Walden

By Henry David Thoreau and Henry Claridge

No nineteenth-century American writer can claim to be as modern as Henry David Thoreau.  His central preoccupations – the illusory nature of much of what we call ‘progress’, the proper symbiotic relationship between man and the natural environment, the limitations of government, especially where it seeks to intrude on the personal, the moral and political case for non-violence,  the dubious pleasures of material comforts, our intoxication with excess, our unrelenting search for the ‘rules’ by which we might live our lives – these, and many other matters are as real to us now as they were to Thoreau in 1845 when he began his experiment in self-sufficiency.  Walden is his autobiographical record of his life of relative isolation at Walden Pond, some twenty miles west of the city of Boston, but it is also a work of detailed natural history and the expression of a philosophy of life by a deeply poetic sensibility.  His essay (originally a lecture), ‘Civil Disobedience’, has over the 150 or so years since its publication exerted an enormous influence, animating thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi as well as political movements such as the British Labour Party, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and various forms of oppositional activism across the globe.

Walden and ‘Civil Disobedience’ are reprinted here in a new edition alongside three of Thoreau’s seminal essays, ‘Slavery in Massachusetts’, ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’, and ‘Life Without Principle’.   Henry Claridge’s introduction illuminates the extent to which Thoreau’s writings and his thinking were a response to the dramatic changes wrought by the physical expansion of the United States and the migration of European peoples across the American sub-continent in the first half of the nineteenth-century. The edition also comes with a bibliography and extensive explanatory notes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781848706026

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American writer, thinker, naturalist, and leading transcendental philosopher. Graduating from Harvard, Thoreau’s academic fortitude inspired much of his political thought and lead to him being an early and unequivocal adopter of the abolition movement. This ideology inspired his writing of Civil Disobedience and countless other works that contributed to his influence on society. Inspired by the principals of transcendental philosophy and desiring to experience spiritual awakening and enlightenment through nature, Thoreau worked hard at reforming his previous self into a man of immeasurable self-sufficiency and contentment. It was through Thoreau’s dedicated pursuit of knowledge that some of the most iconic works on transcendentalism were created.

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Contents

Introduction

Walden

The Essays

Further Reading

A Note on the Texts

Walden, or Life in the Woods

Economy

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Reading

Sounds

Solitude

Visitors

The Bean-Field

The Village

The Ponds

Baker Farm

Higher Laws

Brute Neighbours

House-Warming

Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors

Winter Animals

The Pond in Winter

Spring

Conclusion

Civil Disobedience

Slavery in Massachusetts

A Plea for Captain John Brown

Life Without Principle

Notes to Walden and the Essays

Introduction

Walden

Walden is at once one of the most important and one of the most peculiar books in American Literature. Its importance derives from the simple fact that there are few American works of which it can be said so confidently that they are inconceivable in the literature of any other nation. In response to the question ‘What is the most American of books?’ Walden, in the eyes of most informed scholars of American literature, will come high on the list. The English novelist George Eliot recognized this when, reviewing Walden for the Westminster Review (January 1856), she noted that Thoreau’s work was ‘a bit of pure American life (not the ‘go-ahead’ species, but its opposite pole), animated by that energetic, yet calm spirit of innovation, that practical as well as theoretic independence of formulae, which is peculiar to some of the finer American minds.’ And Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing an enlarged version of his funeral oration for Thoreau for Atlantic Monthly (August 1862), remarked that ‘No truer American existed than Thoreau’, thus extending to his friend an exemplarity that has rarely been emulated by any other spokesman for the American character (as Emerson most emphatically was) when speaking of a fellow-American. Walden’s peculiarity derives, above all, from its seeming to be work without a provenance, a product not merely of a new and exceptional society, but also of a new and exceptional way of thinking (I use the word ‘exceptional’ here in the way that it attaches to historical and intellectual arguments to the effect that the United States is a country like no other). The questions of Walden’s literary genre are equally difficult to answer. Thoreau was not writing his autobiography or confessions, thus the models provided by Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions were of little use to him. Though Walden has some affinities with Puritan spiritual autobiography there is little here about man’s transactions with God and little about God’s providential interference in the ways of the world. The impetus towards psychological self-analysis or introspection is largely eschewed: what we know about Thoreau as a man we learn only through what he does and what he sees, insofar as these experiences and observations are reformulated into obiter dicta or homilies. We find ourselves reading something like Robinson Crusoe without the fiction, but to say this is not to ignore the fact that the hero of Walden chooses to be a castaway, that he can find the solace and security provided by others a few miles away, should he wish to, and that he has no Man Friday to complicate his life by reminding him that our lives are very largely made up of concerning ourselves with the care of others.

