This chapter is more straightforward, moving away from extended digressions into his direct experience. To support this elegant tribute for solitude, Thoreau leans on his affinity with nature, Confucius, Greek mythology, classic literature, and Eastern spirituality.
By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent.
We might call this using witness, detached or objective mind, where we observe our thoughts and actions. This capacity is cultivated by meditation and solitude—learning to observe yourself, allowing the mental stream to keep moving.
Thoreau also takes us more experientially into the mythology of living in the woods. “I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars” where he has “occasional visits…from an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond….” and “An elderly dame…she can tell me the original of every fable….” He isn’t just reading or being inspired by mythology—we are now inside the myth itself.
So by now, you’re on to him when he says, “I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.”
The chapter invites us to consider how we live in our own company and the host of imagination we harbor, whether you too can find “the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
He closes with a vigorous tribute to morning air, one of many in Walden, and his preference for Hebe, goddess of youth. As such, we are firmly being tethered now inside the mythology of Walden. See if you can continue reading with this sensibility—that all is not literal, that truth and meaning are fact, experience, inspiration, and something else, something transcendent.