I.
A brief introduction of Henry David Thoreau
A) Superficial simplicity
B) Inward richness
II.
Analysis of Thoreau’s thought of simple life
A) Walden – an exponent book of simple life
B) Thoreau’s attempt to find truth and meaning through
simplified living
a) Live a simple life
b) Pursue a spiritual pursuit.
III.
Thoreau’s reputation and impact
IV.
The application of Thoreau’s thought of simple life
V.
Conclusion
The Strength of Simplicity
The mass of men lead lives of quite desperation.
I love my fate to the very core and rind
– Walden
[1845-1847]
Among all of the writers of American, no one horns for simple more eagerly
than Henry David Thoreau do, yet few are more complex to be understood.
Thoreau’ life itself is quite a good example. It is quite obvious that Thoreau has had
a good chance to be a wealth man, since he was a Harvard graduate. Had he so
chosen, he might have studied some popular subjects like law, business or politics
and then hitched his wagon to the star of a traditional career, living the so-called
“American dream”. But all through his life, he lives as craftsman, a loafer, a hermit,
above all, an eccentric.
Actually, the facts of Thoreau's life are appropriately spare for one who wrote,
"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a
hundred or a thousand. . ." He was born July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts;
graduated from Harvard College in 1837; made a living primarily by surveying
land and helping with the family pencil-making and ground lead business, though
he taught school for several years when he was in his 20s and lectured from time to
time from 1838 until 1860; traveled rarely (but almost always wrote about it when
he did); and died at the age of 44 on May 6, 1862. Neither he nor any of his three
siblings married; his only brother died in 1842 and one sister in 1849.
Moreover, Thoreau’s literary choice is apparently another mystery. He is
remembered for being at odds with his culture, what is more, he paid little effort to
achieve his fame, even his close associate and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson
disappointed that Thoreau did not turn his energy to greater intellectual influence
(thoreau331-32). It is not that he cares little about his literary career. On the
contrary, he probably decided sometime during college that he wanted writing to
be his life's work. Apart from an early essay about the seasons that may not be
authentic, Thoreau's first surviving compositions are those he wrote for college
classes in English that included composition, logic, and public speaking. Later, his
famous book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers appeared. During his
lifetime, Henry Thoreau wrote and wrote and wrote—essays, books, poems,
translations, letters and journal entries. His largest, most impressive work, the
journal he kept, contains over two million words! So much he loved writing, only a
small part of his works had been published when he was alive, and none of those
published ones have been sold well. As a matter of fact, he had to support himself
at the various other jobs he held in order to keep writing. He did some painting,
gardening, and hauling jobs, and he worked in the family pencil-making business,
and as a surveyor for local landowners.
If you want to simplify his character, Thoreau himself has a famous saying:
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a
different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or
far away."
Probably Thoreau is just the man who “hears a different drummer”.
As he recommended to others, Thoreau actively sought this simplicity in his
circumstances in order to enjoy extraordinary richness in his intellectual and
spiritual life, his writings testify to his success. Ignored at first, he gradually
gained recognition. Two hundred years passed, what he wrote now has become an
important part of our heritage. And today it is just and necessary to read Thoreau
as a man of "simple and high thinking", who committed to achieving simple, just
and sustainable ways of life.
Among all of his writings, Walden is the most influential one. It is about the
cycle of his life at Walden Pond, a lake about two miles away from the center of
Concord, Massachusetts. On his personal day of independence, July 4, 1845,
Thoreau moved into his one-room cabin, a home that he had built for himself on the
shores of Walden Pond. He stayed there for two years, two months and two days,
living a life of voluntary simplicity and writing the books "A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers" and "Walden."
Thoreau’s own famous statement of
purpose in Walden is remarkable for the vigor of its verbs: he intends, he says, “to
live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” He does not “wish to
practice resignation”; rather he wants to “live deep and suck all the marrow of life,”
“to live…sturdily,” “to put, to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and
shave close, to drive life into a corner” When he left, he had done what he declared
he was going to do...to live deliberately
In order to live deliberately, Thoreau decided it is necessary not to work six
days and rest one day, but to reduce one’s need enough and work efficiently
enough so that one day’s work would be sufficient to allow six days of leisure for
more important pursuits. Such plans led his neighbors to conclude – logically
enough by their standards – that he wanted to loaf. By writing Walden, Thoreau
demonstrated that none of his purposes for going to the pond allowed for loafing:
There were all of the concord woods to study, a book to write, and in the summer a
bean – field to be hoed. (For Thoreau, intellectual and spiritual labor was every bit
as strenuous as physical labor.)