Thoreau dates his sojourn at Walden pond from the end of March 1845, though for rhetorical and dramatic purposes he announces in Walden that he took up ‘his abode in the woods . . . on Independence Day, on the 4th of July, 1845 . . . ’ (the name ‘Walden’ derives from old English and means ‘wooded valley’). Thoreau had known the spot on which he built his cabin since childhood and the land was owned by his close friend and fellow-Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Earlier, in 1842, after a brief career as a schoolmaster (he and his brother John established a progressive school in Concord in 1837) Thoreau took up residence in Emerson’s house, paying for his room and board by acting as a handyman and general factotum. (He was now Henry David Thoreau after beginning his life as David Henry Thoreau, reversing his first two given names, perhaps in some gesture of independence from his familial origins, perhaps that ‘sloughing off of the old skin’ which D. H. Lawrence found so characteristically American.) Thoreau also seems to have made use of Emerson’s extensive private library. It was Emerson who suggested to Thoreau that he take up residence in New York City with Emerson’s brother William who practised law in the city, and act as private tutor to William’s son. Thoreau went to New York in May 1843 and whilst there visited Henry James Senior (father of the novelist Henry James and, at the time, one of the leading figures in literary and intellectual life in the United States). By way of his friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne (whom he had met in Concord in 1842) Thoreau ‘touted’ his literary wares around New York City, but there is little indication that what he was writing was in any way commercially marketable and by the end of November 1843 he had returned to Concord, not to Emerson’s home but instead to the family home and the family business of making graphite for lead pencils (no doubt he always had an inexhaustible supply of implements with which to write, though the graphite that he inhaled contributed to his death from lung disease). Thoreau’s journals from around 1840 onwards show the adumbration of an idea to retire from society and to eschew the calls of politics, government, education and the state. The move to Walden pond in 1845, whilst it may have been motivated by considerations about which the biographer can only speculate, is entirely consistent with his thoughts about his future life that the journals, effectively his diary, articulate.

With the aid of his friend, Ellery Channing (see Notes), Thoreau built a one-room hut, a habitation that, he tells us, was ten-feet wide, fifteen-feet long, with one door to the outside, two windows and a fire-place. The clearing of the brier patch on which the hut was built was, in effect, a form of payment to Emerson who was leasing him the land rent-free. A garret in the roof was accessed by way of standing on a chair and the cellar (built for the storage of potatoes) occupied the space where a woodchuck had previously dug his burrow. Thoreau congratulated himself on both his workmanship and his frugality, for the materials had cost him a little over twenty eight dollars and the labour nothing more than his own time. From the 4th of July, 1845 his address was Walden Pond, Concord, though, as he tells us in Walden, he rarely received any letters that were worth the cost of their postage. He remained in his residence in his cabin until 6th September, 1847, having spent exactly two years, two months and two days at Walden Pond. Nothing of great moment occurred whilst he lived there beyond his arrest in 1846 for his refusal to pay the Massachusetts poll-tax (a tax on those registered to vote) as a protest at the United States’ prosecution of the war with Mexico and the night in Concord jail that constituted his punishment. Thoreau reflected on his incarceration in his January 1848 lecture at the Concord Lyceum. (The lecture was subsequently published in essay form as ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ and remains, to this day, one of the most significant and influential contributions made to political thought by an American.) He had regular visitors, Ellery Channing, Emerson, and Bronson Alcott among them, but for a great deal of the time he was entirely alone and occupied himself with reading, gardening, husbandry, and acute observation of the natural world around him. And of course he wrote, above all, his journals, which were to furnish him with the repository of observations and memories out of which his great contribution to American literature and culture grew.

His decision to leave his cabin was motivated by ‘as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.’ One of these lives was lived through the writing-up of his experiences. The journals provided a copious source-book for Walden but these were too inchoate for book publication (they have been published in a scholarly edition in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau by Princeton University Press) and Thoreau was clearing intending to write a work of deliberate and conscious artistry. The gap in time between September 1847 and Walden’s publication in August 1854 suggests a long period of gestation and scholars (notably Robert Sattelmeyer) have shown that the text underwent four distinct draft or revision stages. The actual period of residence at Walden was distilled into a fictional one year, thus facilitating a body of description, observation and moral instruction that begins, symbolically, with Thoreau’s declaration of independence on 4th July 1845 and ends with the first signs of the onset of autumn. Thoreau considered it employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons and much of what occupies the foreground of Walden is the meticulous record of the changes in flora and fauna as summer moves into autumn, autumn into winter, and winter into spring, thus reinforcing the cycles of the natural world and emphasising the symbiotic relations between organic and human processes (such as agriculture and husbandry).

Most of the chapters are focussed on a single activity (‘Reading’ or ‘The Bean-Field’), geographical location (‘Baker Farm’ or ‘The Pond in Winter’), or sensory observation (‘Sounds’ or ‘Winter Animals’). Each of these chapters acts as a stage in the growth of his understanding of the natural world. Thoreau begins, however, with a challenge to our conventional wisdom. The first chapter, entitled ‘Economy’, takes the form of a cost-benefit analysis that gently mocks the political economy of Adam Smith. Outgoings of some $62 are offset by income of just over $36 (earned by day-labour and the sale of farm produce): by any capitalist criteria of expenditure, investment, income and the accretion of wealth such as Smith delineates in The Wealth of Nations Thoreau has made a poor show of it. We are reminded of Charles Dickens’s Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield: ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’ But this materialist calculation is outweighed by ‘the leisure and independence and health thus secured’, and the provision of a ‘comfortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy it.’ The second chapter (‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For’) reinforces our sense that the nature of the cost-benefit analysis of Thoreau’s experiment is not economic in the way it has come to be understood in 19th century usage, but invokes an older, more Latinate meaning. The archaic use pertains to household management and involves both the senses of practicality and thriftiness. In ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For’ a dominant note is struck by the question ‘Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?’ The answer to the futility of the ‘busy-ness’ and expense of energy and resources that Thoreau poses here has been given to us a page or so earlier:

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 practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

This is Thoreau in the role of Epictetus, the Roman Stoic philosopher whose injunction to us was to live life virtuously and in accordance with the nature of things. The ascetic implications of Thoreau’s retreat to Walden pond also show the impact that Hindu mysticism, and oriental religious and moral teaching more generally, had upon his thinking, for in Hindu philosophy the route to transcendence only comes through rising above the trivial preoccupations, thoughts and interests of mankind, much as he advocates and demonstrates in Walden.

Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond is consistent with many of the other experiments in living that the New England transcendentalists undertook, much as his refusal to pay his poll-tax to support the war with Mexico echoed the actions of Amos Bronson Alcott, whose non-payment had, like Thoreau’s, resulted in imprisonment. American Transcendentalism (which I discuss later) gave rise to many reform movements and was particularly associated with demands for the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women (especially in the political sphere), and improvements in both the provision and methods of public education. Anti-urbanism, largely a response to the swift industrialisation of New England and mass immigration and their perceived deleterious impact on the both the American landscape and American social life, led to the establishment of many experimental, utopian communities in both New England and the Ohio valley. Brook Farm, at West Roxbury, was Massachusetts’ main contribution (Nathaniel Hawthorne provides a fictionalized account of it in The Blithedale Romance [1852]). But Brook Farm was an experiment in communal living; Thoreau’s was an exercise in solitude. Behind Brook Farm (and its near-relative Fruitlands at Harvard) lay ideas drawn from the writings of Robert Owen, the English reformer of industrial and work-place practices who established a utopian colony at New Harmony in Indiana, and Francois Marie Charles Fourier, the French philosopher and socialist whose writings influenced the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune. Fourier advocated the development of small planned communities where work was organised on a collective, essentially socialist, basis as a solution to the perversion of social relations and human goodness by industrial society. The Brook Farm experiment in ‘better living’, ‘this Paradise of shepherds and shepherdesses’, as Emerson described it, lasted six years and Thoreau’s two years at Walden pond coincided with Brook Farm’s slow but ineluctable decline into personal disagreement and pecuniary loss, prompting Emerson’s disillusioned conclusion that ‘People cannot live together in any but necessary ways.’ The failure of Brook Farm and the success of Thoreau’s experiment also suggests that transcendentalism was essentially individualistic in character and that its emphasis on self-reliance was at odds with communitarian and socialist ideals. Thoreau himself resisted the call of movements and maintained a lifelong distrust of them, despite his historic role in indirectly starting many after his death.

