The Village

In the eighth chapter of Thoreau’s Walden, “The Village,” Thoreau gives a systematic description of his usual encounters with Concord village and its people. Through this description, Thoreau establishes in himself a superiority over the townspeople and also explicitly criticizes their activities. Essentially, he attaches himself to the abstract tenets of transcendentalism, free-thinking individualism and nonconformity, and attaches the opposite attributes to his most clear physical opposite, the town and with it the government.
Thoreau expresses his feeling of detached superiority over the townspeople by portraying his attitude toward them the same as his attitude towards other interesting, but impersonal, sights he sees in nature. “As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle” (Thoreau). Here Thoreau establishes detachment with the townspeople by comparing his impersonal evaluation of “birds and squirrels” to his observation of the people He does not attach any special value to the other humans here, which reflects his own idea (expressed in Civil Disobedience especially) that the townspeople, due to their lack of individual spirit, really do not have uniquely human value in his opinion. In fact, Thoreau also almost glorifies the natural order he sees in the woods in comparison to the contrived man-created order he sees in the town. The positive connotation in natural appeal associated with “the wind among the pines” beats the mundane manmade inadequacy of “carts rattl[ing].”
Thoreau especially rejects the town’s gossip, which represents to him that desire to know about other things and not oneself, which transcendentalism rejects. “Some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs, that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian winds” (Thoreau). While he does not come out and say “gossiping is bad,” Thoreau clearly means to demean the activity by describing its consumers as allowing it to mindlessly pervade their consciousness (“whisper through them”), which directly conflicts with the transcendentalist tenet of free thought.
Thoreau also uses descriptions of walking in a dark, snowy night to emphasize the transcendental view of nature. Thoreau essentially glorifies the idea of the mysterious and unknowable night (“very pleasant…to launch myself into the night”), and espouses that complexity as reflecting the true order of nature. “[N]ot till we are completely lost…do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature….Not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations” (Thoreau). Consistent with transcendentalist thought, Thoreau says we can learn about ourselves through the “infinite extent of our relations” with the “vastness and strangeness” nature and the reflection of us in nature, and of nature in us.
After a characteristic lash-out at the State, Thoreau concludes by glorifying his own lifestyle at Walden and his positive interactions with people who come to him. He uses this to lead into an ideological statement on how Thoreau thinks people should live to complete the natural order. On his own behavior to visitors, Thoreau says, “The tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary…” And about others’ response to him, he says, “[T]hough many people of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources.” Then Thoreau goes into his ideological absolute, “[I]f all men were to live as simple as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown.” Thoreau expresses that societal problems arise from the contrived clash with nature that defines manmade order, and that with a natural life like Thoreau lives, societal problems would not exist. Thoreau further enhances this idea of mutual trust and belief in the morality of the individual human by adding a classic quote praising the virtues of an individual over the laws and justice of the state.