Q. Read the following passage and answer the given question.
Henry David Thoreau, knowing his Greek, loving puns and etymologies, and being a punctilious writer, was likely quite deliberate in the choice of ‘Economy’ as his title for the longest and first chapter in Walden (1854). By living in his spartan little pond house, his oikos, and getting this house in order, as it were, Thoreau meant to help others get their houses in order – and, house by house, family by family, give new life to society. The dry title hides a pun with a deep purpose, one that whispers: this is a book about a house, a simple one on a pond, but also a not-so-simple one, a disordered one, orbiting the Sun.
Thoreau’s purpose at his pond house was akin to the purposes of his contemporaries. While Thoreau’s intellectual compatriots, especially the Transcendentalists, experimented with communal living – for example, George Ripley’s Brook Farm (1841-47) and Amos Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands (1843-44) – Thoreau experimented with the opposite: solitary living. The scholar Michael Meyer notes this contrast in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Walden, adding that Thoreau’s ‘two-year retreat to Walden Pond was his response to the communal efforts of the Transcendentalists’.
Why so many experiments in living at that time? Why that explosion of new forms of ‘home economics’, communal or solitary? The answer might be related to the fact that the national oikos was divided. Abraham Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ speech, given 11 years after Thoreau’s last day in his Walden Pond home, and four years after the publication of Walden, confronts the essential fears of this period:
‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.
An abolitionist, Thoreau felt his country becoming all one thing: a nation of slave auction blocks, driven by immoral and insatiable commercial cravings. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, enacted four years before the publication of Walden, required all slaves be returned to their owners, even if the escapee lived in a free state. Effectively, there were no more free states. The house was all one cruel thing now. The federal act, of course, saddled the federal government with its enforcement: Washington, DC became the national slave-catcher.
Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax to this government; he would not bankroll slave-catchers, nor the unjust war against Mexico. From this brief incarceration, Thoreau wrote one of the most influential political essays of all time, ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849); Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr, were among those profoundly inspired by it.
What conclusion can be drawn from the passage?
