Odd- Fellow Society !

Around noon, after his morning chores are finished, Thoreau takes a second bath in the pond and prepares to spend the rest of his day at leisure. Several times a week he hikes into Concord, where he gathers the latest gossip and meets with townsmen at the main centers of activity, the grocery, the bar, the post office, and the bank. Stores of all kinds try to seduce him with their advertised wares, but Thoreau has no interest in consumer splurges, and makes his way back home without lingering too long in the marketplace. He often makes his way back to Walden Pond in the dark, which is challenging. But with practice he grows accustomed to the way, feeling his path out by the neighboring trees or the rut of the path below. Other people, he notes, are not as adapted to nighttime walking. Even in the village itself, he says, many lose their way in the darkness, sometimes wandering for hours. Thoreau does not consider such dislocation to be a bad thing. Through being lost, he says, one truly comes to understand oneself and “the infinite extent of our relations.”

On one of his journeys into Concord, Thoreau is detained, arrested, and jailed for his refusal to pay a poll tax to “the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house.” After a night in jail he is released, and returns to Walden Pond, remarkably unexcited about his incarceration. Thoreau calmly muses about how, except for governmental intrusion, he lives without fear of being disturbed by anyone. He does not find it necessary to lock up his own possessions and always welcomes visitors of all classes. He says that theft exists only in communities where “some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough !