50 Fun Facts About Walden

In the Brute Neighbors chapter of Walden, which creatures fight a woodpile battle that Thoreau compares to Austerlitz?

Ants of two kinds, small red ones and larger black ones, covered the chips in his yard with their dead and dying. Thoreau carried three fighters indoors on a chip and watched them under a tumbler.

In The Village chapter of Walden, why does Thoreau say he was seized and put into jail one afternoon?

Not paying a tax got him locked up, because he would not recognize a state that bought and sold people. He was released the next day and was back in the woods in time for a dinner of huckleberries.

Which friend and mentor owned the woodland beside Walden Pond where Thoreau built his cabin and ran his experiment?

Ralph Waldo Emerson let his younger friend build there in return for clearing part of the woodlot and doing other chores. He was 14 years older and had drawn Thoreau into Concord's circle of writers.

In the Higher Laws chapter of Walden, which animal crossing his path was Thoreau strongly tempted to seize and eat raw?

A woodchuck stealing across the dark trail gave Thoreau what he called a strange thrill of savage delight. He was not hungry, he wrote, except for the wildness the animal stood for.

On which American holiday in 1845 did Thoreau, by his own account in Walden, first sleep in his unfinished cabin?

Independence Day was the date by accident, he says. The house was then only a defence against rain, with no plaster and with wide chinks between its rough, weather-stained boards.

In Walden, what did a hundred laborers come daily from Cambridge to harvest at the pond?

Ice from Walden was stacked in a heap Thoreau put at ten thousand tons and covered with hay and boards. Part of it was never carted off, and it did not finish melting until September 1848.

In Where I Lived, and What I Lived For in Walden, Thoreau says he went to the woods to live how?

Deliberately was his word for facing only the essential facts of existence. He feared reaching his deathbed and discovering that he had never really been alive.

In the Conclusion of Walden, a man who does not keep pace with his companions is said to hear a different what?

Drummer is the word, and Thoreau's advice is to let the man step to the music he hears, however measured or far away. William Melvin Kelley borrowed the phrase for the title of his first novel in 1962.

Which Robin Williams film heavily features an excerpt from Thoreau's Walden as a motif in its plot?

Dead Poets Society is one of several films to borrow from the book. In All That Heaven Allows, from 1955, Jane Wyman's character reads lines from it aloud.

What disaster did Thoreau and a friend accidentally cause near Walden Pond in 1844, a year before he moved there?

A forest fire set by Thoreau and Edward Hoar burned some 300 acres that April. He began building his cabin by the pond the following spring.

According to the Economy chapter of Walden, the mass of men lead lives of quiet what?

Desperation, he argues, hides even under what people call their games and amusements. What passes for resignation, Thoreau adds, is only the same despair confirmed.

Thoreau's Economy chapter in Walden names four necessaries of life in a New England climate; which is one of them?

Fuel makes the list because, he reasons, the grand necessity for our bodies is simply to keep warm. Most luxuries beyond the four he calls positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

In Walden, which borrowed implement did Thoreau carry to the pond in March 1845 and return sharper than he received it?

An axe was all he had when he began felling tall white pines for the frame of his house. Its owner told him how dearly he prized it as he released his hold.

In Walden's Economy chapter, which bread ingredient did Thoreau give up for good after accidentally scalding his supply?

Yeast turned out not to be indispensable, though housewives assured him that wholesome bread could not be made without it. He went on baking loaves of rye and Indian meal.

In Walden's Economy chapter, what six-foot railroad object does Thoreau say a hard-pressed man could buy and live in?

A tool box where the laborers locked up their gear at night could be had for a dollar, he reckoned. Bore a few auger holes for air, hook down the lid, and a man would owe nobody rent.

Which crop did Thoreau plant in rows adding up to seven miles, as he describes in Walden, to earn a little money?

Beans filled most of his two and a half acres, and he hoed them barefoot until the sun blistered his feet. He did not care to eat them himself and exchanged the harvest for rice.

In Walden's Economy chapter, Thoreau warns readers to beware of all enterprises that require new what?

