Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

The cry comes a few lines after Thoreau explains why he went to the woods, in the chapter “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”. “Our life is frittered away by detail,” he complains: an honest man hardly needs to count beyond his ten fingers, or “in extreme cases he may add his ten toes”. After the triple exclamation, he spells it out: let your affairs be “as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand”, and keep your accounts “on your thumb nail”. A few lines on he insists again, “Simplify, simplify”: one meal a day instead of three if need be, five dishes instead of a hundred.

Thoreau practised what he preached during his two years at Walden Pond, from 1845 to 1847: in the book’s first chapter, “Economy”, he lists to the half-cent what his cabin cost. Walden was published in 1854.

The passage remains a touchstone for anyone trying to live with less, from the “voluntary simplicity” movement to today’s minimalists.

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

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work