Actual Possession in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”

The “Where I Lived” chapter features the farm Thoreau considered buying before building his home in the woods.  Here, his home is something much more than either an expense or a piece of architecture – his home allows him to feel more fully constructed, more like a self than a mere “squatter” (36).  He admits this reliance on the material in an unusual moment of humility: “With this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward settling in the world.  This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me” (57).  It is fitting, then, that the chapter in which he talks most about living both within spaces and without institutional guidance should end in a passage that reflects the self as owner of the self.

            Thoreau really exposes himself in this last passage, bespeaking self-contentment perhaps for the first time in the narrative.  He pours out self-knowledge as well as knowledge of the social (time as a construct, for example), and he acknowledges his limitations in the presence of eternity and starry skies.  Pointing to his head as the center of “his best faculties” (66), he then defines it as “an organ for burrowing” (66).  Here, he is owning, not just theorizing on, his unique animal instinct toward finding shelter.  The house not only helps Thoreau both feel and practice his own subjectivity, but it also reverts him back to an Edenic lifestyle of simplicity, when Adam and Eve “wore the bower before other clothes” (18).  While the syntax of the chapter's last passage is undoubtedly confusing, Thoreau is at least purposeful in the last sentence: "I think that the riches vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine" (66).  Henceforth, feeling settled and sheltered, uninhibited and self-aware, Thoreau really will begin "to mine," that is, to own himself.

Thoreau, Henry David.  Walden.  1854.  Ed. Owen Thomas.  New York, NY: Norton, 1966.