1—
Walden:
A Manifesto in Wood and Stone

Despite its claim to the status of nonfiction, and despite the fact that it was published later than some of the works examined in the coming chapters, Walden is an appropriate starting place for an inquiry into the role of houses in American fiction because the little house at Walden Pond is, in a way, Thoreau's "supreme fiction"—an embodiment of an ideal and an idea, a visible text articulating and illustrating a philosophy whose roots lie deep in American Protestantism and whose branches have penetrated every area of American thought.^[1] In its unorthodox form, its radical reassessment of the priorities of domestic life, and its articulation of the defining tensions of American culture with respect to material life, Walden has provided a model for many of Thoreau's literary descendants. No American writer could think about houses in a morally neutral way after Thoreau invested them with such profound and inclusive significance.

Under the rubric of a philosophical inquiry into the proper nature of human shelter, the book presents a rambling autobiographical chronicle of building and habitation that resembles nothing so much as an expanded sermon, complete with text, exegesis, and application. Thoreau leans heavily on a transcendental notion of the world as an endless crystalline replication of structures: elaborate analogies are drawn among the house, the life of the man within it, and the text that man writes. A house, as any architect will verify, is a text with its own peculiar grammar, syntax, and way of communicating and generating meaning. Thoreau's development of these simple but pregnant ideas provides a point of departure for understanding their appropriation by his literary successors.

The houses of early nineteenth-century Massachusetts that were the foils against which Thoreau measured the simplicity of

his cabin at Walden Pond were by most standards neither ostentatious nor overfurnished. A tour of Concord today, which may include a number of the houses Thoreau frequented, might lead one to wonder what elicited his hue and cry against over-adornment, redundancy, and loss of simplicity. It was not only in the great houses of Beacon Hill but in these humbler clapboard dwellings that Thoreau saw signs of social and moral degeneracy, love of superfluousness and show, and signs of unhealthy materialism.

A recent reading of Walden as a parody of the architectural "pattern books" that were very popular at the time of his writing makes a persuasive argument that one of Thoreau's multiple and complicated objectives in the book was to offer a scathing response and challenge to the claims of Andrew Jackson Downing and his followers for the morally instructive value of rightly designed domestic architecture.^[2] In the years Thoreau was living at Walden and subsequently writing about it, Downing and lesser-known architects were popularizing moralistic guidebooks for the building and decoration of dwellings supposed to inculcate Christian virtues and values. Downing himself wrote an article that appeared in Horticulturalist , entitled "Moral Influence of Good Houses." Elsewhere he claimed, "ABSOLUTE BEAUTY lies in the expression, in material forms, of those ideas of perfection which are universal in their application. We find them in nature as well as in art"; he identified those ideas as "PROPORTION, SYMMETRY, VARIETY, HARMONY, AND UNITY."^[3] These values, he believed, informed, infused, and emanated from the structures he had designed and prescribed in the pattern books Thoreau evidently found so pretentious and misleading. Much of Thoreau's rather extreme argument for a return to primitive life in Walden is put into more comprehensible perspective when understood as an answer to Downing's encomiums to civilized life, such as the following passage from The Architecture of Country Houses : "A good house . . . is a powerful means of civilization. . . . So long as men are forced to dwell in log huts and follow a hunter's life, we must not be surprised at lynch law and the use of the bowie knife. But, when smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country, we know that order and culture are established" (v-vi).

Thoreau himself rarely separates aesthetic from moral issues, though his conclusions about what constitutes the good life almost diametrically oppose Downing's notions, which Thoreau regards as sentimental, effete, and dangerous. From the beginning of Walden it is clear that domestic architecture brings the two value dimensions together with an explicitness that serves his didactic purposes perfectly.

The first sentence of Walden establishes a three-point analogy among book, house, and narrator: "When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only" (3). Building the cabin and writing the book symbolically reiterate the simultaneous enterprise of designing and defining the author's life: "simple and sincere" statements of a "simple and sincere" man. Thoreau's biographer William Howarth views the whole body of Thoreau's work in light of the author's frequent architectural metaphors and writes of the cabin itself that "in all his days Henry Thoreau had not built a piece of writing as sound and tight as this small house. The whole process of construction—a place, a plan, a set of new uses for old materials—resembled his compositions, but here the form and function were consonant."^[4] The book, like the cabin, unites a rustic style with a sophisticated and highly articulated transcendental philosophy. Like Wordsworth's, Thoreau's rustic persona is a self-conscious and indeed artful attempt to return to certain childlike simplicities, but for spiritual and political purposes not at all simple: "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms" (81).

