Chapter 6 Economics - 1

As I write the pages that follow, or the mass of words that follow, I am living alone, in the woods, in Concord, Massachusetts, on the shores of Walden Pond, while I build in a log cabin a mile from any neighbor, and supported myself only by the labor of my hands.I lived there for two years and two months.At present, I am once again a sojourner in civilized life. If the citizens had not been particularly careful to inquire about my way of life, I would not have been so abrupt, and I would have called the reader's attention by reading a private matter.Some people say my way of life is eccentric, although I don't find it eccentric at all, it just feels very natural and reasonable given my circumstances.Others ask me what I have to eat; am I lonely, am I scared, etc.Others are very curious, wanting to know what part of my income is donated to charity, and some people are very rich, wanting to know how many poor children I have supported.Therefore, readers who have no special interest in me, please forgive me when this book answers questions of this type.In many books, the so-called first-person pronoun "I" is avoided; this book uses it; the feature of this book is that the word "I" is used a lot.In fact, no matter what book is speaking in the first person, we often forget this.If I knew people as well as I knew myself, I wouldn't talk so much about myself.Unfortunately, my experience is limited, so I have to confine myself to this one subject.However, I ask every writer not only to write about the lives of other people he heard, but also to write about his own life in a simple and sincere manner sooner or later, as if he was sending it to his relatives from afar; Because I think that if a person lives sincerely, he must be living in a distant place.The following words may be particularly suitable for poor students.As for the rest of the readers, I think they will take whichever applies.Because, no one will cut their feet to fit the shoes; only the clothes and shoes that fit the size can be useful to a person.

The things I am willing to tell are not necessarily about the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders, but about you, the readers of these words, the residents living in New England, about what happened to you, especially about your life in this world What kind of life have you lived in this world in terms of the extraneous things or environment of the local residents? Is it necessary for you to live so badly? Can this kind of life be improved?I have been in many districts in Concord; and everywhere I have seen, in the shops, in the offices, and in the fields, the inhabitants, as if atoning for their sins, engaged in a thousand kinds of astonishing drudgery.I have heard of the Brahmins, who sat surrounded by flames, stared at the sun, or hung their bodies upside down over the flames; Twisted, so that nothing but liquid can flow into the stomach-sac", or, with a chain for life, chained themselves under a tree: or, like caterpillars, with their bodies to measure the empire's or, that they stand alone on the top of a pillar—yet even this conscious atonement is not less plausible, nor more terrifying than what I see every day.The twelve labors of Hercules are nothing compared with those of my neighbor, for he had only twelve, and he was done, but I never saw my None of the monsters had been killed or captured by their neighbors, nor had they been seen to perform any drudgery.Nor did they have Iolas, a loyal servant of Hercules, who branded the nine-headed monster with a piece of fiery iron. It was cut off with one head, and two heads would grow back.

I see young men, my fellow citizens, whose misfortune is to be born with fields, huts, barns, cattle, sheep, and implements;It would be better for them to be born in an open pasture and let the wolves come to nurse them. They can see clearly what kind of environment they are working hard in.Who made them slaves of the land?Why are some people able to enjoy the support of sixty acres of land, while many more are destined to eat only dust?Why do they have to dig their own graves as soon as they are born?They had to live a human life, to promote all this, to work hard, to make things as good as possible.How many a poor immortal soul have I met, so nearly crushed under the burden of life that they could not breathe, they crawled along the path of life, and pushed before them a body seventy-five feet long by forty feet wide? barn, an Augean stable that was never swept, and hundreds of acres to drive, hoe, mow, pasture, and woodlot!Others, however, who did not inherit the property, certainly did not suffer from this unnecessary suffering handed down from generation to generation, but still had to live and work desperately for their few cubic feet of flesh and blood.