Ten By Fifteen
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, is a true account of two years in the woods, and it has no plot to spoil. So this summary is safe for everyone. You get the eighteen chapters in plain English, the five ideas the book keeps coming back to, and a few numbers from the text. Every count is mine.
The Edition
I read the Project Gutenberg ebook, which bundles Walden with his essay on civil disobedience. This summary covers Walden only. By my count the eighteen chapters run about one hundred and six thousand words, and the first chapter, Economy, is nearly a quarter of that.
The book opens with a plain fact. Thoreau lived alone in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house he built himself on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and he earned his living by the work of his hands. He says he lived there two years and two months. He moved in on the Fourth of July, eighteen forty-five, and he left on September sixth, eighteen forty-seven.
He also explains why he is writing in the first person. His neighbors kept asking what he ate, whether he was lonely and whether he was afraid, so he answers them.
Economy
Economy is the long first chapter, and it is where the book argues with how people live. Thoreau looks around Concord and sees neighbors weighed down by farms, barns and tools they inherited. He writes that most men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Then he does the math. His test is this: the cost of a thing is the amount of life you have to exchange for it. He figures an average house in his neighborhood cost about eight hundred dollars, which took a worker ten to fifteen years of labor to earn.
His own house is the answer. It was ten feet by fifteen, with a brick fireplace, and he lists every material. Boards, old windows, a thousand old bricks, nails. The total was twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents. His food for eight months came to eight dollars and seventy-four cents, mostly rye and Indian meal, potatoes and rice. By his tally, all the money he spent came to about sixty-two dollars, and he earned back about thirty-seven by selling crops and doing day labor.
He also takes on charity. Doing good is one of the professions that are full, he says. His advice is to set about being good.
Where I Lived
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For has the lines people quote. He tells how he nearly bought a farm, the Hollowell place, until the owner’s wife changed her mind, and what he liked in it.
Then the famous passage. He went to the woods because he wanted to live deliberately, to face only the essential facts of life, and not discover when he came to die that he had not lived. He wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.
His fix for a cluttered life is a word said three times: simplicity. Keep your affairs to two or three, not a hundred. He doubts the news, saying that if you have read one robbery or one wreck, you need never read another. And he takes a swipe at the railroad, which he says does not carry us; it rides upon us.
Reading, Sounds, Solitude
Reading is a short argument for reading the classics slowly, as deliberately as they were written. He kept the Iliad on his table all summer, though he looked at it only now and then.
Sounds is the opposite. He says books are only one language, and that the language things and events speak without metaphor is just as important. Then he describes the train whistle that cuts through his woods, and the bells of the village.
Solitude is the calm chapter. He says it is wholesome to be alone most of the time, and that he never found a companion as companionable as solitude. He argues that loneliness is not measured in miles between you and other people.
Visitors And The Bean-Field
Visitors is Thoreau’s reply to the lonely-hermit idea. He loved society as much as most, he says. The famous detail is the three chairs: one for solitude, two for friendship and three for society.
The Bean-Field is the chapter about farming for a reason he can’t quite state. His rows, added together, ran seven miles. He hoed them all summer, fought the woodchucks and tallied the results. He sold nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans, and by his own figures his profit on the whole farm was a little under nine dollars.
The Village And The Ponds
In The Village he goes to town most days for news and gossip. He says that wherever a man goes, men will pursue him with their institutions. One afternoon, in the summer of his first year, he went in to get a shoe mended and was put in jail for not paying a tax. He was let out the next day, got his shoe, and was back in the woods in time for huckleberries. He doesn’t dwell on it in this chapter.
The Ponds is a tour of the ponds around Concord, and it is mostly about Walden itself: a clear, deep green well, he calls it, with water that changes color depending on how you look at it.
Baker Farm To Brute Neighbors
Baker Farm puts him in a shack with John Field, an Irish laborer, and his family. Thoreau tells Field that he could live more simply and fish for fun. Field can’t see how, and Thoreau closes the visit sadly. It is the book’s most pointed look at a neighbor who isn’t able to follow his advice.
Higher Laws deals with the pull between a wild appetite and a spiritual life, and he admits he felt both. Brute Neighbors is the funniest chapter. It opens as a conversation between a hermit and a poet and then turns to the mice in his house and a loon on the pond.
Winter
House-Warming is about October, grapes, chestnuts, and building the chimney against the cold. Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors is about the ghosts of earlier residents, such as the last occupant of the woods before him, and the few people who came through the snow.
Winter Animals describes frozen ponds that became new roads. In The Pond in Winter, he sounds Walden through the ice. People had said it had no bottom. He found the greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet, and he calls the pond a symbol.
Spring And The Conclusion
Spring is the thaw. The pond booms and breaks up, birds return, and thawing sand banks flow like lava into leaf-like shapes. It ends with a short note: his first year in the woods was done, the second was similar, and he left Walden on September sixth, eighteen forty-seven.
The Conclusion turns to the reader. He left the woods for as good a reason as he went there: he had several more lives to live. He warns about the deep ruts of tradition and conformity. If a man doesn’t keep pace with his companions, perhaps he hears a different drummer. The last line is this: the sun is but a morning star.
Five Big Ideas
Here are the five ideas, in my words.
One, the cost of a thing is the life you spend on it. Two, simplify: fewer possessions, fewer affairs, fewer things you owe. Three, live deliberately, on purpose, instead of by habit. Four, solitude and nature feed the mind in ways society cannot. Five, trust your own pace and your own conscience, even when others disagree.
My reading is that the book is part experiment, part argument, and part nature diary. The experiment is real: it has receipts. The argument is sometimes unfair, and the diary is the best part. That is a draft opinion, not the summary.
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