…The second summer at Walden, Thoreau decided he had had enough of agriculture, and so he planted only a third of an acre of garden-just enough for his own use. “I learned from my two years’ experience,” he explained, “that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods…”
—Who Was This Man?
Though Henry David Thoreau had little use for the ways of society, he was far from a misanthropic crank. In Walden he confesses that he loves to talk with farmers as he makes the rounds looking for a piece of land to settle on. On July 4, 1845, when he began his project to live alongside Walden Pond, he chose 14.5 acres within hailing distance of humanity. True, Thoreau lived alone in his cabin, but he was only 1.5 miles from the home of his good friends the Emersons. He states in Walden that he can see through the trees the roofs of the nearby village of Concord. Frequently he entertained visitors at the cabin and then he went visiting himself.
As sociable as he was, we need not make Thoreau out to be a smooth character. Encountered up close I think he may have had been like the homely unplastered, unchinked planks of his cabin. Planed mostly smooth, but still with some splinters and knotholes and lots of air leaking through. He was what we’d call a “character.”—Read More:http://thevanwinkleproject.blogspot.ca/2010/10/thoreau-unplugged.html
In the colder seasons he found other methods of earning a living. For a dollar a day he did fence building, painting, gardening, and carpentering. Once he built a fireplace for a man who would not accept his protests that he was not a professional mason. On another occasion he built a woodshed “of no mean size” for six dollars and cleared half that sum by close calculation and swift work. Going home from one task he suffered a misfortune. As he was about to clamor onto a hayrack, he inadvertently frightened the horse with his ubiquitous umbrella. Feet flew, the bucket on Thoreau’s arm was smashed, and Thoreau himself was stretched out on his back on the ground.
The sudden bending of Thoreau’s body backward strained his stomach muscles, and for a time he had to give up hard manual labor. He also tried his hand at surveying, making use of borrowed instruments and those left over from his school teaching days. He found the work both satisfying and remunerative; it enabled him simultaneously to earn a living and to spend most of his time out-of-doors in the fields and woods he loved.
The only flaw was that his surveying was all too often a preliminary to woodcutting on the part of his employers, and thus he was playing his part in the destruction of the Concord woods. That fact was to disturb his conscience for some time.
From all these various sources Thoreau found he was easily able to support himself at the pond by working, at the most, six weeks a year. “In short,” he wrote his friend Horace Greeley, “I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely…It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.”
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