Thoreau’s Idea of Being Awake

In paragraphs 14 of Where I Lived and What I Lived For from Thoreau’s novel Walden, he discusses being aware, a topic we recently talked about in class. In Thoreau’s opinion, “the morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour.” What he means by this is that in the morning, when the Nature that is awake and alive, makes him aware of himself, his thoughts, and the life that is happening around him. He begins telling the reader about how he takes his morning bath in the pond, as “a religious exercise,” in order to renew himself. He says that “the faint hum of a mosquito” is more impressive than “any trumpet that ever sang of fame.” Being surrounded by Nature allows Thoreau to be consciously aware of his surroundings and his self. Thoreau says that the morning was cosmical; it made him feel connected to something bigger than himself and his surroundings. Thoreau states that “there is least somnolence in us” meaning that in the morning, for a brief amount of time, we are fully conscious because the part that is always asleep, finally wakes up. He makes the switch toward the end of paragraph 14 by asking the reader “Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they had not been slumbering?” Thoreau answers this question by stating that “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion,” and that “To be awake is to be alive.” Thoreau is implying that nobody is ever truly awake, rather we are all just sleepwalking. Thoreau makes this shift because he wants to wake people up, so to speak, and show them that they are sleeping while life happens around them. It’s a necessary move because Thoreau is trying to show the reader how just a simple bath in the morning was able to wake him up. Thoreau even tells the reader the he has been asleep, since he has never seen a man who is truly awake because he has not been conscious enough to see him. He opens the paragraph up with his daily ritual to get the reader to relate and then asks the question to make the reader think about what he is theorizing. I find it interesting that Thoreau uses a question to make the switch because it is a clever way to engage the audience and actually make them consider what he’s really saying.