ii

‘I have travelled much in Concord . . . ’ Thoreau writes in chapter two of Walden.

The statement is both comic (Concord was little more than a village) and provocative. The provocation comes from Thoreau’s implicit moral challenge to the values of a frontier society. 1849, the year that saw the publication of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau’s first major work, was also the year in which residents of San Francisco set up a temporary government for their region and the year in which Congress established a Home Department (latterly the Department of the Interior) whose purpose was to facilitate both Indian removal and the settlement of the West. The same year a stagecoach service was established to carry mail between Independence, Missouri and Santa Fe in New Mexico, a distance of some 800 miles, along what had been known since 1821 as the Santa Fe Trail, one of the major overland routes that enabled American expansion into the South-West. In 1850 grants were made available, through the efforts of Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, to build a railroad from Chicago to Mobile, Alabama, a distance of some nine hundred miles. John Marshall’s discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill near Sacramento in California in 1848 had lured over 40,000 prospectors west by the end of 1850. By May 1851 the Great Lakes and New York were connected by rail. A year later, in 1852, with the Senate increasingly preoccupied with the deepening conflict between the interests of Southern slave-holders and those of the anti-slavery movement, the Pennsylvania Railroad was completed and two large and expanding cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, were now connected by half a day’s travel as against the four days of travel necessitated by the overland coach. By the end of 1853 the ten discrete railway lines in New York State connecting Albany, Buffalo and New York City had merged to become the New York Central Railroad with a timetable that facilitated expeditious transfers between one line and another. A month before Walden’s publication in August 1854 the Federal government opened an office in the Kansas territory to distribute land to settlers. Thoreau was, therefore, living through a period of dramatic expansion of the American continent and dramatic improvements in the means of access of one region to another; in other words as the continental United States was expanding it was, speaking figuratively, also contracting, for technology was bringing men and women closer together. This fulfilment of what John Louis O’Sullivan, writing in 1845 as editor of United States Magazine and Democratic Review, called ‘our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’ could not have been effected without ‘those multiplying millions’ being drawn to the New World from Europe, steerage from Liverpool to New York costing as little as $10 for the one-way trip for many of them (about $350 or £250 at present prices). At the time of the third national census in 1810, seven years before Thoreau’s birth, the United States had a population just in excess of 7 million; by 1860, two years before he died, this had reached 31 and a half million, a more than four-fold increase in fewer than two generations. It is easy to underestimate the extent to which Thoreau’s writings, particularly, Walden, are a critical response to these staggering changes in both the physical scale of the settled United States and the migration of European peoples across the American sub-continent. Like many modern environmentalists and ecologists, he held ‘growth’ in low regard. Likewise ‘modern improvements’ in communications: ‘We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate’, he avers in ‘Economy’. ‘For my part, I could easily do without the post-office . . . To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life – I wrote this some years ago – that were worth the postage’, he adds in the next chapter, ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For’. ‘We have the St. Vitus’ dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still’ he writes in the same chapter, bemoaning the absence of any work that he thought had ‘consequence’. Thoreau challenged what R. W. B. Lewis has called ‘the diversion of energies to material expansion and . . . the enthusiastic arithmetic by which expansion was constantly being measured.’ His is, therefore, one of the first important voices in American literature to strike a note of dissenting opinion with respect to the continental ambitions of the United States and the investment of its future in the expansion of its territories by conquest and military might. In this respect Walden might be called an ‘anti-frontier’ work, but it also an attempt to address first principles about what kind of life mankind should live.

What Thoreau offers in response to the seemingly limitless and illimitable growth of the United States in the middle of the 19th century is not, in the proper sense of the term, ‘political’, and that is why attempts to talk about Thoreau politically often prove fruitless (F. O. Matthiessen, for example, said his ‘natural direction was that of left-wing individualism’, thus attempting to reconcile the collectivist characteristics of 19th century radicalism with Thoreau’s unyielding commitment to the primacy of the self). Thoreau’s mind was not systematic enough to engage in the dialectical give-and-take of political debate. His gestures are largely those of refusal – the refusal to pay the poll-tax to a corrupt state that is waging an undeclared war on Mexico, the refusal to live a life of middle-class comforts – rather than proposal, but the gestures have an exemplary purpose, even if their very exemplarity is sometimes confuted by their unreality. His response to the human condition is governed, above all, by his morality, and this is something that owes as much to Thoreau’s indebtedness to Unitarian thinking (the Unitarian church, with its rejection of the Trinity and its belief that God is one person), as it does to the does to the influence of idealist and transcendental European philosophy as it comes down to him filtered through he writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, and, of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson. From Unitarianism Thoreau draws his attachment to conscience, whose workings are evidence of the divinity of man. From European idealism he inherits the notion, by way of Emerson’s interpretations, that man in his apprehension of pure consciousness partakes of God; that is, man can transcend the world of mere phenomena (see below). The target of most of his social criticism is the state: ‘I was never molested by any person but those who represented the state’, he writes. Such a view, while in one sense radical in its attitude to authority, is consistent with the Social Darwinism of the 1880s that saw the state (as represented by government, or, more abstractly, society) as little more than a benighted intruder in the affairs of men. This side of Thoreau is conservative, in the sense in which we understand the term as it is re-shaped by 19th century economic liberalism (but not to be confused with ‘Toryism’, or ‘American Toryism’ with their belief in man’s essential brutality and the necessity of law to protect man, and society, from his own excesses). As Stanley Cavell has said, if the guiding question of political theory is the question ‘Why ought I to obey the state’, Thoreau’s reply denies both the question and the subject. This side of him is also, of course, implicitly optimistic about human nature, for Thoreau, like Emerson and Romantics such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Blake, argues for man’s essential goodness and explains man’s inclinations to sinfulness or venality by an appeal to the deleterious influence of society and social institutions. It follows from this that we must have a very positive outlook on human nature if we are to deny to society any ameliorating role in the affairs of men. ‘Nature’, Emerson writes, ‘never wears a mean appearance’, and we can hear Thoreau concurring. It is nature that guides and informs Thoreau’s philosophy, and transcendentalist philosophy more generally.

