Walden, taking up an abode in the woods

Thoreau moved into his cabin at Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, and stayed two years, two months, and two days. He published it as Walden in 1854. The book shapes those two years at the pond into a single cycle of the seasons. The land belonged to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Project Gutenberg carries the full text.

Where this text comes fromThe sentence keeps amending itself. Thoreau states when he moved in, then interrupts to define what moving in actually meant, then qualifies the definition, and the qualification runs on until the original statement has almost been lost. That habit is the book in miniature: nothing is allowed to stand as a simple fact, because he is arguing with an imagined reader who thinks he knows what living in a wood involves. Copying it means following a mind correcting itself in real time.

What you might not noticeThe passage stops to explain that taking up his abode meant beginning to spend nights there as well as days, a distinction nobody had asked for and which he evidently thought would otherwise be misunderstood. Source

What it trainsFourteen commas inside 383 characters is the tightest comma packing anywhere in this corpus, one every twenty-seven characters. Counted by words instead of characters it is an exact tie: a Constitution passage here also puts fourteen commas into seventy words. There is no full stop until the very end, so every pause you get is a comma and none of them resolves anything. Four digits appear, breaking the hands out of the letter rows once. Six capitals, five of them inside sentences. The one hyphenated word, weather-stained, runs fifteen characters and arrives in the middle of the longest clause.

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