The appropriateness of the cabin as an embodiment of values becomes clear the moment those values are named. Nothing but a house could more adequately and simply demonstrate the importance of economy, simplicity, and autonomy ("I built it myself"); individualism ("Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly"); integrity ("a house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest"); sincerity ("a house which you have got into when you have

opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over"); closeness to nature ("The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow"); organicism ("What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller"); or the conviction that the material is always a manifestation of the spiritual. "Most men," the writer observes, "appear never to have considered what a house is," implying that it, like all the material world, is a thing to be seen into and beyond. The building is a philosophical statement that in its medium of wood and stone sidesteps the complexities of language that "building" his book enmeshes him in.

The governing idea in Walden is that the material is always a manifestation of and a conduit to the spiritual—a construction of that relation that challenges old iconoclastic notions of the material world as a source of temptation and illusion. "To be a philosopher," Thoreau writes, "is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically" (13). The house built with his own hands is just such a practical solution to the problems of life and a means to understand them. It is intended as a kind of sacrament—"an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual things"—a vehicle for forming the self, and a self-portrait. Furthermore, the building of a house is a practical education—and Thoreau's house at Walden was not his first lesson in the construction of houses. As a young man he had worked as handyman for the Emersons, and in the fall of 1844 he helped his father build a new house west of the Concord railroad tracks for which Thoreau's mother had chosen the site and drawn up plans.

So in the opening pages of Walden the writer asks us to recognize and contemplate the house as the fulfillment of a pedagogical and spiritual agenda. Building his own house is a step in his training as a philosopher—a practical exercise in problem-solving and an attempt to integrate material and spiritual life, which are so prone to the kind of fatal disjuncture that produces the many social, political, and spiritual ills Thoreau identifies in his frequent jeremiads. Howarth takes Thoreau's own

notion of his purposes a step further, pointing out that "the building of a house at Walden Pond is a positive, constructive act that liberates Thoreau from youthful solipsism. He borrows his tools, recycles old materials, builds from a foundation upward. The house is an ascending form; it . . . grows in stages that are persistently faithful to the indweller's character. His past and future selves are not contradictory, they fulfill each other: 'We belong to the community'" (94–95).

Ultimately the cabin, having served its purpose, falls away like a mollusk's shell. It is not the cabin but the kind of life engendered in such a dwelling that matters. Once achieved and fully embraced, that way of life can sustain itself in other places, having become internalized; the outer structures of daily life shape the patterns of the psyche and the grooves of habit. The house is a prop, or an aid, in a spiritual journey whose end is to rise above dependency on setting and circumstance. Thoreau's deep iconoclasm thus extends finally even to the work of his own hands. Eventually, he leaves his cabin, having taught and been taught by it, having "other lives to live."

Like the cabin, the book produces an impression of organic simplicity—almost of haphazardness at first glance—until the details of construction come under the scrutiny of an attentive reader. Characteristically, Thoreau challenges his readers to abandon conventional notions of appropriate form and to contemplate the implications of his radically unconventional textual strategies. In Walden temporal and spatial dimensions interpenetrate. The four seasons of the year, like the four walls of the cabin, define and encompass a private but complete universe. House and text are both microcosms, closed systems within which all of life is symbolically contained and signified. The "breathing room" that the one-room cabin is designed to create is reflected in the text as well, where themes interpenetrate and ideas are not obtrusively partitioned into discrete categories. Just as the single open room allows for interpenetration of private and public life, a blending of domesticity with intellectual and social pursuits, so the loosely structured chapters of the book allow such intermingling of various modes of discourse, and we move easily, with no thresholds to cross, from the anecdotal to the analytic to the contemplative. Our

attention is drawn first to the interior and then to the exterior life, the intimate relation of the two always emphasized, thereby underscoring an ideal of absolute equilibrium, equivalence, and permeability between the outer man and the inner, between life within and life without, so that the conscious life might ultimately come full circle and attain the simplicities of the unconscious natural world.

