On this day in 1857, Thoreau wrote as follows in his journal:
Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sand-banks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines. You may run upon them as much as you please — even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content. You may see them on chance any warmer hour. In these banks, too, and such as these, are my funds deposited, a fund of health and enjoyment. Their (the crickets) prosperity and happiness and, I trust, mine do not depend on whether the New York banks suspend or no. We do not rely on such slender security as the thin paper of the Suffolk Bank. To put your trust in such a bank is to be swallowed up and undergo suffocation. Invest, I say, in these country banks. Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.
These thoughts echo something Thoreau wrote on the first of May in that same year:
It is foolish for a man to accumulate material wealth chiefly, houses and land. Our stock in life, our real estate, is that amount of thought which we have had, which we have thought out. The ground we have thus created is forever pasturage for our thoughts. I fall back on to visions which I have had. What else adds to my possessions and makes me rich in all lands? If you have ever done any work with these finest tools, the imagination and fancy and reason, it is a new creation, independent on the world, and a possession forever. You have laid up something against a rainy day. You have to that extent cleared the wilderness.
While perusing Plato's Apology recently, I realized that these observations chime with something Socrates said at his trial (here in the translation that Thoreau would have read, Sydenham and Taylor 1804, volume 4, p. 213):
I go about doing nothing else than persuading both the younger and older among you, neither to pay attention to the body, nor to riches, nor anything else prior to the soul; not to be so much concerned for any thing, as how the soul may subsist in the most excellent condition. I also say that virtue is not produced from riches, but riches from virtue, as likewise all other human goods, both privately and publicly.
As previously noted, during his time at Walden Pond Thoreau borrowed this translation of Plato's dialogues from his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson (who also owned the woodlot where Thoreau built his cabin). His masterpiece Walden was in many ways an apologia, a defense of his way of life: not the superficialities of his two years at the pond that everyone focuses on these days, but his deep cultivation of simplicity, independence, contentment, magnanimity, wisdom, and other excellences of character. Both Socrates and Thoreau recognized that the true wealth consists not in material possessions, but in the higher riches that only soulcraft can procure for us.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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