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Walden by noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and manual for self-reliance. First published in 1854, it details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. The book compresses the time into a single calendar year and uses passages of four seasons to symbolize human development. By immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the American Romantic Period. As Thoreau made clear in his book, his cabin was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, about two miles (3 km) from his family home.
Paperback: 196 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (December 1, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1505297729
ISBN-13: 978-1505297720
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (358 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #19,979 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #24 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > Literature > American Literature #30 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Anthologies #40 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Nature Writing & Essays
There are so many reviews, what more could I add? Why do some love and others hate this book? I think some people who secretly envy or at least understand Thoreau's experiment of leaving the shackles of society will love this book. Just the first pages you can see here on when you click look inside, have some great thoughts that resonate with me. I truly loved this book including the section on civil disobedience.I think your love or hate of this book will be determined by the type of person you are, no judgement on either type (diversity makes life interesting) from me, just an observation. The people who loved it are just as right as the ones who hated it.There are parts where it can ramble some and those are obviously harder to get through but well worth it in my opinion.
Henry David Thoreau had a mind that was intelligent, complex, and rigidly righteous. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817, into a family of uppity Unitarian abolitionists. After attending Harvard, he worked as a schoolteacher for a few years. Later, he lived with Ralph Waldo Emerson, serving as a tutor, handyman, and editorial assistant. Emerson took him under his wing, and encouraged his literary efforts. Emerson owned land on Walden Pond, and he allowed the young man to build a cabin there. Living by the pond led to experiences that inspired Thoreauâs classic, Walden.Thoreau built the cabin at age 27, and moved out at 30. His thinking was not yet set in concrete, and it wandered to many regions in the world of ideas, tirelessly searching for eternal truth. He read the ancient classics in Greek and Latin, and discovered that enlightened philosophers preferred paths of voluntary simplicity. He adored Native Americans, because they thrived in wildness and enjoyed a simple life. He worshipped nature, and loved spending time outdoors.Unfortunately, he was born during a diabolical hurricane of what is now called Sustainable Growthâ¢. Concord was becoming discord, as the ancient forest was replaced with gristmills, sawmills, cotton mills, a lead pipe factory, and a steam powered metalworking shop. It was rare to stroll by Walden Pond in daytime and not hear whacking axes. Railroads were the latest fad for rich folks. Countless trees were hacked to death to provide millions of railroad ties. By 1850, just ten percent of the land around Concord was forest, and wild game was getting scarce.Obviously, the residents of Concord were not philosophers aglow with timeless wisdom. They were also not wild folks who had lived in the same place for thousands of years without destroying it. These new people acted crazy! They were possessed, out of their minds, infected with the highly contagious status fever. They burned up their precious time on Earth in a furious struggle to appear as prosperous as possible â fancy houses, cool furniture, trendy clothes. If a monkey in Paris put on a travelerâs cap, then every monkey in America must do likewise.Thoreau was not impressed. âA man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.â In 1845, he moved into his tiny new cabin. He hired a farmer to plow two and a half acres (1 ha), and then planted a bean field. Using a hoe to control the weeds proved to be far more challenging than his fantasy of humble simplicity. The net income for a summer of sweat and blisters was $8.12, far less than envisioned. He learned an important lesson, and this experiment was not repeated.A low-budget life of simplicity required a low-budget diet. Thoreauâs meals majored in water and unleavened bread made from rye and corn meal. Over time, he lost interest in hunting and fishing. âI had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination.âThe second summer included a pilgrimage to Maine. He had a gnawing hunger for genuine wilderness that Concord could not satisfy. He also wanted to meet real live Indians, and be invigorated by their purity. Alas, Mount Katahdin was a rugged wilderness without trails, and the philosopher from Harvard was shocked by how difficult it was.Big Mama Nature gave him a swift dope slap. In The Maine Woods he recorded her harsh words. âI have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother?â This nasty wilderness âwas a place for heathenism and superstitious rites â to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.