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Simplify, Simplify

25:50 recording · EN · 1 speaker

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Brief overview

Thoreau argues that a life stripped to essentials is the only way to meet reality.

  1. Live deliberately or discover you never livedHe went to the woods to front only the essential facts of life and learn what it had to teach.
  2. Simplicity is a practical instruction, not a moodOne meal instead of three, five dishes instead of a hundred, accounts kept on a thumbnail.
  3. Improvements and news are mostly illusionThe railroad rides upon us, and to a philosopher all news is gossip read by old women over their tea.
Executive Summary AI
  • Reading part two of chapter two of Walden, Thoreau states why he went to the woods: to live deliberately, front only the essential facts of life, and not discover at death that he had never lived.
  • He diagnoses a life frittered away by detail and prescribes the remedy directly — "Simplify, simplify" — three meals cut to one, a hundred dishes cut to five, accounts small enough to keep on a thumbnail.
  • Turning to the age's proudest improvement, he says the railroad rides upon us rather than we on it, and that the sleepers under the track are men, an Irishman or a Yankee, a new lot laid down and run over every few years.
  • He dismisses news and the post-office as gossip — he never received more than one or two letters worth the postage, and holds that the foreign news could be written twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy, England's last significant item being the revolution of 1649.
  • He closes by urging the listener to wedge down through opinion, prejudice, tradition and appearance to a hard bottom that can be called reality — a place to set a realometer — and says the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts, where he will begin to mine.
Key Quote
“i went to the woods because i wished to live deliberately”
— Henry David Thoreau
Key Quote
“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life”
— Henry David Thoreau
Key Quote
“Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary, eat but one.”
— Henry David Thoreau

Transcript

0:00 CHAPTER II. walden by henry david thoreau chapter two part two i went to the woods because i wished to live deliberately
0:34 to front only the essential facts of life and see if i could not learn what it had to teach and not when i when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
0:47 I did not wish to live what was not life. Living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation,
0:57 unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,
1:07 to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life,
1:14 to cut a broad swath and shave close,
1:18 to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms,
1:24 and, if it proved to be mean, why then to
1:28 get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world? Or,
1:35 if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
1:47 For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil
1:54 or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to to, quote, glorify God and enjoy Him forever, end quote.
2:08 Still we live meanly, like ants, though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed
2:16 into men.
2:18 Like pygmies we fight with cranes.
2:23 It is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has
2:29 for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by
2:38 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 or three, and not a hundred or a thousand. Instead of a million, count half a dozen,
3:08 and keep your accounts on your thumbnail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life,
3:18 such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and- one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live,
3:27 if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning,
3:32 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.
3:55 Our life is like a German confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is
4:07 bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements,
4:16 which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and
4:23 overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps,
4:31 ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as for them is in rigid economy a stern and more ice and talk through a telegraph and ride thirty miles an hour,
5:11 without a doubt whether they do or not.
5:13 But whether we should live like baboons or like men is a little uncertain.
5:23 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 How shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads?
5:51 We do not ride on the railroad.
5:56 It rides upon us.
6:00 Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad each one is a man an irishman or a yankee man and the cars run smoothly over them.
6:29 They are sound sleepers, I assure you,
6:34 and every few years a new lot is laid down and run over,
6:38 so that if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail,
6:42 others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.
6:50 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
6:56 hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of
7:04 men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is for this is a sign that they may some time get up again

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