Summary: Baker Farm
Thoreau sometimes roams beyond Walden Pond and Flints’
Pond to outlying groves and woods, surveying the land. One day,
caught in a rainstorm on a fishing trip, Thoreau takes cover in
a hut near Baker Farm that he imagines to be deserted. But inside
he finds John Field and his family, poor Irish immigrants. A conversation
ensues, although it is more a lecture by Thoreau to Field on how
he should live his life, telling Field that if he reevaluates his
priorities and economizes, he can pull himself out of poverty. Thoreau
says that the wild state of nature is best and that “the only true
America” is that place where one can do without luxuries such as
tea, coffee, butter, and beef. Thoreau insists that he speaks to
Field as a fellow philosopher, but Field is not overly receptive
to Thoreau’s points. Thoreau concludes that the Irishman is not
interested in taking risks, and lacks the “arithmetic” to see the
wisdom of Thoreau’s financial management advice. He leaves the Field
home with no mention of having shared a moment of warmth or humor
with the family. Moreover, Thoreau makes the unfair speculation
that Field suffers from “inherited Irish poverty.” Before departing,
Thoreau notes that even the well is dirty, its rope broken, and
its bucket “irrecoverable.” Yet, having asked for a drink of water,
Thoreau says he does not refuse the dirty “gruel” that “sustains
life here.” Thoreau proclaims, “I am not squeamish in such cases
when manners are concerned.”
Summary: Higher Laws
On the walk home, Thoreau passes a woodchuck, and is seized
with a primitive desire to devour it. He notices his own dual nature,
part noble and spiritual, part dark and savage, and declares that
he values both sides of himself. Thoreau believes in the importance
of the hunt as an early stage in a person’s education and upbringing,
noting that intellectual and spiritual individuals then move on
to higher callings, leaving “the gun and fish-pole behind.”
Although he is a skilled fisherman, Thoreau confesses
his reluctance for the practice in recent days, borne of a sense
that the fish is neither fully nourishing nor fully clean. His impulse
toward vegetarianism, however, is based on his instincts and his
principles rather than on any actual experience of poor health.
Thoreau also avoids the consumption of alcohol, tea, and coffee
on the same grounds. To him the simplest fare is the best, and the
consumption of animal flesh is a moral debasement that far fewer
would indulge in if they had to slaughter beasts themselves. Thoreau
feels strongly that the minister should not partake of the hunt,
and he himself finds grains and vegetables both more filling and
less difficult to prepare. Thoreau says that one should delight
in one’s appetite, rather than obey it dutifully. Yet, while there
is much to be gained from savoring a meal, taste should not be taken
to the point of indulgence. Thus there is water to quench thirst,
rather than wine. This simplicity of taste marks his other pleasures
as well: Thoreau prefers a breath of fresh air to the strains of
a musical composition.
Thoreau aspires to distinguish his higher nature from
his more animalistic tendencies. It is never a fully successful
effort, yet even in failure he says it is a pursuit that yields
considerable rewards. As the animal nature fades, one approaches
divinity. Thoreau says we have a choice: we may strive to be either
chaste or sensual, either pure or impure. In the end, Thoreau says,
it is up to each individual to care for his or her body and his
or her soul, saying that “[e]very man is the builder of a temple.”
The proof of that care will be evident in the face and in the features,
he says, which will acquire the visage of nobility when one engages
in right thought and action and the visage of degradation when one
engages in wrong thought and action. To conclude, Thoreau invokes
the figure of John Farmer, an allegorical representation of the
common man who hears the music of higher spheres, questions his
life of hopeless toil, and decides to live his life with a “new
austerity.” Farmer “redeem[s]” himself by letting his “mind descend
into his body,” and becomes able to “treat himself with ever increasing
respect.”
Analysis: Baker Farm and Higher Laws
Most of the material in these two sections, and afterward,
was added after Thoreau left Walden. In general, these sections
were not begun in earnest until 1851, and
Thoreau did not impose chapter divisions until 1853,
more than five years after he abandoned his cabin in the woods.
As a result, much of the writing that appears in the latter portion
of Walden does not feel as closely related to his self-reliance
project as the earlier chapters do, though they still remain connected
by themes and ideas.
The Baker Farm episode raises questions that are central
to the earlier part of the work, giving us the opportunity to see
what happens when Thoreau applies his ideas about domestic economy
onto the lives of others. Thoreau demonstrates a strange lack of
generosity on his part when considering John Field and his family.
He describes Mrs. Field’s “round greasy face and bare breast,” representing
her as an ineffectual housekeeper “with the never absent mop in
one hand, and yet no effects of it visible anywhere.” Here, in a
single breath, he is calling a woman who offers him shelter unwashed,
unkempt, and unproductive—and with no apparent remorse. In a similarly
ungenerous manner, he describes the Field baby as “wrinkled” and
“cone-headed.” And when this baby naturally regards Thoreau with
the self-confidence of infancy, Thoreau sees not its sweet innocence,
but rather its self-delusion in behaving as though it were “the
last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure of the world” instead
of an ugly and malnourished creature. John Field himself is described
as honest and hard working, but “shiftless,” a poor money manager.
This verdict, which is quite damning given Thoreau’s insistence
on keeping one’s accounts simple and healthy, may explain the mild
animosity he shows the family (perhaps without realizing it): the
Fields are the negative examples of economy, while he is the positive
example of it. That he himself once contemplated living on Baker
Farm, as he tells us, and that he too is living in the backwoods
on a subsistence level suggests that he sees the Fields as his counterparts.
But the difference between him and the Fields is what matters most
to Thoreau: they do not share his enlightened philosophy of self-reliance,
and so they fail where he has succeeded.