According to these facts, it is logical to assume that Thoreau has been
stimulated by the natural things he found in life; he went to Walden to shun any
artificial. According to him, the manufactured collections that most of us work on
through our lives are bogus -- and costly: we sweat, we labor, we toil and we worry
but we rarely ask ourselves to what purpose. Happily for Thoreau, a ticket to
nature is free and the only answer is to live happily and simply. For Thoreau this
could not only be done inexpensively, but only could be done, indeed, if one lived
simply, with few possessions. So we can say that Walden is an exponent book of
Thoreau’s simple life.
In this sense, one can see to Walden as having three functional parts. In part
one, mostly in the first chapter, Thoreau defines what he sees as the major problem
of his time, how work and the acquisition of material goods can consume your life.
Henry did not want to live out his life, then "when I came to die, discover that I had
not lived." Part Two, especially in the first, second, and seventh chapters, Thoreau
describes his own experiment in living a simple life. While careful not to recommend
his own specific lifestyle, Henry does make a genuine effort to test his ideas and
follow his own advice. Part three is his (and our) reward for having focused on what
is really important.
Economy is always the methods and materials we think can get us to the
destination we set for ourselves. And maybe it is the reason why Thoreau begins
his fascinating discussion of the simple life by economy.
But apparently, economy
has a totally different meaning to Thoreau. He sum up his idea here in his advice to
“simplify, simplify” Through his experiment at Walden Pond, Thoreau attempts “to
live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if
only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been
taken to attain them”(w 11)
To explain his idea vividly, Thoreau made a short list of “necessaries”, which
conspicuously omits the essential elements of capitalism: money. “Money,” he
asserts, “is not required to buy one necessary of the soul”(w 329). If money is
unessential, then so is work, which Thoreau defines as any activity done solely to
obtain money. By this definition, “as for work, we haven’t any of consequence” (W
93). Any activity done out of true necessity or love then becomes “not a hardship
but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely” (W 70).
Thoreau defines a necessity as anything “so important to human life that
few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do
without it” (W12). These he reduces at first to four: clothing, shelter, food, and fuel.
Clothing, he complains, has become more fashion than necessity. People are more
concerned, he finds, “to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes,
than to have a sound conscience” (W22). We do not need new clothes for our
journey, because “a man who has at length found something to do will not need to
get a new suit to do it in” for “if there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be
made to fit?” (W23)
New England tastes in housing also run to the merely fashionable and
luxurious, he complains, while not more that half the families actually own houses.
Whereas some build palaces without having the noble character to deserve them,
others live in unheated shanties that, Thoreau points out (W 34), line the railroad
tracks throughout New England. Thoreau’s one-room cabin with its six modest
pieces of furniture thus becomes the antithesis of the fancy homes described in
house pattern books by such architects as Andrew Jackson Downing (Masteller).
Regarding food Thoreau was not a complete vegetarian – he records
experimenting with woodchuck meat – but he describes his diet at Walden as
consisting mostly of such simple staples as “rye and Indian meal without yeast,
potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses, and salt, and my drink water”(W61).
Even when he dined with his family in town, his mother served excellent bread,
vegetables, fruit, and occasionally pies or puddings but not meat (Harding 86)
Clothing, shelter, and food all finally serve the one purpose of fuel, however,
“to keep the vital heat in us” (W13). The key to living therefore becomes to maintain
our physical vital heat by the most economical (that is, the simplest) method,
thereby producing the maximum amount of the only cabin that is ultimately real:
time. “The cost of a thing,” he reminds us, “is the amount of what I will call life
which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run”(W 31) As
an example of the superiority of valuing time rather than money, he uses the
example of traveling thirty miles, a typical day’s travel in his day, he will cover that
distance more quickly than the traveler who travels by railroad but must first spend
a day earning the ninety cents for a ticket. As he walks he can enjoy the landscape
and people along the way as well (W53). The true value of time, however, is not in
producing material goods or service such as railroad travel but in producing
spiritual and psychological capital in the form of self-culture.