Clothes matter too much, he complains: people are more anxious to look fashionable than to have a sound conscience. What such ventures really need, he adds, is a new wearer.

In Walden's Economy chapter, what did Thoreau buy from the laborer James Collins to get boards for his cabin?

A shanty cost him four dollars and twenty-five cents, paid the night before the Collins family moved out. While he carted the boards away, a neighbor quietly pocketed the best of the nails.

In Walden, which item of furniture did Thoreau keep exactly three of, one for solitude and two for friendship?

Chairs were so scarce that larger groups shared the third and mostly stood up. He still claimed to have had twenty-five or thirty people under his roof at once.

In the accounts of Walden's Economy chapter, which skilled work in the village earned Thoreau money besides carpentry?

Surveying, carpentry and other day labor in the village brought in $13.34, and he boasted of having as many trades as fingers. He later measured and mapped the pond itself.

In Walden, Thoreau says he wanted to live deep and Spartan-like and suck out all the what of life?

Marrow was his image for whatever is left when existence is driven into a corner and reduced to its lowest terms. If it proved mean, he promised to publish its meanness to the world.

Which single word does Thoreau repeat three times as an exclamation in Walden, urging readers to keep their affairs few?

Simplicity is the cry, followed by the advice to keep your accounts on a thumbnail. Let your affairs be as two or three, he says, and not a hundred or a thousand.

In Walden, which farm did Thoreau nearly buy before the owner's wife changed her mind and wished to keep it?

The Hollowell place was almost his when the owner offered ten dollars to be let off the bargain. Thoreau handed back the land and waved away the money, counting himself rich enough with his seeds and a dime.

In the Visitors chapter of Walden, what is the trade of the cheerful Canadian whom Thoreau admires but never names?

A woodchopper so contented puzzled Thoreau, who could not tell whether the man was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child. His real name was Alek Therien.

In The Village chapter of Walden, what errand had taken Thoreau into Concord on the afternoon he was arrested?

Fetching a shoe from the cobbler was his only business in town that day. He collected it, mended, on his release the next day and went straight back to the woods.

Thoreau writes in Walden that he never locked his door; what was the only thing ever taken from the cabin?

A volume of Homer went missing, perhaps, he joked, because it was improperly gilded. He left the door unfastened even when he spent a fortnight away in Maine.

The night in jail that Thoreau mentions in Walden became the subject of which famous essay of his?

Civil Disobedience began as lectures at the Concord Lyceum in 1848 and was first printed as Resistance to Civil Government. Its argument later influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

In The Ponds chapter of Walden, Thoreau calls a lake the landscape's most expressive feature and names it earth's what?

Eye is his word, and he pushes the image further: the trees along the shore are the slender lashes that fringe it. The wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.

In the Higher Laws chapter of Walden, what does Thoreau say he sold before he went to live in the woods?

His gun went because he had come to feel differently about fowling. His old excuse for carrying one was the study of rare birds, and he decided there was a finer way to study them than shooting.

In the Higher Laws chapter of Walden, which virtue does Thoreau call the flowering of man, with genius among its fruits?

Chastity ripens into heroism and holiness as well, he writes. Yet a few lines later he confesses that we have heard of this virtue but do not know what it is.

In Walden's Higher Laws, which pastime does Thoreau say he cannot pursue without falling a little in self-respect?

Fishing was something he had skill at and, he admits, a certain instinct for that revived from time to time. But whenever he had done, he felt it would have been better not to have gone.

In Walden's Brute Neighbors chapter, which diving bird does Thoreau chase by boat across the pond as it laughs at him?

A loon led him on like an opponent at checkers, vanishing under the board and surfacing where he least expected. Thoreau concluded that the bird laughed in derision of his efforts.

In Walden's Brute Neighbors chapter, which small animal nested under Thoreau's house and ate lunch crumbs at his feet?

A mouse of a wild native kind, not the common village sort, grew so tame that it ran along his sleeve. It once nibbled cheese held between his thumb and finger, then cleaned its face and walked away.

In Walden's Brute Neighbors, what odd pet does Thoreau say was kept at a Lincoln farmhouse near the pond?