To explain what might be called Thoreau’s ‘philosophy’ means going back a little into the history of European thought, notably that of the eighteenth-century, and the history of American political ideas. The New England world of Thoreau’s ancestors (his father, John Thoreau, was the son of a Protestant emigrant from the Channel islands, thus the French surname) was one powerfully shaped by the beliefs and practices of Puritanism, and while by the time of the American revolution these had been weakened by the combined effects of increasing prosperity, the swift movement of the American frontier, immigration, and the ineluctable growth of secular attitudes, the cultural forces that Puritanism had unleashed exerted a formidable influence on the social, political, intellectual and moral aspects of human affairs. Thus whilst a good deal of the theological and ecclesiastical character of New England Puritanism had faded by the time Thoreau was born in 1819, the values associated with the efficacy of labour, self-reliance, the emphasis on man’s direct, unmediated relationship with God, the probity that should obtain in all contractual and legal relationships, the role of conscience in human affairs, and the importance of education both to personal improvement and to social improvement, still guided much of American life. The combined forces of New England transcendentalism and Boston Unitarianism did much to challenge, and break up, the old orthodoxies associated with Puritanism. The Unitarian church maintained a conventional view of the Bible as the written record, or revelation, of God’s intentions but the Puritan insistence on predestination, on election and reprobation (that is, whether we are saved or damned), and, above all, its belief in innate depravity were cast aside. In part this challenge to the hold that Puritan thinking had exerted for so long is the result of the ineluctable rise of science and scientific explanation, It is also, however, in part, the result of the liberating effects of the American and French revolutions on the understanding of the nature of human action and human motivation. These revolutions acted in differing, and, arguably, inconsistently successful ways in secularising philosophical thinking. Emerson was exposed to the influence of the German ‘higher criticism’ (that is, the criticism and scholarship of the Bible that questioned its divine inspiration) on his visit to the University of Gottingen in Germany in 1824, and it was this influence that informed his increasing trust in natural moral sentiment, the role of pure intuition, and, as was consistent with Unitarian thinking, the inward testimony of personal conscience. God, Emerson and other transcendentalists argued, revealed Himself in nature, rather than through the written word or the voices of the pulpit. Nature and God were, to all intents and purposes, co-extensive, and since it was a condition of our believing in God that we impute to Him a moral intelligence our life in Nature must be morally ennobling. Our moral sense, therefore, is deep within us, almost as if it were a Kantian a priori, and is activated by Nature. In Nature, Emerson avers, ‘all mean egotism vanishes’ and we partake of the divine: ‘I am part or particle of God’. In his essay ‘The Over-Soul’ (the idea of which owes much to neo-Platonism and Hindu mysticism) Emerson writes that ‘Of this pure nature man is at some time sensible’, and it is nature that acts as an aid to the comprehension of God, though by intuitive and not empirical methods. These conclusions are never expressed in this philosophical way by Thoreau (he was, for one thing, far less mystical than his friend, though some commentators have adverted to the almost trance-like state Thoreau describes when listening to the world around him in the chapter entitled ‘Sounds’ as mystical in character), yet they govern his thinking and his doing. Antithetical to the benevolent and ennobling force of nature is society, and the evidence is all around him that much of what man does that is bad is the fault of society, witness the evils of slavery, a social and economic construction, and the subordination of women, not something natural but something created by social conditions. Retire from society into nature awhile and one might undo the damage done by the institutions of the state, of government, of economic organisation, or of the church, or of education. Thoreau thought nothing was more opposed to poetry than business, thus committing the Romantic fallacy of thinking that writing and making money are mutually exclusive conditions. Like Emerson, he was of the view that institutions are not aboriginal, that they can be imitated and altered, improved or discarded. In contrast, Nature is the supreme work of art (thus his frequently amateurish and ill-informed remarks about American architecture) and only it can determine the value of any body of philosophical thought. The experiment at Walden pond is an attempt to see whether this philosophical position can be lived, whether, in other words, it is demonstrable.

iii

It is easy to criticise Thoreau for his weaknesses and they are more apparent in Walden than in his other writings, but it would be remiss not to point to some of them.

The most obvious among them is a failure of sympathy. Because Thoreau never married and bore no children he had little grasp of how the behaviour of others is frequently governed by an unselfish regard for the material needs of those whom they hold most dear and an unselfish interest in their aspirations. This is very apparent in his treatment of the Irish farmer, John Field, in the ‘Baker Farm’ chapter of Walden. Here Thoreau describes Field, who lives with his wife and ‘several children’ in the run-down, leaking hut on Baker Farm. Thoreau calls Field an ‘honest, hard-working, but shiftless man . . . ’, ‘a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty, or poor life . . . ’ Whilst Thoreau shelters from the rain he subjects Field to a lecture on self-reliance and abstinence, remarking that while he might ‘look life a loafer’ he was getting a living like Field. Impressing on Field the fact that he ‘did not use tea, not coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them . . . ’ Thoreau concludes that since ‘I did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard . . . ’ He despairs of the culture of the Irishman, ‘an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe’, and leaves the Fields, surmising that ‘they still take life bravely, after their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail, not having skill to split its massive columns with any fine entering wedge, and rout it in detail; - thinking to deal with it roughly, as one should handle a thistle. But they fight at an overwhelming disadvantage, - living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and failing so.’ Thoreau has little grasp of Field’s life, no understanding that Field’s efforts are driven by the desire to improve, not so much his own lot, as that of his wife, and, more significantly, his children. Thoreau sees him entirely from the outside, averring that in coming to a country where you could get ‘tea, and coffee, and meat everyday . . . ’ Field had ‘wasted his life into the bargain’ for he had failed to grasp the fact that ‘the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.’ Thoreau reveals himself to be someone hopelessly out of touch with the aspirations of ordinary people, and, were he not sceptical about reform movements as a whole, we would liken him to those other middle-class reformers who seek to improve the lot of those they deem disadvantaged by helping them become more like themselves. This lack of sympathy is closely connected with another of Thoreau’s failings: his occasionally pontificating self-righteousness. He is the kind of man who is eager to tell others how to live and someone who is eager to impute the failings of others (as he sees them) to some failure of vision on their part.

