For several months now, I have been keen to read, again, Henry David Thoreau’s ideas about houses and homes in Walden. Now that it is summer and I have time to read in the shade while the heat blasts on, I have finally returned to reading my good ol’ friend Henry. I had missed him, the way one misses a friend from home when one is on a long voyage.
Today I read what I regard as the main philosophical principle of Thoreau’s vital economy. I want to share it here, as it may spur some good thinking for this summer season — a season in which I aim to simplify life while making and nourishing a loving home; a peripatetic season in which I will move from summer to winter, from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn, and try to be live my days as deliberately as Nature. Thoreau writes as follows.
The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run – Thoreau
Thoreau introduces this principle while discussing what it costs most people, in “civilized” society, to build or buy a house: it costs them most of their lives, most of their hours, as it anchors them in lives of quiet desperation. It shouldn’t be so costly, if they simplified and sought the bare material necessities and the abundant inward riches, rather than the superfluities, of life.
As for me, in the southern hemisphere I aim to nourish a loving home that doesn’t cost me a life, but rather enriches it and makes it more pleasurable and felicitous for the sharing.
Daniel G. Campos 