âHis experience with the Indians also disappointed him. After 200 years of colonization, their traditional culture had long been bludgeoned by smallpox, whiskey, missionaries, and civilization. âMet face to face, these Indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the streets of a city. There is, in fact, a remarkable and unexpected resemblance between the degraded savage and the lowest classes of the great city. The one is no more a child of nature than the other.âSadly, Thoreau never experienced a community that was fully wild, free, and at one with the land. He returned to Walden, a tame and comfortable place, and buried some fantasies. He wasnât at home in wilderness, and he wasnât at home in civilization. Could he find peace somewhere in between? He soon packed up his stuff, left the cabin, and returned to the Emerson home. He had learned a lot from 26 months of solitude, but he was wary of getting stuck in a rut.After eight years of work, and seven drafts, Walden was published in 1854. It caught the worldâs attention, and he finally had a steady stream of income. Thoreauâs sister died of tuberculosis in 1849. His father died of tuberculosis in 1859. In 1862 it killed Henry, at the ripe old age of 44.He had spent his life trying to find a beautiful, healthy, and ethical way of living. His education prepared him for a life in civilization instead, loading his mind with myths, hobbles, and blinders. Thoreau was well aware that his society was on a dead end path. Its citizens robotically submitted to the peer pressure of their culture. They could imagine no other way to live. The only thing they could change was their clothes. Consequently and tragically, âThe mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.âHis core message was âexplore thyselfâ â question authority, question everything, every day. Never assume that you are crazy, and never assume that your society is normal and sane â it is not! Stay away from status fever, and the living dead that suffer from it. Go outdoors! Live simply! Live! Live! Live!Thoreauâs world was deranged. But viewed from the twenty-first century, it looks far less crazy than our nightmare. He gathered chestnuts by the pond, a species that would later be wiped out by blight. The skies were often filled with passenger pigeons, now extinct. Millions of buffalo still thundered across the plains. He drank water directly from the pond. There were no cars or aircraft. Most folks moved by foot or horse. They did not live amidst hordes of strangers, they knew each other. None spent their lives inside climate-controlled compartments, staring at glowing screens.Henry would have hated our world. His mission was to live as mindfully as possible. âI went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.â
Principles:Self generating happiness.Self confidence.Hard work.Resourcefulness.Unapologetically living how you want to live at your own costs and not others'.
My house burned down and while we were still living in a hotel, I bought this book in hardcover because it has always spoken to my soul. His experiment in nature is evocative and inspiring. But hardcover isn't very portable, so I replaced it with this Kindle edition and every time I read even a few pages I am reminded how lucky I am to live in such a beautiful world.
It's been a little while now since I've read Henry David Thoreau's Walden but I'll do my best to write from recollection. Basically, Thoreau goes to live on Walden pond in a little town in Massachusetts for two years. He built the place himself and he starts to grow his own beans, I think. This is for him an experiment in living.What he hopes to achieve is a life lived simply and deliberately. What this means is a little difficult to ascertain but it seems to me this. He wants to be more mindful and appreciative of what the natural world has to offer him and not be so dependent on the technology and busy city life. By stripping away all of these amenities, he thinks he can arrive at some deeper understanding about his place in the world and what really matters to him.The life he describes is somewhat paradoxical. As much as he protests to not being lonely, there is an air of loneliness to his writing. And he's never one to turn down the company of strangers who come to visit him. He also seems to be curious about the people who spend their days retrieving blocks of ice from the pond to go back and sell at the market (Thoreau is only a couple miles out of town). But Thoreau does, in spite of all that, begin to feel genuinely as though he has learned something about the human spirit, namely that it's all right to march to the beat of your own dream, to obey your higher spiritual laws, and find beauty in nature, even in its occasional wildness and savagery.Walden isn't a perfect book but no book ever is. I'd heard some advice to read the first chapter last and that's what I did. I think it changes the experience of reading the book for the better if you read the first chapter as a kind of afterword. Just my two cents.
Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (A Reader's Companion) Walden: Life in the Woods Walden and Civil Disobedience Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (Dover Thrift Editions) Walden: 150th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of the American Classic The Illustrated Walden: Thoreau Bicentennial Edition Walden Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition Thoreau: Walden / Civil Disobedience Walden Pond: Nocturnes and Barcarolles Mixed Chorus, Three Violoncellos, and Harp Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom
