"Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furrowing": Thoreau on work and leisure

(by Anastasia Chan)

Henry David Thoreau’s classic work Walden (2008 [1854]) is widely appreciated for its poetic insights into deliberate living, immersion in nature, and its critique of modern industrialism. But there is a complex philosophy of work in Walden that has received less academic and public attention. In fact, much of Thoreau’s writing addresses the right place of work in our lives – this not only the case with Walden but also “Life Without Principle” (1863), and his Journal written between 1837 and 1861 (2009).

It is a common practice to think of Thoreau as an anti-work advocate who espouses leisure and contemplation whilst deriding hard work. This image is supported by the superficial ad-hominem critiques of Thoreau as the ‘loafer’ or ‘freeloader’ – the isolated hermit who took from Emerson, his own family, and society, and contributed nothing in return. A deeper reading of Thoreau’s work, however, offers great evidence to the contrary. Thoreau’s critique of industrialised work served as the foundation for his ideal vision of work. His experiment at Walden Pond was an attempt to reconceive of work as a deliberate and life-affirming activity, rather than a merely instrumental activity that fulfils our biological need for food and shelter.

Thoreau’s Negative Account of Work

Thoreau begins Walden, on the very second page, with a discussion of work. It is already clear that work is of greatest importance for his experiment and his text:

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it if not before. (Walden 2008, 7).

According to Thoreau, an error has occurred. Bound by unquestioned work and necessity, individuals foolishly commit themselves to a single mode of life. Work is conceptualised as an unchangeable struggle oriented towards obtaining material goods. This is a struggle that finds its end only in death. Here, and throughout his writing, Thoreau frames work as an existential issue. When work is not carefully scrutinised, the greatest loss is felt at the level of the individual. This is one of the most tantalising dimensions of Thoreau’s work – individual existence is the most fundamental ground against which work activities are assessed, rather than their contribution to economic or societal functioning.

Thoreau further articulates the negative effects of modern industrialised work on individual character and individual life:

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be any thing but a machine… The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly. (Walden 2008, 7-8). 

The modern worker unduly focused on materiality has become reduced to a machine. They are unable to pluck life’s “finer fruits” – the most important and essential facts of life, including psychological, moral, and spiritual goods. Under the guise of increased efficiency and productivity, this machine-like work squanders away the quality and intimacy of the work itself. Such mechanical action can be contrasted against the deep sensory experience of life and nature that Thoreau articulates in The Maine Woods (2009 [1864], 64):

Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

However, this contact and intimacy with nature is not only attainable in pristine wilderness, but always available in our present location and even at work.

To grasp the “finer fruits” of life, Thoreau asserts that work must be performed with a critical awareness of its place in our individual lives. And the very first task is to re-examine the relationship between work and necessity, or what is truly required for life.

Necessity

It is clear that necessity is a central theme in Walden. A primary objective of Thoreau’s two-year experiment at Walden Pond was to discover what was needed to materially sustain human life, at its most rudimentary levels. Thoreau defines these “necessaries of life” as:

…whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any… ever attempt to do without it. (Walden 2008, 13).

Thoreau designates these necessaries of life under the categories of Food, Shelter, Clothing and Fuel. They are set as the standard for what is truly needed and what is not. But the level at which these needs are satisfied must be inspected too:

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. (Walden 2008, 15).

There are some things that are absolutely necessary and require work, whilst others may not require work, and must be inspected before we engage with them.

We must draw attention to the fact that Thoreau’s philosophical framework does not only consider higher, spiritual matters, but also everyday material concerns. It is striking that a spiritual, moral, and existential experiment would even mention or capitalise ‘trivial’ concerns such as Food and Shelter. However, Thoreau’s experiment is precisely one concerned with life as a whole. This means that every aspect of life is examined, especially the problem of work. Work is not just one aspect amongst others, but unerringly central in realising Thoreau’s experiment.

Furthermore, Thoreau’s understanding of basic material concerns collapses the traditional boundaries between the physical and the spiritual. He declares:

The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. (Walden 2008, 14).

At its simplest, “vital heat” is sustained by material goods, by Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel. But Thoreau simultaneously asserts that vital heat extends to spiritual forms of “vitality”. To retain the vital heat within ourselves, we must also retain our spiritual heat:

The philosopher... is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men? (Walden 2008, 15).

The philosopher, who feeds, shelters, clothes, and warms their body, should simultaneously maintain their spiritual vitality. To accomplish this in his doctrine of work, Thoreau layers the metaphysical upon the physical. Like the “reverse side of the tapestry” (Emerson 1842), the basic metabolic dimensions of existence concurrently hold spiritual significance. In this schema then, even the most humble acts of meeting one’s physical needs – such as farming, housework, acquiring one’s food – are endowed with the highest existential and poetic potential.

Thoreau’s Positive Account of Work

Deliberate Action

One of Thoreau’s most striking insights is his elucidation of the moral and existential dimensions of work. Thoreau considers how every activity, including and perhaps most importantly the activities we engage in in our working lives, can be deliberately oriented towards truth, goodness, and our ‘higher’ natures. The conclusion of Walden ends with such a celebration of work:

Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furrowing. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse... Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work. (Walden 2008, 294).

Work, for Thoreau, is a holistic undertaking that requires deliberate action even in the most mundane details and everyday activities. Thoreau calls for productive action that does not only patch up holes, but that is performed with such conviction that it has a lasting metaphysical, not only physical, effect.