Thus his oft-quoted ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’ in the first chapter of Walden offers a sentiment of dubious value as a generalisation, for the conclusion that men spend all their time earning a living that they have no time to live is predicated on the belief that there can be little pleasure or virtue in work and that ‘living’ is only found outside gainful employment. It is a sentiment that is entirely consistent for someone who holds, with William Wordsworth, that society is a form of imprisonment. Its strength, if it has any, is in showing us how emphatically Thoreau had the cut the cords that tied him to Puritan virtues of industriousness and discipline. ‘He condemns a world’, James Russell Lowell trenchantly observed, ‘the hollowness of whose satisfactions he never had the means of testing . . . ’

These criticisms aside, few American works of the nineteenth-century can claim to be as ‘modern’ as Walden. Thoreau’s central preoccupations – the illusory nature of much of what we call ‘progress’, the proper symbiotic relationship between man and the natural environment, the limitations of government, especially where it seeks to intrude on the personal and the moral life, the moral and political case for non-violence, the dubious pleasures of material comforts, our intoxication with excess, our unrelenting search for the ‘rules’ by which we might live our lives – these, and many other matters, are as real to us now, perhaps, in some cases, more real, as they were to Thoreau in 1845. Walden articulates these preoccupations in the autobiographical (what Thoreau would call the ‘egotistical’) register and thus he anticipates many modernist works in which the author offers a report to himself. Like Emerson in his writings, Thoreau teaches a new relation to nature. He invites us to challenge the conventional wisdom that our lives are inescapably social and encourages us to give some consideration to the question as to whether we would be happier if we were to resist the injunctions of our social and economic lives and enjoy, instead, the physical world that God gives us. And, arguably he was philosophically more intelligent than Emerson for he never sought to define what he meant by Nature, asserting that the closest we come to it is in mythology. The student generation of the 1960s re-discovered Thoreau in the politics of passive resistance, analogising the war with Mexico and the Vietnam War (both of them undeclared wars), and replicated his non-conformist stance, a man reminding them that there is another United States of America from the one they associate with the symbols of a business culture, while a younger generation has re-discovered Thoreau the environmentalist and ecologist. And while his skills as a natural historian have sometimes been deemed ‘inexpert’ he has handed down to successors such as Ernest Hemingway, John McPhee and Peter Matthiessen a sense of the sacredness of American space. There may well be new ‘Thoreaus’ to discover, for, as Emerson poetically concluded of him in his funeral oration: ‘It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst of his broken task, which none else can finish, - a kind of indignity to so noble a soul, that it should depart out of nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.’

