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Walden: Economy

30:16 recording · EN · 1 speaker

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Brief overview

Men enslave themselves to labor and debt when life's true necessaries are only food, shelter, clothing and fuel.

  1. Inherited property makes men serfs of the soilYoung men who inherit farms, houses, barns and cattle are condemned to labor and begin digging their graves as soon as they are born.
  2. Debt and self-imposed slavery breed quiet desperationAnother's brass keeps men promising to pay tomorrow and dying insolvent today, and worst of all is being the slave-driver of yourself.
  3. The necessaries of life reduce to keeping warmFood, shelter, clothing and fuel exist to keep the vital heat in us, and a few implements can be had at a trifling cost.
Executive Summary AI
  • The reader opens Henry David Thoreau's chapter Economy, in which Thoreau explains he lived two years and two months by a pond in Concord, Massachusetts, earning his living by the labor of his hands, and answers his townsmen's questions about what he ate, whether he was lonesome and what he gave to charity.
  • Thoreau says the inhabitants of Concord do penance worse than Brahmins or the twelve labours of Hercules: young men who inherit farms eat their sixty acres, carry a barn seventy-five feet by forty and one hundred acres of land, and begin digging their graves as soon as they are born.
  • Debt, the ancient slough the Latins called aes alienum or another's brass, drives men to lie, flatter and curry favor to get custom, and while a southern or northern overseer is bad, worst of all is being the slave-driver of yourself, so that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
  • He rejects the authority of age, saying that in some thirty years on this planet he has never heard a syllable of valuable advice from his seniors, that old deeds are for old people, and that man's capacities have never been measured because so little has been tried.
  • He reduces the necessaries of life in this climate to food, shelter, clothing and fuel, all of which serve to keep the vital heat, citing Darwin's naked savages of Tierra del Fuego and Leibig's idea that man's body is a stove, and notes that a knife, axe, spade and wheelbarrow cost a trifle while the luxuriously rich are cooked a la mode.
Key Quote
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
— Narrator
Key Quote
“But worst of all, when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”
— Narrator
Key Quote
“It is never too late to give up our prejudices.”
— Narrator

Transcript

0:00 CHAPTER I. ECONOMY by henry david thoreau chapter i economy when i wrote the following pages or rather the bulk of them i Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned
0:48 my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present
0:56 I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
1:00 I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers, if very particular
1:06 inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would
1:12 call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering
1:17 the circumstances, very natural and pertinent.
1:21 Some have asked what I got to eat, if I did not feel lonesome, if I was not afraid, and the like.
1:29 Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes.
1:34 And some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained.
1:40 I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me
1:45 to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book.
1:50 In most books the I, or first person, is omitted. In this it will be retained.
1:58 That, in respect to egotism, is the main difference.
2:01 We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person
2:06 that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself, if there were anybody else whom
2:13 I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.
2:21 Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer every writer first or last a simple and sincere account of his own life and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives
2:35 some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land for if he has lived sincerely it must have been in a distant land to me perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students as for the rest of my readers they will accept such portions as apply to them that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to
3:06 him whom it fits.
3:10 I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and sandwich islanders as you
3:16 who read these pages, who are said to live in New England, something about your condition,
3:23 especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world,
3:26 in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is,
3:32 whether it cannot be improved as well as not.
3:36 I have travelled a good deal in Concord, and everywhere, in shops and offices and fields,
3:42 the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.
3:50 What I have heard of Brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun,
3:57 or hanging suspended with their heads downward over flames, or looking at the heavens over their shoulders,
4:03 until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but
4:09 liquids can pass into their stomach.
4:12 Or dwelling, chained for life at the foot of a tree.
4:16 Or measuring with their bodies like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires.
4:22 Or standing on one leg on the top of pillars. Even these forms
4:27 of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily
4:32 witness. The twelve labours of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my
4:38 neighbours have undertaken, for they were only twelve, and had an end, but I could never see that these men slew or captured
4:47 any monster, or finished any labor. They had no friend, Iolus, to burn with a hot iron the root
4:54 of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up. I see young men my townsmen whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms houses barns cattle and farming called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil?
5:28 Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt?

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