Satisfaction

Thoreau also provides a plethora of examples of what good work looks like. Good work has the characteristics, amongst others, of being satisfying and enjoyable, deliberate, and not merely for economic ends. Several of these characteristics of good work are captured in Thoreau’s discussion of his neighbour Minott, the “poetical” farmer:

He does nothing with haste and drudgery, but as if he loved it. He makes the most of his labour, and takes infinite satisfaction in every part of it. He is not looking forward to the sale of his crops or any pecuniary profit, but he is paid by the constant satisfaction which his labor yields him. He has not too much land to trouble him, - too much work to do, - no hired man nor boy, - but simply to amuse himself and live... He knows every pin and nail in his barn... He is never in a hurry to get his garden planted and yet [it] is always planted soon enough, and none in the town is kept so beautifully clean. He always prophesises a failure of crops, and yet is satisfied with what he gets (Journal III in Raymond 2009, 149).

The farmer loves what they do. If undertaken in the right way, humble toil holds the intrinsic value of being satisfying and enjoyable in itself. This satisfaction “makes the most” of labour in that it extracts the greatest value from human activity, and holds existential value against the backdrop of an individual life. To set about this satisfying work, however, one must have faith in their own capacities and faith that one’s material needs will be met. This faith, for Thoreau, is a quality that must be trained and developed.

Self-cultivation

A further characteristic of good work is that it cultivates one’s mind, body, and spirit. This concept of work as self-cultivation is clearly articulated in the chapter “The Bean-field”, where Thoreau embraces the analogy between literal and metaphorical cultivation:

I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and maintenance, and sustain me. (Walden 2008, 148).

Here, the boundary between the material and the moral are blended. Self-cultivation sustains the spirit, as toil sustains the material body. The virtues are qualities that must be sown and reaped as food of the spirit. Similarly, Thoreau writes:

But labor of the hands… has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result. (Walden 2008, 142).

Planting, hoeing, and harvesting beans, like any other work, is an innately moral activity that cultivates the worker in some way. For Thoreau the writer and poet, this labour also rewarded him with an intellectual profit. A striking analogy is created here between the labour of the hands and the labour of the artist – a good farmer creates ‘classics’, akin to a Homer of the garden.

At its core, Thoreau’s message asserts that work to meet material necessity is most valuable when it takes on the significance of self-cultivation, and without this higher purpose, work will remain in a cycle of materiality.

Intimacy with Nature

Given our inevitable finitude, Thoreau asserts that good work should be an activity oriented towards the finest aspects of human life, including our intrinsic “divinity” and sensitivity to the world. He gives examples of the spiritual and sensory pleasures that are attainable through good work:

When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. (Walden 2008, 143).

Whilst Thoreau worked in the field, his deliberate labour afforded him an “instant and immeasurable crop”, a spiritual harvest that sustains the spirit. He details an ecstatic and immediate act of self-transcendence where the object of his labour was elevated (“It was no longer beans that I hoed”) and his own identity, dissipated (“nor I that hoed beans”). Furthermore, Thoreau likens such work to the true realm of freedom that is leisure. His work contained such musicality and spirituality, that it could challenge his friends’ leisurely experiences of attending the religious musical works of the oratorios.

Thoreau further articulates the deep poetic sensibility and dignity attainable through work:

Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer,— to make this portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. (Walden 2008, 140).

Thoreau describes work that endows the worker with strength, self-respect, and intimacy with nature. Whilst writers in the Romantic-Transcendentalist tradition typically used the emotion and drama of classical Greek mythology to describe nature or art, Thoreau remarkably uses this same mythology to describe the topic of work. By growing beans, which themselves contain a life “pulse”, Thoreau became connected to the living earth, like the divine hero Antaeus who received his power from the earth, his mother Gaea. It is also striking that the form of work that Thoreau most elevates is the labour of the humble farmer. Yet this reflects Thoreau’s return to the original purpose of work. Rather than being an inherently economic activity concerned with money acquisition, work is an activity of sustaining our bodies through nature.

Leisure

Where does leisure fit into Thoreau’s philosophy of work? Thoreau is well known for his elevation of leisure and contemplation, yet many have ignored the fact that for Thoreau, good leisure comes only after good work:

The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. (Walden 2008, 47).

It is work alone that gives leisure its noble and beneficial character. This remarkable theory of leisure directly challenges a long philosophical tradition, running from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt and André Gorz, of opposing leisure and work as spheres of freedom and unfreedom. Rather, these two domains of life are very much intertwined for Thoreau. Individuals who acquire their leisure without engaging in necessary labour experience an existentially unprofitable leisure.

But Thoreau also emphasises the unique benefit of idleness and leisure. In our modern context, the strain and frustrations of work frequently bleed into our leisure time. We use our leisure time to recover from and compensate for bad or excessive work, rather than as a positive domain of freedom where we enact our higher projects. Thoreau, however, maintains that leisure and contemplation are of vital importance to his philosophy of work:

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness... I grew in those seasons like a corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals meant by contemplation and the forsaking of works. (Walden 2008, 102).

This passage is not a contradiction of Thoreau’s work ethic above. Leisure, idleness, and contemplation are not antithetical to work, but instead vital elements for a life of flourishing. They cultivate the individual towards deep attention, stillness, and lingering. There were times when Thoreau worked, sustaining his body and simultaneously his spirit, and there were times set aside simply and wholly for leisure and contemplation. Thoreau thus harmonises the seemingly irreconcilable realms of leisure and work within a philosophy of work oriented towards human flourishing.

There are many preconceptions about Thoreau’s thoughts on leisure, contemplation, and work. But upon closer reading, we find an unexpected and remarkable doctrine of work that challenges several long-standing notions of work in the philosophical tradition. Work is conceptualised, not as an ignoble or merely instrumental activity, but a deeply moral and existential domain with the potential for self-cultivation and spiritual elevation.

Image

Henry David Thoreau, by B. D. Maxham. Daguerrotype of Thoreau in 1856. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daguerreotype_of_Thoreau_in_1856_by_BD_Maxham.png