Walden

Thoreau begins not in the woods but in Concord, in its shops, offices and fields. Everywhere he walked, his neighbours seemed to him to be doing penance, and he means the word exactly.

He sets them beside the ascetics he had read about in India: men who hang head-down over flames, or stand for years on one leg on top of a pillar. Those feats, he says, are hardly stranger than the scenes he witnesses every day in his own town.

There is one difference. The ascetic knows he is suffering and chose it; the farmer and the shopkeeper do not see their labour as penance at all. And unlike the twelve labours of Hercules, which at least had an end, theirs are never finished. Crush one head of the hydra and two spring up.

His sharpest picture is of young men who have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle and tools. Most people would call that luck. Thoreau calls it a misfortune, because such things are more easily acquired than got rid of.

He imagines one of these heirs creeping down the road of life, pushing before him a barn seventy-five feet by forty and a hundred acres of tillage, mowing, pasture and wood-lot. Better to have been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, he says: at least you would see clearly which field you were really called to work.

The point is not that barns are wicked. A possession you never chose still sets the terms of your days, and you can spend a lifetime serving it before you ask whether you wanted it.

Why does Thoreau call the young men who inherit farms unfortunate?

• Farming is a lower kind of work than study and writing
• Inherited wealth makes a young man lazy and unwilling to work
• Their property commits their lives before they choose how to live✓Correct answer
• The land around Concord was too poor to ever pay its way

Such things, he says, are more easily acquired than got rid of: the barn and the acres decide how the heir will spend his days. He is not attacking farming itself, and his worry is the opposite of laziness: too much labour in the service of something never chosen.

From the heirs he turns to nearly everyone: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." The word doing the work is quiet. Nobody is screaming. The despair is folded into ordinary, respectable days.

He pushes further. What we call resignation, he says, is only confirmed desperation, despair that has stopped arguing. It hides even in our games and amusements, which have no real play in them, because they come after work.

Then he names the overseer. A southern slave-driver is hard, a northern one is worse, but worst of all is to be the slave-driver of yourself. Public opinion, he writes, is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion of ourselves. What a man thinks of himself determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

The oddest part, Thoreau notices, is that people live as if they had chosen the common way of life because they preferred it. Ask them, and they honestly believe there is no choice left.

His reply is brisk. It is never too late to give up our prejudices, and no way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody repeats today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.

He goes as far as to say that in some thirty years he has not heard one syllable of valuable advice from his elders. Their experience was too partial. A life, for him, is an experiment still untried by the person living it, and somebody else having tried it does not help you.

Thoreau claims that in about thirty years of living he had not heard a single piece of valuable advice from his elders.

True✓Correct answer

He says exactly that: he has yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from his seniors. It sounds like youthful arrogance, but his reason is serious: their experience was partial, and each person's life is an experiment she has to run herself.