Thoreau initially focuses his ruminations on a question of practical necessity—what does a person need to live? Anything not necessary is suspect: "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind" (13). Here, for the first of many times in the course of his reflections, the writer encapsulates his Christian asceticism in an aphorism that points to an inflexible opposition between creature comforts and spiritual life. His rhetoric is reminiscent of Jesus' oft-reiterated, "You have heard it said . . . but I say unto you . . .," a formula that overturned a conventional moral precept and replaced it with a paradox positing a "higher" and more complex moral standard. This is typical of Thoreau's style, in which the resolution of apparent contradictions, the reconstruction of opposites as complements, and the inversion of conventional formulas figure largely.

Whereas Thoreau the rationalist builds his house to meet the natural needs he outlines in his disquisition on necessity (a one-room, ten-by-fifteen-foot wood and brick structure with a tree as king post), Thoreau the ascetic seems to squirm even under those material necessities he allows himself, perhaps because he is not yet at the point of extreme purification of desire and possession that it took for Jesus to say, "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head" (Matthew 8:20). In the interests of "elevation" Thoreau attempts to establish a definition of necessity that is useful as a rule of life. The design of his house, the choice of his furniture, and the establishment of his daily routine are all efforts to put that standard to a test. He considers, in turn, whether food, clothing, and shelter, those things we

have traditionally taken to be basic necessities, are really necessary. In doing so, he attempts to expose the moral slippage that treats luxury as necessity. "As for a Shelter," he writes, "I will not deny that this is now a necessary of life, though there are instances of men having done without it for long periods in colder countries than this. . . . Probably, man did not live long on the earth without discovering the convenience which there is in a house, the domestic comforts, which phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family" (24). The house itself, being a material thing, has to be justified as a necessity in order to be admitted as a legitimate part of the paraphernalia necessary for his experiment with life.

Having established the necessity of shelter, he traces a brief history of housing, from "roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stone and tiles," concluding, "at last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. . . . It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies. . . . Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots" (25). He grudgingly acknowledges the necessity of housing, almost pronouncing it a necessary evil. The myth of progress, the notion of civilization, the value of technological advancement, are all treated here with pointed irony, as betrayed, for example, in the word obstruction and in the rueful observation that birds, perhaps the freest, most poetic, and spiritual of creatures, have no such obstructions between themselves and the "celestial bodies." At one point the writer fondly recalls, "I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them" (77). Thoreau's romantic fancy reaches a new poetic pitch here, which is tempered with characteristic, almost comic haste by the next passage, where poet and philosopher turn historian and craftsman: "However, if one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without

a clue, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary" (25).

If we must build houses, he reasons, let us minimize the offense against nature. The examples that follow of what forms of shelter are "absolutely necessary" border on the ludicrous if taken to be literally prescriptive but serve to expand the spectrum on which he seeks to locate a definition of necessity: the "skin bags" of the Laplanders, the wigwams of the Penobscot Indians, Adam and Eve's bower, the caves of prehistoric men who suddenly found a handy solution to cold in the hollow of a rock. The more extreme they become, the more vividly these examples of "practical solutions" to the problem of how to live serve to measure the complexities and, ultimately, corruptions of civilized life.

The dangers of perversion increase, Thoreau suggests, in proportion to the complexities of life that come to bear on the design of our houses. Labyrinth, museum, almshouse, prison, and mausoleum constitute an inventory of grotesque caricatures that houses might resemble if their purpose is not rightly understood. Certainly the homes even of the wealthiest New England patricians of the time were hardly labyrinthine except by the severe standard of architectural simplicity Thoreau adopted when he declared that the whole of the home and the life within it ought to be apparent on crossing the threshold. In the chapter called "House-Warming" he describes such an ideal house:

Of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head . . . where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that a man should use . . . a house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest. (218–219)

Such architectural ideals are borrowed directly from moral categories: the openness of a dwelling without partitions represents a kind of honesty; the absence of any unnecessary decoration, humility and simplicity; the enduring materials, moral

toughness; and the relative inattention to comforts, asceticism. The "vastness" is important as well, being an attempt to approximate as closely as an enclosing structure can the open spaces of the out-of-doors. The one complaint the writer ventures to utter about his own little house is that a place so small does not lend itself to "great thoughts," which need room for expansion: "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. . . . Our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the interval" (127–128).

This genuinely hospitable desire for good company and conversation runs throughout the pages of Walden, counterbalancing the paeans to the solitary life and the general deprecations of civilized society. While the ascetic eschews as excesses what most would deem necessities, he retains the hope that visitors will come and share his solitary and simple pleasures with him, on his terms, claiming that real contact may be enhanced, rather than inhibited, by his style of entertaining. Thus, his hospitality constitutes a challenge to his visitors: "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" (127).

Several times the writer wistfully observes that his challenge goes largely unmet. Visitors come infrequently: "There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never comes" (242).^[5] Thoreau's ideal visitor is a seeker; Thoreau is not situated so as to be dropped in on by the casual passerby but must be sought out by one explicitly desiring what simple goods he may find there. Like Thoreau's other exercises of virtue, hospitality is as stringently held to his own terms as it is magnanimous within those terms; the visitor must come two miles out of town, thereby meeting Thoreau more than halfway.

In any case the ideal house would simply be a perching place; real living, the best living, takes place outdoors, as close to

nature as it is possible to dwell. "My best room," he continues, "my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house" (128). Far from museum or mausoleum, this house would resemble more closely a kind of all-purpose outhouse designed to service bodily needs for food, rest, and shelter and to put as little obstruction between the indwellers and the ground beneath their feet as possible. For separation from nature is to be feared: it vitiates a man's powers, which Thoreau believes to be derived from direct contact with the earth and sky. As our lives grow more remote from those vital sources, they become less real, less vital. The literalness with which he espouses this notion can hardly be overstated. Even our language, he maintains, is only alive and effective by virtue of its connection with the earth:

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. . . . As if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them. (220)

Some of the stately Concord homes Thoreau frequented, like Channing's or Emerson's, doubtless did resemble museums, filled as they were with relics, mostly in the form of books and heirlooms. The stable old families that had lived in and around Concord for several generations had accumulated possessions in excess of those usable in daily life and had kept them for their sentimental value or as measures of status. Such useless objects, like needless ornament, were to this zealous iconoclast an offense against the virtues of reason, order, and simplicity.

Nor was the private dwelling to become, as he put it, an "almshouse." His charity was cultivated in an atmosphere of guarded solitude, a world of established boundaries and clear bargains in which hospitality was freely given but on sternly established terms. As a sacred refuge from the world of commerce and society, the walls of the home were not to be indiscriminately permeable to society; they were to be a protective barrier

from the demands of social intercourse. The idiosyncratic selectivity of Thoreau's own charity and hospitality were regarded rather wryly by his contemporaries.

The ways in which a house may become a prison are manifold, and Thoreau's recognition of the imprisoning qualities of domestic life prefigure a good many women writers who find their homes to be prisons and who locate the source of their problems precisely where Thoreau does—in the perversities of a civilized life whose artificial structures are no longer grounded in the balances of nature but in an artificial hierarchy of capitalistic values. That Thoreau's list of perverse analogs for houses should end with a "mausoleum" is fitting, for the logical conclusion is that a badly designed, ill-conceived house can ultimately destroy by suffocation the life impulses of the people within it, thereby fatally impinging on their freedom of movement and discourse.

To counter these horrifying possibilities Thoreau proposes a solution that in its extremity and ludicrousness serves to establish as wide a spectrum as possible of practical solutions to his philosophical problems:

I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. . . . You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. (26)

Characteristically, the writer constructs his argument on ludicrous juxtapositions and reductions so extreme that they caricature, lending humor to his point while sharpening it. But the equation of freedom with dispossession invites serious contemplation of the relation between the two.

The "nothing but" formula strips the idea of house down to its bare bones in exactly the fashion Thoreau has attempted to

carry out in the design of his cabin. Typically, he localizes his example to bring it closer to home: "A comfortable house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here almost entirely out of such materials as Nature furnished ready to their hands." He goes on to cite an early English settler's description of local Indian wigwams that concludes, "I have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English houses" (26). Thoreau seems to feel obliged to apologize for any degree to which his rude dwelling exceeds the comforts of those wigwams; he is uncomfortable with his own concessions to creature comforts even to the addition of plaster to seal his walls: "My house never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable" (217–218).

By way of contrast to this severe standard, Thoreau goes on to consider the ordinary comforts of a middle-class American:

An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars . . . entitles him to the benefit of the improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man . . . it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. (27–28)

He deplores the exchange of so much "life" for the ownership and upkeep of houses. When the structure that enables and protects becomes a burden, a set of obligations, something that consumes rather than enhances freedom, peace of mind, and time for contemplation, it has become an evil. A person can ultimately either devote that measure of "life" to the inner dwelling place, the nurturing of soul and body, or to the house of bricks and boards "where moth and rust doth corrupt" (Matthew 6:20). In the way things have of turning from good to evil, he reasons, what is built for a good may itself become a great evil if its purposes are lost sight of:

And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him . . . and it may still be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them. . . . I know one or two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death will set them free. (30)

Once again the argument proceeds by precept, example, and application. Key ideas of freedom, true wealth, and consciousness are reasserted, as is the paradox of possession: that when it has ceased to be vigilantly purposeful, it becomes a form of dispossession. Conscious, voluntary dispossession, however, allows a man to repossess what is fundamentally his: his freedom, his time, his energy.

