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shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but two hours' work. I took particular
pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for
an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the
cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has
disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at
the entrance of a burrow.
Walden& 32
At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my acquaintances, rather to
improve so good an occasion for neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the
frame of my house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than I.
They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day. I began to
occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards
were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain, but
before boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of
stones up the hill from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the
fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the meanwhile out
of doors on the ground, early in the morning: which mode I still think is in some respects
more convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was
baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed
some pleasant hours in that way. In those days, when my hands were much employed, I
read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or
tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the
Iliad.
*
It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did, considering, for
instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man,
and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than
our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his
own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men
constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and
families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed,
as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and
cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller
with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of
construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the
mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and
Walden& 33
natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the
tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant,
and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally
serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he
should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least
possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a
necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps
from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A
sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. It was
only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugarplum, in fact, might
have an almond or caraway seed in it--though I hold that almonds are most wholesome
without the sugar--and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within and
without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever
supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin merely--that the
tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shell-fish its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such a contract
as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with
the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the
soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The
enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me to
lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants who really
knew it better than he. What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually
grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is
the only builder--out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a
thought for the appearance and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be
produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting
dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log
huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they
are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and
equally interesting will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and
Walden& 34
as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of
his dwelling. A great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a
September gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the
substantials. They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.
What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the
architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our
churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and their professors. Much
it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what
colors are daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, he
slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece
with constructing his own coffin--the architecture of the grave--and "carpenter" is but
another name for "coffin-maker." One man says, in his despair or indifference to life, take
up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that color. Is he thinking of
his last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for it as well. What an abundance of leisure
be must have! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better paint your house your own
complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of cottage
architecture! When you have got my ornaments ready, I will wear them.
Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house, which were already
impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log,
whose edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane.
I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-
feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap-doors, one
door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the
usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which was done
by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very few are able to tell exactly
what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials
which compose them: [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]