Each chapter of the book has some kind of transition from the last one, or it has a complementary opposing theme. Here, Thoreau continues the theme of what kind of house he needs.
He establishes his experience in considering properties and tell us what he rejects, a ‘Not This’ so we understand ‘This’ choice of a house. Think about when we tell stories or describe something new, we often say we what did not choose. By establishing what we reject and why, we answer that question and we provide a contrast to illuminate the choice. So, all Thoreau’s digressions serve a purpose in giving us complete reasoning for elements of his ‘excursion’ in the woods.
This takes us into a description of his house, the woods, and the pond, all layered in mythological and poetic imagery. He shifts from the ‘why’ of the Economy chapter and the ‘where’ of the house into the ‘what’ he experiences living in the woods by the pond. Here lie some of the narrative’s more spiritual declarations:
To be awake is to be alive.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.
I wanted to live deep.
Simplify.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?
Fortunately, he mixes in complementary digressions to temper the weight of these. He returns to the theme of economy to support his intention to live awakened, deliberately, and simply:
The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast.
He continues for several paragraphs expounding on the traps, distractions, and too fast living of the modern world. Because in order to reject them, we must acknowledge them. Again, a Not This, Instead This.
We already know his conclusion, “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track…” While we can admire and long for this too, or we probably wouldn’t be here now, consider how radical this is. To reject the world, its conventions and accomplishments? Of course, this isn’t completely possible, even for Thoreau the writer who wants to be published and read, and Thoreau the pencil maker. So he ends this chapter with a series of paradoxes that altogether feel like a parable. I’ll leave you to make that out.
Special note on the Sleepers Section: A sleeper is a railroad tie laid under the tracks. A common adage of the time was that for every sleeper lay an immigrant who gave his life for the construction of the railroad. Sort of a sacrifice for the good of progress. So this section is an extended play on the pun of sleeper, along with a criticism of the advances and human costs of technology. It also provides a contrast to the ongoing theme of being awakened.