Simplicité
At Thoreau’s, simplicity isn’t an aesthetic of deprivation but an arithmetic of necessity: reducing the number of matters to handle so as not to drown in the minutiae of civilized life. The anaphora *“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”* introduces a concrete calculation—*“let your affairs be two or three, not a hundred or a thousand”*—then the imperative that sums it up: *“Simplify, simplify.”* It’s not about giving up on living, but refusing to let life scatter into a thousand accounts.
De la simplicité, de la simplicité, de la simplicité !
“A man of integrity scarcely needs to count beyond his ten fingers,” writes Thoreau just before the anaphora: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” What follows sharpens the gesture: “let your affairs be as two or three, not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count by the half-dozen, and keep your accounts on the thumbnail.” Simplicity is not renunciation—it is a reduction in the number of affairs, a reckoning that fits on the fingers of one hand.
The motive behind this reckoning is drowning. “At the center of this choppy sea that is civilized life, there are clouds and storms and quicksands and a thousand and one details to keep track of”: those who do not simplify end up “sinking and going to the bottom without ever reaching port.” Hence the imperative that closes the movement: “Simplify, simplify.” Fewer dishes, fewer meals, fewer accounts—so that life ceases to “fritter itself away in detail.”
This reduction aligns with the deliberate life described elsewhere in the same book: freeing up time and attention by cutting away what is not essential. To simplify is not to impoverish oneself but to stop scattering—it is the same arithmetic of necessity that leads Thoreau to pare down his meals as he pares down his affairs.
Not to be confused with poverty: earlier in the same text, Thoreau observes that “the wise have always lived more simply and more frugally than the poor”—simplicity is a chosen vantage point, not a deprivation endured. Nor is it mortifying asceticism: no renunciation of the body or of pleasure is at stake, only an arithmetic of necessity. It approaches, without merging with, Seneca’s otium—the studious leisure that likewise sheds the incidental to uncover the essential, but through the withdrawal of the learned sage rather than the reckoning of affairs.