Walden

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 Thoreau’s 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 Growth™. 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 — fancy houses, cool furniture, trendy clothes. If a monkey in Paris put on a traveler’s cap, then every monkey in America must do likewise.

Thoreau was not impressed. “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” 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. Thoreau’s meals majored in water and unleavened bread made from rye and corn meal. Over time, he lost interest in hunting and fishing. “I 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.”

The 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. “I 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?” This nasty wilderness “was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites — to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.”

His 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. “Met 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.”

Sadly, 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 wasn’t at home in wilderness, and he wasn’t 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 world’s attention, and he finally had a steady stream of income. Thoreau’s 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, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

His core message was “explore thyself” — question authority, question everything, every day. Never assume that you are crazy, and never assume that your society is normal and sane — it is not! Stay away from status fever, and the living dead that suffer from it. Go outdoors! Live simply! Live! Live! Live!

Thoreau’s 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. “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.”

Even though the book was written in a seemingly backwards style, which caused me to re-read some sentences to make sure
I understood the meaning...I found the book very educational and interesting, especially when it comes to living simply and understanding your environment. Being creative and adaptive is one of the keys to survival and Walden exposes this process quite well.

One of the greatest books written - my review is of the physical book - the print is too small. There are no margins. And, oddly, there is a copyright notice (spelled "copy right") in the book - obviously a book written in the 1850s is not protected by copyright law.

I will not write a review on the content of the book as it is a classic and a must read. However, in terms of the actual book, it fits great in any size bag. The texture of the pages is quite smooth compared to other books. The words are the perfect size on the page so it is very easy to read and hard for your eyes to get tired.

Dishonest book. Only publishing date given is 2014. Claims all rights reserved. Uncredited editor combined without indication Thoreau's works which are actually in public domain since the 19th century.

I was dismayed to see that this is a "print to order" book without any forward or introduction. Also the print is too small and it makes it difficult to read. I gave up trying to read it. I'll either go to a used bookstore or the library if I decide to try again.

I’ve read a lot of books in my life.. This is a “classic”??The style was crap and style does matter.. This was as entertaining as The old man and the sea.. and that sucked!!

Not many authors have more of a romantic vibe than this guy. Maybe a deep desire to simplify and slow down keeps tourists flocking to the replica of his little house at Walden Pond. Even though he's been dead for over a century, people still hope to catch some of Thoreau's inspiration from just sitting where he sat. He was living the self-sufficient, off-the-grid dream of many of us, which made me choose to read this book for the American classic category of the 2019 Back to the Classics Challenge.

Basically, Henry David Thoreau decided to escape from the hustle and bustle of normal life and be his own master. So he built a tiny house a mile from his home town, furnished it with basic essentials and figured out that he could live off 27 cents per week. He stretched six weeks of work a year to cover expenditure for the remaining 46, which he spent getting up at his leisure, enjoying nature and recording his thoughts. It sure does sound like an appealing lifestyle.

Walden is an eye-opener though, making me consider that Thoreau might have been an intimidating person to get to know. I was used to thinking of him as a hero who gives eloquent encouragement to jump off the treadmills of public opinion and modern living. But the Thoreau I find within the pages tends to be a hardcore fanatic whose views swing further than I thought in the other direction. I've no doubt that no matter how well we feel we've pared down our lives, the real Thoreau might still dismiss us as worldly conformers. Here are just a few things he has to say about various subjects.

Decorations and Ornaments
'I had three pieces of limestone on my desk but was terrified to find they needed dusting daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust.'

Clothing
'Remember their main objectives are to retain the vital heat and cover nakedness. When you do wear them to pieces, they meld to your character.'

Worldly Goods
'When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all, I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that to carry.'

The 7 Wonders of the World
'As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some degraded booby, whom it would have been manlier and wiser to have drowned in the Nile and then given his body to the dogs.' (I guess that ties in with his opinion on working for bosses.)

Also, he maintains a sort of smug tone, that's a bit on the nose. Being confident in your own ethic while going against the norm is great, yet sometimes it's hard to turn a blind eye to Thoreau's show-offy, superior attitude. It's like sitting in on one man's long back-patting session. A prime example is the way he pays out John Field, a destitute Irish immigrant with a wife and several small children, for struggling not to starve. 'Poor John Field, thinking to live by some derivative old mode in this primitive new country. I trust he will not read this unless he can improve by it.' I wonder if any of Thoreau's friends ever reminded him of the following points, which indicate that his case was different from Field's in other ways too.

1) You're single, which means only one mouth to feed.
2) You don't even own the land you're living on. Ralph Waldo Emerson is letting you squat. Others aren't so lucky.
3) Being a local boy, you have frequent visitors from friends and family, who no doubt bring potluck dinners.
4) There's always the option of packing up and moving back to your parents' place in Concord. In fact, you only lasted two years anyway.

That last point was one of the biggest surprises for me, as I'd picked up the book imagining him settled on the banks of the pond for at least a decade. He only did it for two years! It sounds like such a short time for anyone not to lose a bit of face, but he explains it with his usual dash of pomposity. 'I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.' Yeah, okay Thoreau.

Some of the people he stumbles across are the unsung heroes of the book, whether or not Thoreau intended them to be. I love the self-professed dumb guy, who said he'd always been intellectually deficient from childhood, but guessed that the Lord loved him just as much as the smart guys, since he made him that way. Maybe he's the smartest of all. Thoreau called him a 'metaphysical puzzle.' But he balances it by having digs at clever people too, who he calls, 'men of ideas instead of legs. A sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over.' Nobody is spared from his sharp pen.

In spite of being disillusioned in the ways I've mentioned, his legend continues. He's still such an enigma, and so much irony surrounds him. 'I say let your affairs be two or three, not a hundred or a thousand.' Even though he was such a stickler for not taking on multi roles, so many people from different walks of life still want to claim him as their own, including philosophers, nature writers, poets, minimisers, self-help gurus, relaxation therapists, business men, environmentalists, and the list goes on. I'm glad I read it, although I feel inclined to give it two stars, since it was a bit of a slog and very hard to wallow through at times. Maybe I'm just one of those more intellectually dense people he discusses, who don't fall under its spell. But because I admire the dude for making himself a celebrity by doing nothing much at all for a period of time, I'll add an extra one.

This book is Thoreau's reflections on the time he spent in a home he built on Walden Pond. He lived in a cabin in the woods for 2 years, 2 months and 2 days. He wanted to spend the time reflecting and learning to understand society. He also wanted to see if he could mainly be self-sustaining on the land. He was in the middle of Concord, Massachusetts, so not necessarily in the wilderness, but off the beaten path to the point where he was 2 miles from civilization.

This book was....interesting. First of all, Thoreau is a rambler. I would guess, though, that any of us keeping a journal of our day to day routine would be too. I learned about every bird in the woods. What temperature the pond was compared to other ponds near by. When the pond froze for the winter, how he built his house, how he kept warm, and who he talked with while he lived in the woods. The book could have been about half the size, but he liked to talk for paragraphs about each and every animal or situation to the point of my losing interest and wanting to skim. I did finish it, but it was trying. I do have to say, though, on the bits that I did enjoy, he was telling. And interesting. And sometimes even funny. It had its moments.

I have never been very good with the classics. I am starting to think it is a personal problem I have - I am just not in the mindset for this type of writing. It isn't my cup of tea. BUT - I will continue to struggle through them because I am interested in seeing what makes them classics. Maybe one day, I will come by one that I truly love.

Still looking

Thoreau is such a pleasant read. Also understated humor.