What Thoreau Meant by Waking 'Not by Mechanical Aids'

Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden (1854) that we must learn “to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.” He was writing about attention more than alarm clocks, but the line reads as a verdict on them too.

The sentence sits in the chapter “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” which also holds “Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.” He wanted waking to come from inside the sleeper. His test was whether you were awake all day. Rising at five was beside the point. “To be awake is to be alive,” he writes, and then, with some bite, “I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.”

It is a lovely standard and an unkind one. The man who set it lived in a cabin he built himself, and he noted elsewhere in the book that the village kept its day by the railway: “The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day.” The mechanical aid was already outside his window. Most of us have a 7:40 train of our own, and expecting the dawn does not carry much weight on a January commute.

I think he is right about the target and wrong about the method. Wanting the day is what makes a morning good. It is a poor thing to rely on at 6:00, which is why people once paid a knocker-up to rattle a window and why birders set alarms for a chorus, not a mood. An alarm can get a person to the window. What Thoreau was asking for starts after that.