Thoreau's argument is deeply rooted in traditional Christian and Eastern asceticism, which reach back beyond the New England Unitarianism that formed him, and pushes to a logical extreme the transcendentalist identification with nature that was one attempt to sidestep the consequences of capitalistic Puritanism. Attention to the material world, once separated from attention to matters of the spirit, produces a dangerous imbalance that has individual as well as social and political consequences: "While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings" (30). The argument reiterates the body-soul dichotomy as opposition: focus on the outward material shells that house the inner life is always presumed to inhibit nurture of the life within, the soul, which is the thing of true value. Architectural ornament, therefore, is a dangerous distraction from essentials, appropriate only if it is designed and crafted by the person who is to dwell with it and can thus be "read" as an extension of that man's aesthetic impulses arising from his "true self": "Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing

his own coffin . . . and 'carpenter' is but another name for coffin-maker" (43).

This emphasis on the house as an extension of the individual soul and psyche is a grounding point for Thoreau's entire aesthetic: whatever distances or distracts a person from his essential, inner self fosters illusion and generates a false relation between self and world. Indeed, the body itself is in like fashion that part of the physical world an individual is responsible for designing and bringing into congruence with the soul: "Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones" (199). Therefore, in order to be in right relation to the soul, the material environment we fashion around ourselves must faithfully represent and reflect the soul, so as to act as mirror and portrait: "Better paint your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture!" (43). (He often reiterates this relation in simple analogies: "I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast" [223–224].) The material environment ought in all its particulars to represent an extension of the fundamental natural relation between man and nature—to reproduce faithfully the ecological economy that exists in nature. Aesthetics are therefore always tied to utility: what is unnecessary is inappropriate, and only what is appropriate is beautiful. Thoreau describes his own house as "a sort of crystallization around me" that "reacted on the builder" (77).

This belief in the formative influence of the material environment, the reciprocity of effect between man and the world he fashions around himself, binds Thoreau's aesthetics inseparably to his morality. The house that is too far removed in form and function from the lives lived in it, that has ceased to represent the conscious values and priorities of its inhabitants, and that has become an end in itself rather than a means to enhance "life" can distract a man from his true purposes.

Thoreau's reference to noblemen and kings gives his point an ironic turn as well, for nobility and kingship are designations that attach to outward and accidental attributes and have to be

stripped away to reach the "essential man." Civilization has created noblemen and kings, but not such as deserve the name. And it has conspired to obscure the relation between a man and his work or between work and its just rewards. Building should be at the hand of the dweller so that the value of the act is not lost in indirection:

There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. (41)

This last observation introduces a disquisition on the evils of division of labor as something that fragments and therefore destroys human integrity. The notion that architecture and house-building are "simple and natural" occupations falls strangely on the ears of a modern audience, as indeed it must have even in Thoreau's time. Specialized expertise, he implies, tends to vitiate initiative to the point where men do not trust themselves to care for their own needs. Thoreau's distrust of specialists is like his distrust of the other aspects of the civilizing process he has mentioned: they are a manifestation of the disintegration of human functions, so that a man is finally incapable of independence, or even of true interdependence, but is reduced to servile dependence by his own cultivated ignorance of processes that ought simply to be extensions of ancient instinctive drives like rooting and nesting. Thoreau waxes sarcastic on the subject, suggesting that even the best architects are not worthy of their calling because, being specialized, their work is not "whole" or true:

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if

it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, . . . and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. (41)

When the man who builds the house is not the man who inhabits it, a disjuncture has already occurred that militates against integrity and initiates a system of inequity based on economic mediation between maker and product, between work and reward. "The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam" (31).

