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    Walden In Plain and Simple English (Includes Study Guide, Complete Unabridged Book, Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index)
    Walden In Plain and Simple English (Includes Study Guide, Complete Unabridged Book, Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index)
    Walden In Plain and Simple English (Includes Study Guide, Complete Unabridged Book, Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index)
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    Walden In Plain and Simple English (Includes Study Guide, Complete Unabridged Book, Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index)

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    About this ebook

    Walden was Henry David Thoreau magnum opus. It also can be difficult to understand--it is loaded with themes, imagery, and symbols. If you need a little help understanding it, let BookCaps help with this study guide.

    Along with chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis, this book features the full text of Thoreau’s classic novel is also included. A short biography about the life and times of Thoreau is also included.

    BookCap Study Guides are not meant to be purchased as alternatives to reading the book.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookCaps
    Release dateSep 24, 2012
    ISBN9781301239580
    Walden In Plain and Simple English (Includes Study Guide, Complete Unabridged Book, Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index)
    Author

    BookCaps

    We all need refreshers every now and then. Whether you are a student trying to cram for that big final, or someone just trying to understand a book more, BookCaps can help. We are a small, but growing company, and are adding titles every month.Visit www.bookcaps.com to see more of our books, or contact us with any questions.

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      Walden In Plain and Simple English (Includes Study Guide, Complete Unabridged Book, Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index) - BookCaps

      Chapter Summary

      Economy

      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.

      Inspired in equal measure by his friend, poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Transcendentalist movement that they were both a pretty significant part of, Thoreau takes a kitchen sink approach to the details of his two-year experiment. He treats this opening section of the book as a diary; as a how-to guide on thrifty living; as a humorless manifesto/sermon about the evils of modern society; and as an exercise in the flowery admiration for nature that weaves its way throughout the rest of the book.

      One popular criticism at the time of the book’s release holds true: it hits you over the head with the minutia of the experiment. In Thoreau’s defense, he remains well-aware of his own flaws and contradictions throughout.

      His excitement throughout this opening chapter is palpable. As he lines out his two-year effort to live a life of pure self-reliance and self-reflection in the woods surrounding Walden Pond, he giddily details the questions and dismissals he immediately began receiving from friends and neighbors. How would he eat? Wouldn’t he be desperately lonely? Some even scoff at the notion that his undertaking is even remotely difficult: someone sarcastically asks him how many young children he’ll be supporting during his time in the woods.

      Ignoring the criticisms, he begins building himself a house on land located about two miles away from his family home, given to him by Emerson in exchange for a little manual labor. In explaining the economy of his adventure, Thoreau lists the entirety of his expenditures over the duration of the experiment. He spends around 28 dollars on the house, the equivalent of a little under 900 dollars in today’s money. With the house built, he is free to live in it and spend his days doing whatever he pleases for the indefinite future.

      Thoreau spends a vast deal of the chapter discussing modern society and its impact on the world. It’s difficult to imagine in the age of cell phones and megamalls, but lots of people in the mid-1800s were already gravely concerned that simple living and self-sufficiency were being supplanted by rampant materialism and the thoughtless destruction of nature. Thoreau makes it pretty clear that he’s got a rabid disdain for work, at least in the traditional sense:

      "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

      The main crux of Thoreau’s argument, though coded in the esoteric language of the time, is simple: working longer and harder to afford luxuries is entirely soul-crushing, while casting aside everything but the simplest needs (a home, food, clothes and fuel) is a surefire path to true freedom. Thoreau equates the slavery of labor with African-American slavery, which he was also firmly against.

      The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot.

      It should be noted that Thoreau never claimed to be 100% self-sufficient. Indeed, he built a house on borrowed land, occasionally borrowed tools, and wasn’t isolated in the strictest sense of the word; he had many visitors and regularly visited Concord, a town near Walden Pond. He also kept several things, which could be considered luxuries: stationary, a lamp and several books. Thoreau was not an extremist.

      Where I lived, and What I Lived For

      I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

      Thoreau begins this chapter by recounting his furtive attempts to purchase a farm. He had made a catalog in his mind of every conceivable piece of property within twelve miles of his family home, and he had even visited a few. He tells us that he eventually did buy one, though the owner’s wife quickly forced him to change his mind about the deal. The owner felt so bad that he offered Thoreau 10 dollars as an apology, but Thoreau refused.

