To wake up is to become aware of features of existence that the sleeper ordinarily overlooks. Walden is an exercise book in waking up -- An American Book of Koans. It doesn't have to be read this way, and most people miss the mystique. Practice in Walden and apply to the world.
1.62 By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins' shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he was not at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high. It was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Doorsill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. Mrs. C. came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. The hens were driven in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there a board which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor
extended under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet deep. In her own words, they were "good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good window" -- of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent new coffee-mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soon concluded, for James had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents tonight, he to vacate at five tomorrow morning, selling to obody else meanwhile: I to take possession at six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and fuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their all -- bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens -- all but
the cat; she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.
Thoreau deconstructs the Collins shanty to reconstruct his house/temple at Walden, just as he deconstructs and reconstructs conventional religion. The allusion to "the removal of the gods of Troy" in the next paragraph is a hint of the greater significance of this paragraph. Note: the roof is peaked, the window deep and high, the interior dark, and it appears as if surrounded by a wall. Inside this structure is "a patent new coffee-mill," an icon of the new religion of commerce, nailed to an oak sapling. Oh, James Collins is probably Irish Catholic, and this transaction is probably occurring during Easter Week, 1845. What hidden visual image underlies Thoreau's description of the shanty?
It's a cathedral, the surrounding wall of dirt resembling a flying buttress. The phrase "here a board and there a board" cost me a day to resolve. It is an allusion to "Old McDonald Had a Farm."
To read Walden fully, the reader needs to dwell on the text with a contemplative frame of mind. Otherwise, a shanty is just a shanty, and a coffee-mill is just a coffee-mill. Wrestle with the angel and get the blessing.
Tom