Chapter 4:
Solitude
Solitude
 This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, |
| and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a |
| strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the |
| stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as |
| well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, |
| all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump |
| to usher in the night, and the note of the whip-poor-will is borne |
| on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the |
| fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, |
| like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small |
| waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the |
| smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still |
| blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some |
| creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never |
| complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey |
| now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods |
| without fear. They are Nature's watchmen—links which connect the |
| days of animated life. |
| When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there |
| and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of |
| evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. |
| They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the |
| forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave, |
| either intentionally or accidentally. One has peeled a willow wand, |
| woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. I could always |
| tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended |
| twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what |
| sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace left, as a |
| flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as |
| far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by the lingering |
| odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified of the |
| passage of a traveller along the highway sixty rods off by the scent |
| of his pipe. |
| There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is |
| never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door, |
| nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by |
| us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. |
| For what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some square |
| miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by |
| men? My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible |
| from any place but the hill-tops within half a mile of my own. I |
| have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of |
| the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the |
| fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most |
| part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as |
| much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun |
| and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night |
| there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, |
| more than if I were the first or last man; unless it were in the |
| spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish |
| for pouts—they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of |
| their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness—but they |
| soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left "the world to |
| darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the night was never |
| profaned by any human neighborhood. 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. |
| Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the |
| most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural |
| object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. |
| There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst |
| of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a |
| storm but it was AEolian music to a healthy and innocent ear. |
| Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar |
| sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that |
| nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters |
| my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and |
| melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, |
| it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so |
| long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the |
| potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on |
| the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me. |
| Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I |
| were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I |
| am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands |
| which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded. |
| I do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they flatter me. I |
| have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of |
| solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the |
| woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man |
| was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was |
| something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a |
| slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In |
| the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was |
| suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in |
| the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around |
| my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once |
| like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of |
| human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them |
| since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy |
| and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence |
| of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed |
| to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me |
| and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no |
| place could ever be strange to me again. |
| "Mourning untimely consumes the sad; |
| Few are their days in the land of the living, |
| Beautiful daughter of Toscar." |
| Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-storms in |
| the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon |
| as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and |
| pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which |
| many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those |
| driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the |
| maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the |
| deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all |
| entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy |
| thunder-shower the lightning struck a large pitch pine across the |
| pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove |
| from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches |
| wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the |
| other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that |
| mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless |
| bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men |
| frequently say to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down |
| there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and |
| nights especially." I am tempted to reply to such—This whole |
| earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, |
| think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, |
| the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? |
| Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This |
| which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. |
| What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows |
| and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs |
| can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want |
| most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the |
| post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the |
| grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, |
| but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our |
| experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near |
| the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary |
| with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will |
| dig his cellar.... I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who |
| has accumulated what is called "a handsome property"—though I |
| never got a fair view of it—on the Walden road, driving a pair of |
| cattle to market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to |
| give up so many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very |
| sure I liked it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home |
| to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness and the |
| mud to Brighton—or Bright-town—which place he would reach some |
| time in the morning. |
| Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes |
| indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is |
| always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For |
| the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to |
| make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our |
| distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions |
| their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being |
| executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with |
| whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. |
| "How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of |
| Heaven and of Earth!" |
| "We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to |
| hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of |
| things, they cannot be separated from them." |
| "They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify |
| their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to |
| offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean |
| of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our |
| left, on our right; they environ us on all sides." |
| We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little |
| interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our gossips |
| a little while under these circumstances—have our own thoughts to |
| cheer us? Confucius says truly, "Virtue does not remain as an |
| abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors." |
| With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a |
| conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and |
| their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a |
| torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the |
| driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I |
| may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may |
| not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much |
| more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, |
| of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness |
| by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However |
| intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism |
| of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but |
| spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is |
| no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of |
| life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, |
| a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This |
| doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes. |
| I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. |
| 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. We are for the most part more |
| lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our |
| chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be |
| where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that |
| intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent |
| student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as |
| solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in |
| the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel |
| lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he |
| cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but |
| must be where he can "see the folks," and recreate, and, as he |
| thinks, remunerate himself for his day's solitude; and hence he |
| wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and |
| most of the day without ennui and "the blues"; but he does not |
| realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in |
| his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in |
| turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, |
| though it may be a more condensed form of it. |
| 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. We have had to agree on a |
| certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this |
| frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. |
| We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the |
| fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and |
| stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect |
| for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all |
| important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a |
| factory—never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better |
| if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. |
| The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him. |
| I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and |
| exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by |
| the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his |
| diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be |
| real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we |
| may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural |
| society, and come to know that we are never alone. |
| I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the |
| morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that |
| some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely |
| than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond |
| itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has |
| not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of |
| its waters. The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there |
| sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone— |
| but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of |
| company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mullein or |
| dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, |
| or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a |
| weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April |
| shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house. |
| I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the |
| snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler |
| and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, |
| and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories |
| of old time and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a |
| cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, |
| even without apples or cider—a most wise and humorous friend, |
| whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe |
| or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where |
| he is buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, |
| invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to |
| stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for |
| she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back |
| farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every |
| fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents |
| occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who |
| delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all |
| her children yet. |
| The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature—of sun |
| and wind and rain, of summer and winter—such health, such cheer, |
| they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, |
| that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, |
| and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and |
| the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any |
| man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have |
| intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable |
| mould myself? |
| What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? |
| Not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother |
| Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has |
| kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, |
| and fed her health with their decaying fatness. For my panacea, |
| instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron |
| and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long shallow |
| black-schooner looking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry |
| bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning |
| air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead of the day, |
| why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for |
| the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to |
| morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite |
| till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples |
| long ere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no |
| worshipper of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor |
| AEsculapius, and who is represented on monuments holding a serpent |
| in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent |
| sometimes drinks; but rather of Hebe, cup-bearer to Jupiter, who was |
| the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of |
| restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the |
| only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady |
| that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring. |
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