      For a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

      Instead, he flashes forward to the move-in date at his new home: July 4th, 1845. He assures the reader that moving to Walden on America’s Independence Day is just a coincidence, but the claim seems dubious. Coincidence or not, the significance of that day is certainly understood by him. He is officially the true owner of all that surrounds him, completely free to live life on his own terms. He is overjoyed.

      His descriptions of his new surroundings are downright poetic. His appreciation for the pond is intense. He takes particular note of the birds that he can hear in the woods, but not in his family home just a couple miles away: the wood thrush, the scarlet tanager, the field sparrow and the whip-poor-will are just a few of the new songbirds be enjoys.

      I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them.

      Thoreau describes waking up early each morning and bathing in the pond, not just for cleanliness, but as a kind of religious ritual, a daily spiritual rebirth. He then segues into a diatribe about workers and the exhaustion of civilized life, revealing that, in his mind, only a select few people are awake enough to lead a divine, poetic life. Mostly, they’re only awake enough to labor mindlessly.

      To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

      He turns his eye to a pair of modern day conveniences: the post office and the daily newspaper. He finds nothing much of value in either one, matter-of-factly concluding that only one or two of the many letters he’s received in his entire life were worth the value of the postage it cost to send them.

      He was even more scornful of newspapers:

      If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read of another.

      Though he’s subtle about it, Thoreau also works in a few digs at Christianity. He thinks that it’s probably a little premature to conclude that man’s purpose on earth is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

      Reading

      Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing.

      Thoreau mentions that he’s kept Homer’s immortal classic The Iliad on a table for the entire summer, barely reading a page of it while he put the finishing touches on his house and tended to his small bean field. He tells us that he’s kept himself working hard by using the eventual reading time as a reward for a job well done, allowing himself to read only trashy travel books until the work is done.

      He then begins yet another diatribe, this one a little harder to swallow, especially in modern times: he suggests that everyone should learn to read the classic, ancient books of the world in the language they were originally written. Anything else, to Thoreau’s mind, would be cheating.

      The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

      Thoreau goes on to insult the surrounding town of Concord, informing the reader that even the most educated of its citizens are little more than simpletons, unfamiliar with the awe-inspiring majesty of great literature:

      By the end of the chapter, Thoreau is pretty much boiling over with manic anger. It’s an effective reminder that Thoreau is just a tourist in the woods; he’s a Harvard-educated man who has chosen a temporary poverty as a philosophical experiment.

      I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked—goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot.

      It’s this pretentiousness that confuses readers: how can a man argue for the simplification of life to its barest essentials while simultaneously belittling the townspeople for their apparent disregard for higher education? Thoreau doesn’t provide any answers, except to say that instead of creating a small noble class of intellectuals, we should instead strive for noble villages of men.

      Sounds

      Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

      Thoreau begins this chapter by imploring his readers to not devote themselves entirely to books, but to also remain vigilant for your own truths, to be glimpsed with your eyes. In essence, he wishes the world to not be just students, but also creators and recorders of reality.

      He describes his first summer, as before, as being largely free from reading as a pastime. While he was busy tending to his beans, he would also occasionally just sit in his doorway for hours, wasting the day away with daydreams. In his stillness, he says, he learned quite a bit more than books could ever have taught him, saying that he grew like corn in the night during that summer.

      The absence of any sense of schedule or rigidity was freeing to Thoreau in innumerable ways. His ability to shrug off an entire day, not as wasted, but as spent in a sort-of spiritual reverie, was essential to his objective.

      His stillness is soon interrupted by the Fitchburg Railroad, a daily commuter train that runs alongside Walden Pond. The train reminds Thoreau that he is not exactly away from it all, and progress marcher forward with or without his participation in it. He is, at times, accepting of commerce, but he worries that too much attention paid to business might subvert the better qualities of humanity.

      I will not have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke, and steam, and hissing.

      At night, Thoreau can hear the screaming of owls. He compares the sound to a passionate wail that men would make, if only they had the courage. Though the sounds are jarring, he is thankful for the owls and all of the other animals that are now a part of his constant personal soundtrack:

      They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.

