Student Question
What support does Thoreau provide for simplifying life in Walden? How could you argue against this?
Quick answer:
Thoreau supports simplifying life by highlighting the unnecessary toil of many people and advocating for minimalism, particularly for "poor students." He notes that most lead "lives of quiet desperation." However, his approach is criticized as impractical for those with families, given Thoreau's lack of experience with marriage and family responsibilities. Critics argue that his ideas, while inspiring, are not sustainable long-term, as evidenced by his own brief two-year experiment at Walden Pond.
Thoreau does not claim to be offering advice to everybody. He understood that many people were satisfied with the kinds of lives they were living, although he gives several examples of men who seemed to toil unnecessarily from morning to night without gaining much from it. One of Thoreau's most famous quotes is:
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation
However, he says specifically that he is not offering advice on living to people who are satisfied with the lives they are already living. He writes in the first chapter, "Economy":
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.
One way to argue against Thoreau's thesis that the best way to live is to simplify our wants to the bare minimum would be to point out that Thoreau never married. A...
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single man or woman can live very cheaply, even today. But most men and women end up getting married. And then it seems impossible for the man, at least, to avoid getting a full-time job. Life for most people is a matter of birth, growth, finding a niche somewhere on this crowded planet, and then reproducing. It is a different matter for a man to have to support himself and to have to support himself, his wife, and a number of children. Thoreau had little or no advice to offer to readers who had large families. He seems totally ignorant about the subject of marriage.
Thoreau's argument is very convincing--to some people. It sounds like the answer to most of life's most serious problems. And many people have been convinced by it. William Butler Yeats said that his poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" was inspired by reading Walden. Here is the first stanza of that haunting poem:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
Sounds blissful--as long as one doesn't get tired of living alone. But who wouldn't get tired of living alone on a little island in a lake where the weather was probably very bad for much of the year? Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild is very popular with young people. The protagonist appears to have been inspired by Thoreau's ideas. The enotes study guide gives the following capsule summary:
An electrician picks up a hitchhiker who plans on living in the remote wilderness for three months with minimal gear or preparation. Four months later, the hitchhiker’s decomposing body is discovered inside of a bus. He had starved to death.
No doubt many thousands of people have been convinced by Thoreau's great classic book over the years. But most may have discovered that what seemed easy for him was not so easy for themselves. Even Thoreau did not stick it out in that cabin in the dark, spooky woods for a long period of time. He says in "Economy":
I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
He does not exactly explain why he gave up his idyllic life after only two years and two months, but it would seem that even Thoreau got fed up with living alone and subsisting mainly on beans and home-made bread. The best advice most of us can take from his book is that we ought to watch our expenses and not waste a lot of money on vanities. It is easy to get into debt and hard to get out of it, especially in these days of plastic cards and easy credit. If most men were leading lives of quiet desperation in Thoreau's day, a much greater percentage must be leading such lives today.