I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the
best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that
was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among
men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be
where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and
his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is
as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods
all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes
home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be
where he can :see the folks,:” and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself for his
day’s solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and
most of the day without ennui and :the blues:; but he does not realize that the student,
though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer
in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may
be a more condensed form of it.
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to
acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other
a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of
rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we
need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the
fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another,
and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would
suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory---never
alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square
mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.
I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.
Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no
more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What
company has that lonely lake, I pray?
And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its
waters. The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two,
but one is a mock sun. god is alone---but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a
great deal of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion
in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely
than the Millbrook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower,
or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.