The “house is still but a porch at the entrance of a burrow,” he maintained in Walden. “Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects,” he said, “the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped.” In the background of all his abjurations to simplify lay one simple practicality: Thoreau himself had no money to spare. This business of building a house and living in the woods was going to be “entered into without the usual capital.” And if he were to stay long enough to get a book out of the experience, he would have to husband his resources.
“The fruit a thinker bears is sentences,” he wrote in his journal. And in Canby’s opinion, the secret to his durability in our canon was his effort to take flashes of insight and “then anxiously develop the impression until a sentence was made that was true to the original inspiration, yet communicable to the reader.”11 In order to do so, he had much need for solitude as well as time for observation of nature. Of all the acts of largesse attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps it is his loan of the unused tract of land near Walden Pond that paid the most dividends.
