of philosophy but not philosophers, and that to be a philosopher is to live a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
  • He recounts the unpaid callings he gave himself in Concord — self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, surveyor of forest paths, herdsman of the town's wild stock — accounts he swears he kept faithfully but never got audited, accepted or paid, and likens his writing to the strolling Indian's unsold baskets, choosing to avoid the necessity of selling rather than learn to sell.
  • Turning to clothing, he says its object is first to retain vital heat and second to cover nakedness, mocks men judged by their coats rather than their conscience, and prices a whole serviceable suit at five dollars for a thick coat, two dollars for pantaloons, a dollar and a half for cowhide boots, a quarter for a summer hat and sixty-two and a half cents for a winter cap.
  • On shelter he concedes a house is now a necessary of life, cites Samuel Lang on the Laplander sleeping on snow and Gookin writing in 1674 that Indian wigwams sixty to a hundred feet long were as warm as the best English houses, and proposes that a six-foot railroad toolbox bought for a dollar would already buy a man freedom from rent.
Key Quote
“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.”
— Gordon McKenzie
Key Quote
“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.”
— Gordon McKenzie
Key Quote
“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail.”
— Gordon McKenzie

Transcript

0:00 CHAPTER I. This reading by Gordon McKenzie. Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
0:28 Chapter 1. Librivox Part 2.
0:34 Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life
0:38 are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts,
0:49 the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor.
0:54 The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindu, Persian, and Greek,
0:59 were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches,
1:04 none so rich in inward.
1:08 We know not much about them.
1:11 It is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do.
1:15 The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race.
1:22 None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life, but from the
1:27 vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is
1:36 luxury, whether in agriculture or commerce or literature or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable
1:48 to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to
1:55 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
2:13 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,
2:27 not manly.
2:29 They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are
2:36 in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men.
2:40 But why do men degenerate ever?
2:43 What makes families run out?
2:51 What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations?
2:56 Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives?
3:03 The philosopher is in advance of his age, even in the outward form of his life.
3:08 He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed,
3:14 like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men? When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described.
3:27 What does he want next?
3:30 Surely not more warmth of the same kind,
3:32 as more and richer food,
3:35 larger and more splendid houses,
3:38 finer and more abundant clothing,
3:43 more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like.
3:47 When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities, and that is to
3:55 adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.
4:01 The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radical downward,
4:10 and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself
4:17 thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above.
4:25 For the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far
4:32 from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which, though they

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