He had no
tolerance for the shoddy or for compromises. Exact workmanship was part of
his religion. "Drive a nail home," he writes in _Walden_, "and clinch it so
faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with
satisfaction."
Like so many of the transcendentalists, Thoreau desired to surround his
life with a "wide margin of leisure" in order that he might live in his
higher faculties and not be continuously dwarfed with the mere drudgery of
earning his sustenance. He determined to divest himself of as many of the
burdens of civilization as possible, to lead the simple life, and to waste
the least possible time in the making of mere money. The leisure thus
secured, he spent in studying birds, plants, trees, fish, and other objects
of nature, in jotting down a record of his experiences, and in writing
books.
[Illustration: SITE OF THOREAU'S HUT, WALDEN POND]
Since he did not marry and incur responsibilities for others, he was free
to choose his own manner of life. His regular habit was to reserve half of
every day for walking in the woods; but for two years and two months he
lived alone in the forest, in a small house that he himself built upon a
piece of Emerson's property beside Walden Pond, about a mile south of
Concord.
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