Walden or Life in the Woods By Henry David Thoreau Walden is a book by
transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The text 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-to some degree-a manual for self-reliance.First
published in 1854, Walden 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. Thoreau used this time (July 4, 1845 -
September 6, 1847) to write his first book, A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers. The experience later inspired Walden, in which Thoreau
compresses the time into a single calendar year and uses passages of
four seasons to symbolize human development.The book can be seen as
performance art, a demonstration of how easy it can be to acquire the
four necessities of life. Once acquired, he believed people should then
focus their efforts on personal growth.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.Thoreau makes precise scientific observations of nature as well
as metaphorical and poetic uses of natural phenomena. He identifies many
plants and animals by both their popular and scientific names, records
in detail the color and clarity of different bodies of water, precisely
dates and describes the freezing and thawing of the pond, and recounts
his experiments to measure the depth and shape of the bottom of the
supposedly "bottomless"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. I did not wish to live what was not life,
living is so dear nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was
quite necessary.