A winged cat was what the neighbors called her, because each winter her fur matted into long flat strips along her sides and dropped off in spring. The family gave Thoreau a pair of the so-called wings.

Which friend of Thoreau, a companion on trips from Concord, is the Poet in the dialogue of Walden's Brute Neighbors?

Ellery Channing is also the poet of the winter chapters, the visitor who came from farthest through the deepest snows. In 1845 he had urged Thoreau to go out and build himself a hut.

In Walden's Former Inhabitants chapter, what does Thoreau say Cato Ingraham and Brister Freeman had each been?

Slaves of Concord gentlemen, both men ended their days in Walden Woods, where Cato's master built him a house. Thoreau found the apple trees Brister planted still growing on Brister's Hill.

In Walden, Hugh Quoil, the last dweller in the woods before Thoreau, was rumored to have fought at which battle?

Waterloo was the rumor, and Thoreau says he would have made the old colonel refight it for him had he lived. Quoil worked as a ditcher and died in the road soon after Thoreau arrived.

In Walden's Winter Animals chapter, which animal do hunters and hounds chase through the woods and over the frozen pond?

A fox, one hunter told him, once burst out onto the frozen pond with the pack behind it, ran partway across and turned back to the same shore. On moonlit nights Thoreau heard foxes barking over the snow crust.

In Walden, which old local belief about the pond did Thoreau disprove in the winter of 1846 with careful measurements?

That it had no bottom was a tale people accepted without taking the trouble to sound it, he scoffs. His line and stone found the deepest point at exactly one hundred and two feet.

In The Pond in Winter chapter of Walden, Thoreau imagines the pond's pure water mingling with which sacred river?

The Ganges comes to mind because he imagines the sweltering people of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta drinking at his well. The same cargoes, he notes, also cooled Charleston and New Orleans.

In the Spring chapter of Walden, what thawing material on a railroad bank flows into shapes Thoreau compares to leaves?

Sand and clay sliding down a deep cut made him feel he stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world. He concluded that the earth is living poetry, not a fragment of dead history.

In the Spring chapter of Walden, which bird does Thoreau watch soaring and tumbling alone, as if it needed no companion?

A hawk, very slight and graceful, gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun each time it rolled over. Thoreau thought it might be the kind called a merlin, but said he cared nothing for its name.

Walden squeezes Thoreau's stay of more than two years into one, organizing the book around the passage of what?

The four seasons carry the book round to a late chapter called Spring, and they stand in for stages of human development. The real stay lasted two years, two months and two days.

In the Conclusion of Walden, Thoreau says castles built in the air need not be lost; what should go under them?

Foundations are the missing piece, he says, since the air is exactly where such castles belong. The lesson of his experiment was to advance confidently in the direction of one's dreams.

According to the very last sentence of Thoreau's Walden, the sun is but a what?

Morning star is the closing image, right after the promise that there is more day to dawn. Joe Mansueto named his investment research firm Morningstar after the line.

In Walden's Conclusion, a beautiful bug hatches after decades from an egg laid in the wood of what piece of furniture?

A kitchen table of apple-tree wood had stood in a farmer's house for sixty years before the insect gnawed its way out. Thoreau asks who could hear the story without a stronger faith in resurrection.

Which philosophical movement of the American Romantic period inspired the experiment that Thoreau describes in Walden?

Transcendentalism held self-reliance as a key tenet. Thoreau had followed this loose, idealist philosophy from his early years, alongside thinkers such as Margaret Fuller.

In The Village chapter of Walden, what did Thoreau stroll into town every day or two to hear, in small doses?

Gossip, taken in homeopathic doses, was as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. He went to see the men and boys, he says, as he walked the woods to see birds and squirrels.

In Walden's Higher Laws chapter, Thoreau says every man builds a temple to the god he worships; what is it?

His body is the temple, built in a style purely his own, and he cannot get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, Thoreau adds, working in our own flesh and blood and bones.

In The Pond in Winter chapter of Walden, which ancient scripture does Thoreau say he bathes his intellect in each day?

The Bhagavad Gita made the modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial to him. He spells it Bhagvat Geeta and calls its philosophy stupendous and cosmogonal.