On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a small cabin he had built on the shore of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. He lived there for two years, two months, and two days. He kept a journal. He watched ants fight wars on a stump. He measured the depth of the pond. He refused to pay his poll tax and spent a night in jail. He wrote a book about it that has not gone out of print in over a hundred and seventy years. The cabin was on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. His mother did his laundry. These facts are used by critics to diminish the experiment. The experiment does not seem to mind.

He Was Not Trying to Escape Civilization

The most common misreading of Walden is that Thoreau was a hermit who rejected society and went to live in the woods. He was not. The pond was a mile and a half from town. He walked to Concord regularly. He had dinner guests. His mother brought him pies. He was not running from society. He was running an experiment to see how little he actually needed. Literary scholars at Harvard University, where Thoreau studied and whose library he used throughout his life, have argued that Walden is fundamentally a work of economics. How much money do you actually need to live? How much of what you earn goes to things you do not want? How much of your life do you spend working for things that make your life worse? Thoreau calculated the cost of his cabin at twenty-eight dollars. He calculated the cost of a year's food at under nine dollars. He then asked why his neighbors spent their entire lives working to afford houses they were too busy to enjoy. The questions were rude. They were also unanswerable. They remain unanswerable.

Civil Disobedience Changed More Than Walden Did

In 1846, while living at the pond, Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax as a protest against slavery and the Mexican-American War. He was arrested and spent one night in jail before someone, probably his aunt, paid the tax on his behalf against his wishes. From that single night, he wrote an essay called Civil Disobedience that argued citizens have a moral obligation to resist unjust laws through nonviolent refusal. Political scientists at the University of Virginia have traced the direct influence of this essay on Gandhi's noncooperation movement in India and Martin Luther King Jr.'s strategy of nonviolent resistance in the American civil rights movement. One night in a Massachusetts jail became the philosophical foundation for two of the largest liberation movements of the twentieth century. Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862. He was forty-four. His last words, reportedly, were moose and Indian, which was either delirium or one final refusal to say what was expected. He had lived deliberately. He had simplified. He had gone to the pond and come back with a book that told everyone else they were living wrong, and the irritating thing is that he was mostly right.