A man is rich in proportion to the number of…

The sentence comes in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”, the second chapter of Walden. Before settling by the pond, Thoreau says, he had bought every farm in the neighbourhood in imagination: “Wherever I sat, there I might live.” An afternoon sufficed to lay out orchard and pasture; “and then I let it lie, fallow perchance”, for the reason the line gives. He even obtained the refusal of several farms, “the refusal was all I wanted”, and came nearest to owning one with the Hollowell place, a sale that fell through, to his relief.

Thoreau lived at Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847 and published the book in 1854. The same chapter holds his most famous declaration: he went to the woods “because I wished to live deliberately”.

The line turns the ordinary measure of wealth upside down: not what a man owns, but what he can do without. It echoes Socrates, who is said to have marvelled, before the goods of the Athenian market, at how many things he did not need.

Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”, 1854

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