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 Walden Study Text
Chapter VI: Visitors but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter
of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three
for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but
the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing
up. It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain.
I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty
of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the
big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing
trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your
thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its
last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may
plow out again through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room
to unfold and form their columns in the interval. Individuals, like nations,
must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral
ground, between them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond
to a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so near that we could
not begin to hear—we could not speak low enough to be heard; as when you
throw two stones into calm water so near that they break each other's undulations.
If we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very
near together, cheek by jowl, and feel each other's breath; but if we speak
reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat
and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we would enjoy the most intimate
society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to,
we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot
possibly hear each other's voice in any case. Referred to this standard, speech
is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many
fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the conversation My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it was no
interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding "Arrivéd there, the little house they fill, When Winslow, As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life; I mean that I had some. I met several there under more favorable circumstances than I could anywhere else. But fewer came to see me on trivial business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me. Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated continents on the other side. Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or Paphlagonian
man "Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?" And Peleus lives, son of Æacus, among the Myrmidons, Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve."
He says, "That's good." He has a great bundle of white oak bark under
his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. "I suppose there's
no harm in going after such a thing to-day," says he. To him Homer was
a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know. A more simple
and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such
a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any existance for him.
He was about twenty-eight years old, and had left Canada and his father's house
a dozen years before to work in the States, and earn money to buy a farm with
at last, perhaps in his native country. He was cast in the coarsest mould; a
stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck,
dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with
expression. He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and
cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner
to his work a couple of miles past my house—for he chopped all summer—in
a tin pail; cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle
which dangled by a string from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a drink.
He came along early, crossing my bean-field, though without anxiety or haste
to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He wasn't a-going to hurt himself.
He didn't care if he only earned his board. Frequently he would leave his dinner
in the bushes, when his dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a
mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he
boarded, after deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink
it in the pond safely till nightfall—loving to dwell long upon these themes.
He would say, as he went by in the morning, "How thick the pigeons He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground, that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with your hand at last. He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French, though he spoke English as well. When I approached him he would suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees he would exclaim—"By George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I want no better sport." Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked. In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers; and he said that he "liked to have the little fellers about him." In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and
contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was
not sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he answered, with a
sincere and serious look, "Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life."
But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering
as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual
way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is
never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust
and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. When Nature
made him, she gave him a strong body and contentment for his portion, and propped
him on every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore
years and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction
would serve to introduce him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your
neighbor. He had got to find him out as you did. He would not play any part.
Men paid him wages for work, and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never
exchanged opinions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble—if
he can be called humble who never aspires—that humility was no distinct
quality in him, nor could he conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him.
If you told him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything
so grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibility on
itself, and let him be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of praise.
He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their performances were
miracles. When I told him that I wrote considerably, he thought for a long time
that it was merely the handwriting which I meant, for he could write a remarkably
good hand himself. I sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely
written in the snow I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle of surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the question had ever been entertained before, "No, I like it well enough." It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and 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. His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was
considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, which he supposed
to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable
extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he never
failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light. He had never
heard of such things before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had
worn the home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could he dispense
with tea and coffee? Did this country afford any beverage beside water? He had
soaked hemlock leaves in water and drank it, and thought that was better than
water in warm weather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed
the convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most
philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation
of the word pecunia. There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man's, it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported. He suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy.  Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my house,
and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I told them that
I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a dipper. I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the town's poor,
but who should be; who are among the world's poor, at any rate; guests who appeal,
not to your hospitality, but to your hospitalality; who earnestly wish to be
helped, and preface their appeal with the information that they are resolved,
for one thing, never to help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not
actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however
he got it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not know when their
visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering them
from greater and greater remoteness. Men of almost every degree of wit called
on me in the migrating season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to
do with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time,
like the fox in the fable "O Christian, will you send me back?"
One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward
I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. Girls
and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. They looked
in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men of business, even
farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance
at which I dwelt from something or other; and though they said that they loved
a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless
committed men, whose time was all taken up in getting a living or keeping it;
ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who
could not bear all kinds of opinions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers
who pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out—how came Mrs.—to
know that my sheets were not as clean as hers?—young men who had ceased
to be young, and had concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten track
of the professions —all these generally said that it was not possible to
do so much good in my position. Ay! there was the rub. This is the house that I built;but they did not know that the third line was, These are the folks that worry the man I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I feared the men-harriers
rather.
I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come a-berrying, railroad
men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets
and philosophers; in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for
freedom's sake, and really left the village behind, I was ready to greet with—"Welcome,
Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!
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