Thoreau seems to like to make analogies using traveling. It is interesting to
notice that Thoreau himself presented Walden as, among other things, a travel
book, which was a popular genre of his day, and himself as the tour guide. But it
is not to be an account of mere tourism; it is to record the quest of a student, a
seeker after truth. It is to be “a simple and sincere account of his own life…some
such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land” To put it
simply, Walden is a journey of what Sherman Paul has called “inward
exploration.” He begins the tour guide by discuss “where we lived an what we lived
for”, hinting that we’ve sunk in a swamp of complicity. “Shall we always study to
obtain more of these things,” he asks, and not something less?” (W36). This advice
strikes to the heart of capitalist economics by asserting that less is more and that
it is not material objects but spiritual development that we should seek. One
travels through life best by simplifying bodily needs to leave more time and energy
for pursuing transcendental reality.
Since he rejected authoritarianism and totalitarianism in any form, he
never tries to give directions during his inward exploration. But more than a half
of Walden is spent writing about the truth and meaning he has found through
simplified living. In Henry's case, it is mostly Nature he has been pursuing; the
capital "N" indicates his belief that the study of Nature is a spiritual pursuit. This
idea would not be hard to understand, a lot of our ancestors have kind of a
“hermit complex”. For instances, the famous poet Tao Yuanming has many
well-written natural poems. Through they seemed to be same, Thoreau found
something new in nature. Instead of turning off the society as a hermit, Thoreau
wants to make use of nature to fulfill human beings’ lives. As one of his early
memories suggests: staying awake at night, he “looking through the stars to see if
he could see God behind them." we might say he never stopped looking into
nature for ultimate Truth. For him, life is boundless, experimental, provisionary,
ever-fluid and unpredictable; whatever the accident of the outer self, the truest self
is inward, secret and inviolable. . . . In Walden, he is not only striving to live within
the harmony and beauty of nature and most of all, he is trying to live life fully with
a clear conscience about the trust self.
Thus, we can say that the theory of simple life is the philosophy of a true life.
It may because of his special philosophy of life, Thoreau’s reputation is
like his character: has a pattern all its own, filled with paradoxes and
contradictions, and widely vacillated from decade to decade. In his own day, he
was generally dismissed as a minor writer who would soon be forgotten; yet in
our day he is universally recognized as one of the few American writers of the
nineteenth century who deserve the appellation “great”. Generally speaking, his
writings proved to have more of an impact on the men of later centuries than
the men of his own century, the 19th.For instance, Thoreau’s “civil
disobedience” was adopted as a manual of arms by Indian leader Mahatma
Gandhi in the nonviolent fight for freedom; the theory of passive resistance has
inspired readers like U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) and
civil-rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) to great ideas and
noble deed; “listening to a different drummer” became the mode of the century,
Walden contributed a lot to the establishment of the first Earth Day and
Thoreau was even idolized in the 1960s by hippies. People unremittingly cast
him into different roles – the hermit in the wilderness, the prophet of civil rights,
an inspired nature writer, a philosophical anarchist and a patron saint to
environmentalists – to fit their own needs. Perhaps he would have appreciated
that, for he seems to have wanted most to use words to force his readers to
rethink their own lives creatively, different though they may be, even as he
spent his life rethinking his, always asking questions, always looking to nature
for greater intensity and meaning for his life.
The important question Thoreau raised –inward richness in simplicity– has
become one of the central issues of the modern society. Back to early 1930s, with
the coming of the depression, the philosophy of the simple life has become usefully
appealing and compelling, a revival was on. Later in the 20th century, the voluntary
simplicity movement began in the Pacific Northwest. Thoreau turned to be the
exponent of those simplists. Following Thoreau, more and more people begin to
think about their lives: they refuse to live above their means. They avoid debt like a
disease and could care less what others think of them. They're not about to keep up
with anyone, because they're not focused on what others have or are doing. They
are pursuing something that is driving them from inside. Since then, people have
never stopped the same attempt as Thoreau, the attempt to find truth and meaning
through simplified living.
Juvenile crime come to be a serious thing in school; suicide growth is
increasing day by day, stress and depression become two major modern society
problems. More and more people today are beginning to wonder what is wrong with
our day. The prosper that is the second half of the twentieth century offers us more
and more and more, if only we'll reach in and take it. Yet that horn of plenty is
seldom the horn of freedom. If you want more, you can have more, but there is a
price to be paid. The price is a faster and faster existence to pay for and use the
riches that we've grabbed. Two working partners pursuing promising careers with
the ever so near carrots of greater responsibilities and greater rewards may find
themselves gasping for breath at the end of the day. Even those on a bit slower
track may find themselves asking aloud "What am I doing with all this stuff, and
why am I working harder and harder to get more and more of it? I'm not sure what
I'm doing with half of it now." we can not help thinking of Thoreau’ warning “The
mass of men lead lives of quite desperation.” Now it is not that "he who dies with
the most toys, wins." It's something more along the lines of "he or she who lives,
wins." So startling a phenomenon ought to attract great attention in an age like our
own. "We've been raised to believe that you must go as far as you possibly can in
life, and that distance is measured by how busy you are, how hard you work and
how much you've accumulated. This is still a compelling dream for many who are
happy to buy in and do what it takes to maintain the upgradeable lifestyle. But if
you read Thoreau, you would come to realize that there is also a new alternative
lifestyle emerging that neither rejects the affordable luxuries of life nor yearns for
more. It is a satisfaction with less, in the sense that less of one thing, pressure,
intensity, busyness or affluence means a trade for something else, such as
self-determination, personal satisfaction, spiritual fulfillment or other things not
valued so highly on the trading floor.
“I love my fate to the very core and rind.” So wrote Thoreau and nothing
could be more characteristic of him. Yet most men are to some extent
disappointed and discontented. Though they tried their best, they just labored
"endlessly to make their lives more complex ...
concerned themselves only with
the means and never the ends [and the worst of them] ... do nothing from
conviction, nothing from sincere emotion. Their morality comes from without,
from the milieu in which they find themselves." He was out to test that we can be
rich through simplified living. Of course, Thoreau did not try to persuade us to live
in poverty; what he suggested is to live with balance. The simple life for Thoreau
meant removing "the obscuring clutter and disclosing the spirit that infuses all
things". ... All he asked us to do is to rethink our lives. As William Perry tells us
“Other people cannot give us truth. They can only stir us up to find it for ourselves.
We have to receive and perceive and believe — because the time comes when we
have to walk by faith and not by sight. Life is really quite simple when we stop
believing that money and fame is the essence of truth.” Are you a "human doing"-running from place to place, over-scheduled, over-committed, with your priorities
lost in the trivia of life? If so, this advice is for you. With it, you can adopt tactics to
reduce the clutter of your life, the complications of your daily routine, and your
living costs in terms of time, energy, and money.
There are choices available in life to each of us. They come time and time
again. Picking one path does not mean staying that path forever, or that one way is
necessarily better than another. For some it is the power life. For others the
acceptance of simplicity as a virtuous way of living comes as a welcome relief.
It is sure that life gets more and more complicated. But how does it happen?
What is a "simple life" and is living one really possible? Is it worth it? Is it living
deliberately? Historically, answers to these questions were provided by the
Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Quakers, and the Shakers. And the questions have
been raised again and again by Thoreau. The lesson he had taught himself, and
which he tried to teach others was summed up in the one word “simplify.” That
meant simplify the outward circumstances of your life, simplify your needs and
your ambitions; learn to delight in the simple pleasures that the world of Nature
affords. It meant also, scorn public pinion, refuse to accept the common
definitions of success, refuse to be moved by the judgment of others. And unlike
most who advocate such attitudes, he put them into practice. This kind of practice
has him laughing at all the things ordinary people do to make life very
complicated. Today’s life is three times more prosper than Thoreau’ s day. That is
to say, three times more complicated. Of course, now we could not find a wood to
live in, but Thoreau’s theory is still extremely helpful. It illuminates the pattern of
changes that an increasing number of us are making in our everyday
lives--adjustments in day-to-day living that are an active, positive response to the
complex dilemmas of our time. By embracing, either partially or totally, the tenets of
voluntary simplicity--frugal consumption, ecological awareness, and personal
growth--we can change our lives. And in the process, we have the power to change
the world.
..