In this last bitter observation the issue of inequity of housing arises explicitly for the first time; houses again appear as an index of the evils and imbalances of civilized life. By a simple technique of juxtaposition of opposites, the palace and the hut establish a spectrum of inequities that indicts the democratic ideal. Furthermore, such inequities generate a false sense of relative values that deceives men into desiring what they do not need: "Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have" (31–32). Houses introduce competition, and competition alienates men not only from one another but from themselves and a true relation to their own needs, so that they can no longer distinguish what is appropriate to their character and way of life. Competition militates against contentment, and only retreat from the competitive economic matrix makes it possible to restore the perspective necessary to pursue real contentment rather than continue the race toward unnecessary and inappropriate objects of artificially generated desires. "Shall we always study to obtain more of these things," Thoreau asks, "and not sometimes to be content with less? . . . Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab's or the Indian's?" (32).

The rhetorical question here serves as a window onto much wider issues than furniture. To illustrate the point that "less is more," Arab and Indian are used somewhat indiscriminately as

primitives—noble savages who have not yet been corrupted by possession, whose wisdom is presumed to lie in their nearness to the earth and to natural things. In Thoreau's zeal to articulate an ideal of simplicity, he sees material goods as bordering on positive evil because they consume precious energy, or "life": "A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil" (60). The word evil once again throws so simple a thing as a doormat into the realm of universal ethical principles. No possession is neutral because possession itself is a moral issue; similarly, no structure we build for ourselves is neutral because time and space are part of the economy of the universe, the adaptation to which is our moral education; as such they are not only significant and symbolic but are commodities committed to our stewardship, by which we will be judged.

The notion of stewardship as a significant aspect of moral responsibility explains the frequent inventories of money, time, and possessions; the writer appears to be "rendering an account" to his Maker, as to his readers, for the "talents" entrusted to him:

My furniture, part of which I made myself,—and the rest cost me nothing of which I have not rendered an account,—consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. . . . Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. (59)

Unnecessary things "clutter and defile" and upset the balance between inner and outer life by consuming time, energy, and attention: "I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have furnished a house?" (32). Imbalance between inner and outer life, distraction, anxiety over material things, are to be shunned

as besetting sins because they upset the wider complex economy of relations between the individual and his environment. Objects tend toward evil, Thoreau reasons, because they block our vision of higher things. Comfort anesthetizes and possession blinds. The writer's positive fear of such imbalance is understandable only when we accept his belief that its implications reach far beyond personal moral life and assume social and even metaphysical proportions: "We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. . . . We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten" (33).

The note of the jeremiad is sounded once again: we have become complacent in our comfort. The parallel between the mansion and the tomb presents another grim paradox reemphasizing the displacement of spiritual goods by material ones. When art, or the work of men's hands, becomes an end in itself, it becomes evil. It is only good as a means to a higher end, in the service of the ends of nature and of enlightenment. Apart from these ends, the edifices we build around ourselves are flimsy artifices that loosen our grounding in solid earth: "When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gew-gaws upon the mantelpiece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation" (34).

Thoreau's stance as naive outsider lends credibility to a kind of argument that might otherwise be impalatable: the deserved moral outrage of the pure. He claims not to be involved in the outward-spiraling economy of acquisition that ultimately consumes the individual's energies and resources and leaves him in a state of impoverishment and indebtedness, a deficit economy based on multiple mediations between object and owner and between maker and consumer. Finances, like aesthetics, are inextricably connected to the moral sphere. It is a matter of pride for Thoreau to be able to tell what his house has cost him. "I

give the details [of construction and cost]," he writes, "because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them" (43). Such practical accounting is an imitation of the spiritual accounting a person must, according to the apostle Peter, "be always ready to give" (I Peter 3: 15).

Just as the exchange between man and nature is the standard of economy, so is it the standard of aesthetic value as well, beauty being a by-product of that interaction. And as the walls of a house tend to separate us from that direct interaction, we must be wary of indoor art. Art, like money, can either preserve our connections with the natural world or, more likely, sever them. Again, however, having established the extreme, Thoreau modifies his judgments: "Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shell-fish, and not overlaid with it. But alas! I have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with" (35). The analogy reiterates organicism as a criterion of beauty. Elements of design superimposed from without rather than naturally evolved from within are false and hypocritical. Authenticity, and hence beauty, proceeds from the inside outward. A house, therefore, can either be a mask on or a manifestation of the life within it.

