Art

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.

There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it.

There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint.

Experiment Day 52 - 8 New Visitor(s)

Check the Walden Experiment Visitors listing for more information.

Thoughts

We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.

We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agriculture.

We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb.

Experiment Day 51 - 5 New Visitor(s)

Check the Walden Experiment Visitors listing for more information.

Experiment Day 50 - Review

Check the Walden Experiment Visitors listing for more information.

Lifestyle

The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature.

When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again.

He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain-tops.

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper.

Experiment Day 50 - 5 New Visitor(s)

Check the Walden Experiment Visitors listing for more information.

Travel in Style

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow.

The traveler who stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated.

I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a modern drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sun-shades, and a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.

Experiment Day 49 - 4 New Visitor(s)

Check the Walden Experiment Visitors listing for more information.

Fashionable?

When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture. Or what if I were to allow -- would it not be a singular allowance?-- that our furniture should be more complex than the Arab's, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors!

At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning's work undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world?

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 threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.

Experiment Day 48 - 9 New Visitor(s)

Check the Walden Experiment Visitors listing for more information.