Assignment

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Walden was published in 1854, seven years after Henry David Thoreau ended his stay in a small cabin near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. The book is based on journals he kept while living at the pond. He was known for adhering to the American transcendentalist movement. Very briefly, transcendentalism is a very simple idea. All people have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that "transcends" or goes beyond what they can see, hear, taste, touch or feel. This knowledge comes through intuition and imagination not through logic or the senses. People can trust themselves to be their own authority on what is right. A transcendentalist is a person who accepts these ideas not as religious beliefs but as a way of understanding life relationships (www.ushistory.org/us/26f.asp).

In Walden, Thoreau condensed events of his twenty-six-month sojourn into one year (for the purpose of writing a book). The book’s eighteen chapters celebrate the unity of nature, humanity, and divinity—a central idea of transcendentalism—and portray Thoreau's life at Walden Pond as an ideal model for enjoying that unity. In solitude, simplicity, and living close to nature, Thoreau had found what he believed to be a better life.

The book Walden was especially popular during the enforced simplicity of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and again during the 1960s when individualism, concern for the natural environment, and transcendentalism were important elements in a wave of change that swept through American culture.

Thoreau begins the book by telling readers that he is writing to answer why he chose to live alone for more than two years in a small, simple cabin near Walden Pond. Much of the chapter is devoted to explaining that the way most people live, spending all their time and energy working to acquire luxuries, does not lead to human happiness and wellbeing. Thoreau writes that he prefers having time to walk in nature and to think much more than working long hours to pay for big houses, large tracts of land, herds of animals, or other property. He goes so far as to say that the ownership of such things is actually a disadvantage, as one who owns them must take care of them, while one who owns little has more freedom to do as he or she pleases. This is why Thoreau chose to live simply and cheaply in a house he built for himself: in simplicity he found freedom.

Thoreau then describes the area around his cabin and how much he enjoyed the peaceful natural surroundings. He answers the question why he lived there:

“I 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.”

Excerpts from the rest of the book:

 Thoreau often focuses on the sounds he experiences at Walden, from the singing of birds to the whistle of a train, and on how these sounds affect his mood. The sounds of animals especially cause him to feel the unity and joy of all things.

 Thoreau makes his case that the companionship of nature is more fulfilling than that of humans, and that he could not possibly be lonely in nature because he is a part of it. The plants and animals are his friends and, amid the peace of nature, God himself.

 Thoreau devotes time to describing Walden Pond and the idyllic times Thoreau enjoyed in and around it. He again describes the unity of nature, self, and divinity that he experiences there. He makes clear that the pond has a special kind of spiritual purity, calling it "God's Drop."

 Thoreau often describes many animals that live around his cabin. In observing them, Thoreau concludes that both the animal and the spiritual natures coexist in animals and that animals experience no conflict between the two.

 In conclusion, Thoreau summarizes what he learned during his time in the woods:

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him. . . . In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty, nor weakness.”

 Thoreau ends the book by urging us to apply to our own lives what he has shared with us. He encourages us to explore inner, rather than outer, worlds:

"Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."

 He is confident that new ways of thinking will lead to new, fulfilling ways of living.

Thoreau died at home in Concord on May 6, 1862, at the age of forty-four, of tuberculosis. He was little known and little mourned. Many of his neighbors in Concord and his literary peers saw him as an extremist, and he was often the object of insult and ridicule. In his eulogy, Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly said, "The country knows not yet . . . how great a son it has lost."