A distinct shift occurs next in the writer's approach to the subject of houses. Having established the scale of necessity, he begins to consider legitimate luxury, bringing his subject closer to home by considering what is a realistic and viable way of life in Concord:

Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins to-day, it certainly is better to accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak understandingly on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically and practically. (36)

There follows a lengthy account of the building of the cabin at Walden Pond. Thoreau's attention to the details of construction serves to exemplify the values already discussed: economy, efficiency, directness, focus, and concentration on process as spiritual activity. With a borrowed ax he hews his own timber, leaving the bark on, carefully mortising or tenoning each log by its stump with other borrowed tools. Significantly enough, the carpenter does not even own his own tools; he borrows them, the emphasis being on a simple communism of appropriation according to need. Thoreau further implies that the task is one that any man, minimally equipped, may do and that the one who makes a thing deserves to use it. Doing and thinking, in this view, are not simultaneous—the practical philosopher who digs and hews and builds is thinking with his body and thinks with his mind when his body is at rest. Writing (or thinking) and building are analogous and complementary activities, binding body to soul in imitative action.

Thoreau periodically interrupts his account of the building to reflect on its symbolic significance. Remembering the digging of the cellar in the hill, he writes, "Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow" (40).

This comes very close to Jung's allegory of the psyche, according to which the essential sources of knowledge are rooted in the earth, deep and hidden when we build over them; the further we build upward and outward, the more we separate ourselves from them, to our own potential detriment. They are also what survive the destruction of our edifices. Thoreau's rhetorical reductiveness here again serves his purpose in circling always back to essentials, insistently returning to the central point lest in the widening gyre of elaboration we lose it like the falcon does the voice of the falconer.

In architecture as in writing, the center is lost when elaboration loses its grounding in functional necessity. Ornamentation is conceivably good only if it is a direct, traceable, and organic extension of the idea at the center:

What of the architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder,—out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this country . . . are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. (42)

Anticipating James, Stein, Hemingway, Wharton, Cather, and other literary descendants, Thoreau applies the architectural analogy directly to writing, where the same standards and cautions apply: "What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our Bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do? So are made the belles-letters and the beaux-arts and their professors" (42). Calling attention to writing as an architectural enterprise invites scrutiny of his own text in the terms he has painstakingly set out as a builder, and it meets in every particular the standards he sets for house-building: the text gives an appearance of simplicity, even rudeness, in its frontal, informal appeal to the reader but is carefully crafted of complex materials expertly joined. He "knows his material," as he claims of his house, having picked the bricks and lumber and quarried the limestone. The liberal citations from classical and biblical sources, country lore, and current news bespeak a writer well acquainted with the world he chooses to shun. The book's partitions are few and simple, each chapter serving as an "open room"—having a general topic within which a great deal of meandering conversation can take place. And the book is designed to serve the reader, and undoubtedly the writer, as a shelter from the useless erudition and frivolous gossip that fill the bookshops, making reading a dangerous and wasteful business.

The book and the house are the educational materials of a committed autodidact. Necessity has taught him at each step what he needs to know: "My bricks," he writes, "being second-hand ones, required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that I learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels" (216). He laments the money and time spent on less efficient and purposeful schooling, observing that at Cambridge College (Harvard) students pay thirty dollars a year for small, inconvenient, and noisy rooms and adding, "I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish" (45). And, taking his reasoning a step further, Thoreau claims, "My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on linen paper" (90).

The proper setting for an education is home, a place ideally free of distractions, the pressures of conformity, and winds of opinion and conducive to solitary contemplation. Echoing Emerson's "American Scholar" address, Thoreau sees this enhancement of solitude as a protection from the subservience to the past fostered in universities, where intellectual slavishness too often passes for thought. Dramatically he insists that the spot on which he dwells has never been dwelt on before, and he cries, "Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries" (237)—an outcry that might have served as an epigraph to Emerson's address. Moreover, a house properly built and lived in is not only a proper setting for thought but for the nourishment and free play of the imagination. "Should not every apartment in which man dwells," Thoreau asks, "be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or the most expensive furniture" (218).

For all his insistence on ascetic stringencies, self-discipline, and meticulous craftsmanship, however, Thoreau's final assessment of his own style of life is clearly that it is the most conducive to enjoyment. Indeed, he might well have taken for his own epigraph St. Augustine's adage that "the end of all things is delight." The profound sense of purpose that drives Thoreau's crafts as writer and carpenter rests on this foundation, and what he seeks most urgently to learn is the proper enjoyment of the things it is proper to enjoy. His house is designed as a place where he can do that. As he observes with some satisfaction on contemplating his little dwelling, "In short, 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; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do" (63).