      Solitude

      To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude,

      In this chapter, the reader finds Thoreau, despite the railroad incident from the last chapter, fully engaged with nature. He is so enraptured and overjoyed at the natural wonder of his surroundings that he has difficulty putting it into words. He concludes that nobody could ever be truly depressed while surrounded by nature, assuming that the person still has all five senses.

      He then recounts a statement one of the naysayers had made to him:

      I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially.

      He finds the idea ridiculous now, as he feels more at peace and at home with nature than ever. He believes that nature is, in fact, a superior society to the nearby human one. He maintains that he is no lonelier than Walden Pond itself, which is to say not at all.

      He is deeply happy to be mostly free from the gossip of Concord, which he believes to be poisonous to the soul. Instead, he spends time with an old man who reportedly dug Walden Pond and an older woman with an herb garden who tells him fables. He doesn’t say whether these two people actually exist, but he hints that they might not. He says that the man is thought to be dead but that no one can find the body and that the woman is invisible to most people. He could be using these imaginary people to stave off the loneliness, fear, and boredom of winter in the nighttime:

      I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

      Visitors

      I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.

      While Thoreau is somewhat isolated during his time at Walden Pond, he spent a lot of time entertaining visitors to his humble cabin. In fact, he describes an occasion during which his small space held upwards of twenty-five people. He has three chairs in his home, one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society. Thoreau attributes some of the better conversations he has in the woods with the obvious fact that it takes a greater effort to reach him there, thus cutting down on the unimportant, everyday conversations that society usually forces on people:

      Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.

      Thoreau goes on to discuss Alex Therien, the Canadian woodchopper he often visits with. In him, Thoreau believes, he has found the closest possible approximation of the ideal type of man. He is quiet and contemplative, though hardworking. He lives an incredibly simple existence, which Thoreau, somewhat cruelly, calls an animal life. He remarks that, despite his lack of education, he has a mind as deep as Walden Pond itself.

      In his detailed summary of Therien’s attributes, he takes pains to point out his simplicity, and while he’s ostensibly complimenting him, he also seems to make it obvious that the woodchopper is just a touch beneath him.

      I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise.

      He describes many other visitors to his cabin. He tells of people asking for a glass of water as an excuse for calling on him, and of Thoreau directing them to drink from the pond, as he did. He mentions entertaining what he describes as half-wits in his home, forcing them to exercise what little verbal skill they possessed. Some of his visitors, he laments, were objects of charity, people who refused to help themselves. Thoreau had no patience for this kind of person, saying that he requires his visitors to not be starving. Many of these people, Thoreau says, didn’t know when a visit was over.

      Thoreau mentions, in passing, that one of the men he entertained was a runaway slave. He quickly mentions that he helped the man on his way to Canada. Thoreau’s main take-away from his experience with visitors is that women and children are far more fascinated with the woods and the pond than any of the men he encounters.

      The Bean Field

      This chapter marks a return to the meticulous nature of the beginning of the book. Thoreau gives an incredibly detailed overview of his experience with farming while at Walden. He sells his crop for $23.44, (around $697.00 in today’s money). His total expenditures were around $14.72, ($437.00 today), leaving him with a profit of $8.71 ½, (roughly $259.00 today).

      Despite the (relatively) handsome profit that he makes for his effort, Thoreau insists that his main purpose was not money, or even sustenance. He wanted only to prove his own self-discipline. Thoreau opines that the true aim of farming shouldn’t be to cultivate food, but rather to cultivate the farmer himself.

      While planting, he is somewhat surprised to discover that the area he’d chosen to cultivate was not as unused and nutrient-rich as he’d previously thought. He finds arrowheads and pieces of pottery, evidence that Indians had already tended the land, long ago. He refers to them as the ashes of unchronicled nations. He describes the rains that come and help his crops to grow, and the dangerous woodchucks who threaten it.

      Later, he tells us that nature is as it should be, indifferent to the success or failure of mankind’s crops, just as mankind is indifferent to the needs of the woodchuck. He advises farmers, somewhat naively, to pay less attention to whether their crops grow or not:

      The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.

      The Village

      Thoreau begins this chapter by describing his routine: after doing the day’s chores, he will usually take a second bath in Walden Pond. Most days, he’d then head for Concord (which he refers to as the village) to hear some gossip. He describes his trips in much the same language he uses to describe his nature walks, which serves to emphasize and illustrate his disconnect from society:

      As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle.

