On July 4, 1845, the year he turned twenty-eight, Henry D. Thoreau moved into his house at Walden Pond. He borrowed a wagon from a friend, loaded it with his few earthly belongings, and hauled everything out through the woods to the door of his newly constructed dwelling.
He did not own much. As he tells us in "Walden", he had at the cabin a table, a bed, three chairs, a three-inch looking-glass, and a tent, which he kept rolled in the loft. He also had three plates, a cup, a spoon, two knives and forks, a japanned lamp, a flute, a kettle, a skillet, a dipper, and a wash-bowl. He brought with him a few cherished books, including his copy of "The Iliad", and some lighter reading.
No-one who wants to spend some time in the woods does so without at least a nod to Henry Thoreau who wanted "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." Unlike Henry Thoreau, who lived in his cabin for a little over two years and made do with only a few books, I lined the walls of my small cabin in the woods with shelves, filled them up with books, and stayed there during the warm summer months for just a night or two at a time, never too far away that I couldn't walk home for dinner.
Being without insulation and without any source of heat, the summer idyll of spending nights in my little cabin, my retreat from the twenty-first century, has come to an end. I had become a little addicted to the place. A good addiction in which the modern world fades away. There's something fascinating about simplicity: inside the hut the light of the kerosene lamps cast a warm glow over the wood-panelled walls, and in the peace of the summer evenings I began to appreciate the beauty of shadowed corners, of silence and the natural world. You begin to imagine you could give away all your money and live happily on nothing.
On certain evenings a deep, almost primeval silence would descend. With no artifical light nearby, with just the golden glow of the kerosene lamps, the moon and stars seemed brighter, the sky blacker. The night would be warm; a slight breeze rustled the tree tops, and occasionally all manners of scratchings and scurryings could be heard around the hut.
In the morning, with the sun slanting through the windows, with bird song everywhere, and the cottage filled with air and light and the fresh smell of a new morning, I'd get up early, pour a coffee from the thermos I had carried from the house the night before, and sit in a sunny spot along the east wall, thinking and daydreaming, simply staring at things, drinking coffee and landscape in alternating sips. I have no religion but I came to love those mornings at my cottage, and those quiet moments were the finest hours of the day that came closest to sacredness.
Summer has gone and I'm back in the comfort of my own home with heating, electricity, running water, telephone, television, the internet, and I'm reading "Living at the End of Time" by John Hanson Mitchell.
Henry Thoreau took to the woods because he wished to live deliberately. John Hanson Mitchell took to the woods because "... the woods were the only place I could afford to live". There he discovered firsthand, as Henry Thoreau had taught, that the essence of civilisation is not the multiplication of wants but the elimination of need.
In our time it never hurts to rediscover such simple truths for ourselves.
