Nostalgia: 2008: Bear Trader writes about "self-reliance". About the secrets of Walden Pond

 (Ed.note: Last Sunday, in conversing with "Bear Trader" he made a comment on the simple life to come if the markets came down this week, and one of the group mentioned Thoreau---and then Bear Trader made a comment about Thoreau having his mom do his laundry--which I disputed. Here is his reply:)

We were talking last Sunday about H. D. Thoreau. I made a reference to 
Thoreau, while at Walden Pond, having his mother and sister do his 
washing. I remember reading this in an edition of Walden. Here is the 
excerpt.

From pages xxii and xxiv of Stephen Fender's introduction to the Oxford 
World Classics edition of Walden, available at Amazon.


"The central question is, who is 'Thoreau" There is the man who wrote 
Walden and the voice that talks to us out of its pages. The 'Thoreau' 
inside Walden 'can do without the post office' and disparages 
newspapers. But according to his contemporary, and Walden's first 
editor, Frank Sanborn, 'few residents in Concord frequented the post 
office more punctually or read the newspapers...more eagerly than 
Thoreau'. What looks like a solitary life in the woods was nothing of 
the kind. The woods themselves were sparser around Concord and Walden 
than at any time before or since in the natural history of the area.  
(That is why Emerson wanted Thoreau to plant new trees there.) Walden 
Pond was not a wilderness, but a popular resort of the townspeople.  
Thoreau did not really 'live' at Walden - more like camp out - and his 
life was anything but solitary. He was continually in and out of town, 
or receiving visitors at his cabin. Though on p.56 he slyly admits to 
having 'dined out occasionally', in fact he ate regularly at other 
people's houses in Concord in return for odd jobs. Walter Harding notes 
that almost every Sunday dinner was shared with Emerson and his family, 
and that on his way back from Concord to the Pond he would call in on 
Edmund Hosmer, often staying for supper. Emerson's house was just over 
a mile from Walden down Brister's Hill. With equal frequency Thoreau 
would call in at the house of his mother and sister on Main St., a walk 
of a mile and a half down the railroad tracks to Concord, to eat a meal 
and get his washing and mending done, sometimes in return for odd jobs."
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