      He describes the main thoroughfare of the town as a gauntlet, one that he is proud to run without disturbing or being disturbed. He does his best to avoid engaging in any commerce whatsoever, but he does occasionally purchase a few items.

      One day, toward the end of summer, Thoreau heads to town in order to procure a shoe from a local cobbler. While nearing his destination, he was arrested and put into the jail. Charged with failing to pay taxes, he was released the next day. He reasons that he will not respect the authority of any government who would allow slavery to thrive; subjugating men (and women) who Thoreau felt were at least equal, if not superior to their owners. He quickly points out that, though he knew he’d willfully broken the law, he did not begin his experiment as a way to escape jail:

      I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

      After his release, he cheerfully picks up the shoe from the cobbler and heads home. He mentions that he takes a special pride in being able to find his way to and from the woods on even the darkest of nights. He tells a story of instructing two visitors to his home on how to get back to the village, and then discovering that they’d spent the better part of the night wandering around the woods, soaking wet with rain. Thoreau marvels that some men can’t even find their way around the village in the dark.

      He ends the chapter by describing the complete lack of security that he maintains for his home. He has no locks to speak of, but he’d never been robbed, even during a couple of extended absences. He mentions that only one item went missing, a particularly fancy-looking volume of the works of Homer, but he suspected that whoever borrowed it had simply forgotten to return it. He believes that materialism breeds robbery, and that the solution to the problem is obvious:

      I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.

      The Ponds

      This chapter opens with Thoreau, growing tired of the village and all its gossip, heading west in search of new areas in which to wander. He describes picking and eating huckleberries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and he laments the fact that most people who think they’re eating those fruits aren’t; the true flavor will apparently disappear shortly after picking, and consequently, a huckleberry never reaches Boston.

      Thoreau mentions an old man who is mostly deaf, who he would fish with. He recalls that their discourse, though completely silent, was more pleasant and intellectually satisfying than if it had been spoken. They enjoyed a quiet harmony, he concludes.

      Thoreau then speaks in glowing terms about the surroundings he’s come to know. Though Walden Pond is small and, to the untrained eye, pretty much unremarkable, he is fascinated by its depth and purity. He explains the variation in color (green to blue) as if he’s describing the way diamonds might look in a jeweler’s loop. Thoreau says that people often claim that Walden Pond is bottomless

      The water, when swimming in it, is so clear that the bottom can be seen from a depth of about twenty-five or thirty feet, he says. He recalls a time, years past, when he had been cutting holes in the ice during winter, trying to catch pickerel. As he stepped back on the shore, he clumsily tossed his axe back onto the ice, sending it flying into one of the holes. He lay down on the ice to watch it, twenty-five feet down, crystal clear and swaying in the gentle current. He marveled at it for a few moments before retrieving it.

      He ponders the origin of the name Walden, and decides that it could be named as such because the pond is man-made and walled-in with beautiful white stones. He remarks that the surrounding hills have the same stones.

      Thoreau then gives a short history of the rise and fall of the water line. Giving Walden Pond an almost human character, he insists that the pond rises and falls in order to keep the trees and bushes from growing too close to its shore. After all, Thoreau surmises, the pond has an inalienable right to a shore.

      Thoreau repeats a tale told to him by the oldest people he knows, who describe being told the story as children. According to the story, long ago, in ancient times, a group of Indians were having a pow-wow on a nearby hill that was incredibly tall. They used so much profanity that God shook the hill and made it sink until it was the deep pond that Thoreau now lives near. The story concludes with only a single Indian survivor: an old squaw named Walden, who the pond was eventually named after:

      It has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one.

      Baker Farm and Higher Laws

      Thoreau is once again roaming the countryside, waxing poetic about pine groves, birch trees, and hemlock. He refers to these individual examples of nature as his shrines, which he visits in the summer and the winter. He describes accidentally standing in the middle of a rainbow, the dazzling colors of which filled everything within his sight. He describes it as a lake of rainbow light, which he bathes in like a dolphin. Then, he describes walking along the railroad tracks and pondering the halo effect he could see around him on the ground:

      As I walked on the railroad causeway, I used to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect. One who visited me declared that the shadows of some Irishmen before him had no halo about them, that it was only natives that were so distinguished.

      He then begins to make his way to Fair Haven to fish. While walking to his destination, he nears Baker Farm and reminisces about his possible interest in living there before settling on the idea of living in Walden. Suddenly, it begins to thunder so loudly that it overtakes him. He seeks shelter in the nearest hut, a home occupied by a man named John Field.

      Field, alongside his wife and children, take him in and give him shelter from the storm. Rather than gratefully accept their kindness, what follows is a mostly cruel description of the family’s poverty and character. Their youngest child is recalled by Thoreau variously as cone-headed and a poor starveling brat. John Fields’ wife is described as having a round, greasy face. While he describes John Field himself as honest and hard-working, he also calls him shiftless:

      I tried to help him with my experience, telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that I too, who came a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was getting my living like himself; that I lived in a tight, light, and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly amounts to.

      Thoreau lectures him about his use of coffee, tea, milk, and meat. He tells him that he’s wasting his life, working too hard to provide his family things they do not truly need. He imagines that they are taking in his words and wondering if they are smart enough to follow through with his ideas. Once the rain lets up, Thoreau leaves, heading for the river. Later, he notices that John Field has does the same.

      Thoreau recounts that Field couldn’t catch a fish to save his life and that Thoreau himself had already taken several fish from the pond. They switch seats, and find that Field might just be unlucky.

      While walking home in the dark, Thoreau encounters a woodchuck. He is suddenly gripped with an overwhelming desire to eat it. He contemplates the dual-sided nature of humanity: the savage and the noble. He believes that hunting is essential as a rite of passage into adulthood but that truly spiritual people should eventually leave it behind.

      Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome.

      Thoreau tells the reader that he’d sold his gun before entering the woods and that he feels it immoral to shoot birds and game. He is struggling, however, with the notion of fishing. He’s always been a skilled fisherman, but he’s suddenly reluctant to eat fish, thinking it not particularly nourishing or clean. He is leaning towards vegetarianism, philosophically.

      He eschews alcohol and doesn’t drink coffee or tea. He is beginning to believe in a sustenance only diet, eating only the simplest, easiest foods. He’s doing this, he says, to avoid indulgence and animalistic behavior. While he doesn’t always succeed at using his higher instincts, he believes that the pursuit of nobility is just as good as attaining it.

      Brute Neighbors

      Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing?

      Thoreau begins this chapter with an interesting dialogue between a hermit (Thoreau) and a poet (Ellery Channing). It’s an amalgam, presumably, of many of their conversations. The poet meditates on the eloquence of clouds while the hermit, ever practical, is more concerned with fishing. At the end of their day, the poet regrets that he hasn’t caught any fish.

      Thoreau then tells of the mice that haunted his house. Not the type commonly found in Concord proper, one of them makes a nest underneath the house before he’s even finished it. He assumes that these woodland creatures have never seen a man before, but nevertheless, they make themselves at home, eating Thoreau’s crumbs, climbing over his shoes, and eventually even climbing on Thoreau himself. Thoreau mentions that he fed one mouse a small piece of cheese. He seems happy to play with his brute neighbors.

      In addition to the rodents that share his home, Thoreau frequently encounters birds; a phoebe, a robin, and a family of partridges. He jokingly refers to them as his hens. He sees ducks and otters, and even housecats. He occasionally encounters raccoons. He is astounded and impressed by their ability to live off the humans in Concord while effectively hiding from them.

      One day, Thoreau notices a large black ant fighting with much smaller red ant. Upon closer inspection, Thoreau finds an epic battle between two warring armies. Though the black ants dwarf the diminutive red ants, the black ants are far outnumbered. It reminds Thoreau of human war. He realizes that this is the only real battle he has ever seen. He removes a few of the ants with a wood chip and takes them home. He watches the small skirmish under a microscope. Two of the ants are decapitated. He lets the last one go.

      House-Warming

      Thoreau goes out in search of fruits and nuts, only to marvel at how much of it has been taken from the area for commercial use. Still, he finds all the berries he can eat. While walking, he begins to notice the leaves changing; a surefire signal that winter is coming. He heads to the other side of the pond where the sun is still a little bit warm. The wasps, he tells us, begin to come inside his house, looking for a place to hibernate. He takes it as a compliment and decides that it’s time to join

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