The Essays

Besides Walden this Wordsworth Classics edition reprints four of Thoreau’s most well-known and influential essays: ‘Civil Disobedience’, ‘Slavery in Massachusetts’, ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’, and ‘Life Without Principle’. The reader will notice that the first three essays have a common theme. The great moral and social dilemma to tax the American people during Thoreau’s lifetime was the existence of slavery in the Southern states (the great economic dilemma, on the other hand, too infrequently remarked on in literary histories, and in many ways eclipsing in importance all other issues, was the question of the tariff: what was the appropriate level at which to impose duties on both the importation and exportation of goods, a question not fully resolved until the end of World War 1). The enslavement of African-Americans in the South, the descendents of people forcibly taken into captivity and exported to the New World by the great colonial powers of England, France, Portugal and Spain, forced into unpaid labour in conditions which frequently (if not generally) were harsh and inhospitable, was unambiguously the greatest stain on the republican and democratic character of the United States of America. The states of New England (of which Massachusetts is historically the most prominent) were, of course ‘free states’ but that did not mean to right-thinking individuals that they were not implicated in slavery. The very existence of ‘free states’ and ‘slave states’ was an implicit acknowledgement of the constitutional, legal, and political ‘myths’ by which equality and liberty, in both law and under God, could be circumscribed. Massachusetts was a hot-bed of radical abolitionism, much of it expressed through the reform movements with which the state had become particularly associated, above all those of the New England transcendentalists. Transcendentalist reform with its strongly humanitarian disposition towards pacifism recognized a first-order problem: slavery was clearly a moral evil on a grand scale and it was likely only to be abolished by violence; yet violent action might entail the killing of innocent people, whatever the consequences were of not doing so, and thus the transcendentalists, not prepared to compromise their moral absolutism, found themselves on the horns of a dilemma. The solution was the refusal to co-operate with the state, what Thoreau called ‘passive resistance’. In ‘Civil Disobedience’ Thoreau tells us that ‘I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night . . . ’ Those who imprisoned him, he remarks, ‘thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hinderance, and they were really all that was dangerous.’ The argument for the power of ideas, whether uttered or written, to overwhelm the state has rarely been so forcefully expressed, and it is this programme of passive non-violent resistance to political authority, percolating down to the present through the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Buber and Martin Luther King Jr., that persists in most forms of ‘civil disobedience’, whether they are the bus boycotts in the American South in the era of Civil Rights, student ‘sit-ins’ on the campuses of universities and colleges in the 1960s, marches against political repression and environmental degradation, or the various tax rebellions by which individuals express their unwillingness to cooperate with government and its agencies. But passive resistance, civil disobedience, did not overturn slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which began appearing in serial instalments in The National Era in June 1851, did more to agitate abolitionist sentiment than Thoreau’s poorly attended lecture. A later essay (again originally an address), ‘Slavery in Massachusetts’, enjoyed a larger audience mainly because of its appearance in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. The tone here, moreover, is more strident than that of the earlier lecture. Thoreau’s indignation is directed at those responsible for the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act which was part of the Compromise of 1850 over slavery, among them, of course, the Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster who took the view that disunion (the break-up of the federal structure of the United States) was a greater evil than slavery. Thoreau was equally appalled at the hypocrisy of the church, for many New England ministers instructed their congregations that their duty to obey the law overrode their duty to oppose injustice. In 1857 Thoreau met John Brown and thus the most famous American proponent of passive resistance came face to face with the most famous American proponent of militant abolitionism. Brown had travelled throughout New England raising funds to support armed raids on pro-slavery settlements in Kansas, the state where the implications for the westward march of slavery under the terms of the Compromise of 1850 were being tested. Five pro-slavery men were killed by Brown’s ‘soldiers’ in 1856, but, more dramatically, in October 1859 Brown led twenty-one men in an attack on the undefended federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia. They seized both the armoury and the town but were repelled by U.S. Marines under the command, ironically, of Robert E. Lee who was later to become the commanding officer of the Confederate Army. Brown was arrested, tried and convicted of treason, and was hanged on 2 December 1859. Thoreau’s defence of him in ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’ is one of the most perplexing of his essays if read immediately after ‘Civil Disobedience’, for the two are, broadly speaking, antithetical in their sentiments. But with ‘Slavery in Massachusetts’ between them one can see the changing pattern of Thoreau’s attitudes to the use of violence in the prosecution of a just cause. The defence of Brown is effected largely by way of ad hominem commentary: he makes Brown exemplary, a man of principle whose actions should sear the consciences of the citizens of Massachusetts, and the analogy between Christ’s crucifixion and the hanging of Brown towards the end of the essay invests Brown with an almost mythical status. But these sentiments were at odds with those of most Americans for whom Brown was a dangerous, misguided lunatic, and it is only in recent years that Thoreau’s essay, following the historical reassessment of Brown himself, has taken its proper place in the corpus of his writings.

Towards the end of 1860 Thoreau contracted the severe cold that was to be his last illness. The cold was exacerbated by the graphite that he had inhaled when working for his father’s business some twenty years earlier. ‘Life Without Principle’ originated as a lecture entitled ‘What Shall it Profit?’ delivered to an audience at Railroad Hall in Providence, Rhode Island in December 185. Its posthumous publication in Atlantic Monthly in 1863 was effected by his sister, Sophia, to whom he had entrusted his papers. Here Thoreau seeks to escape the constraints imposed on moral thinking by religious dogma and national boundaries, and to address again, much as he had done in Walden, how we are to live responsibly. The essay, thought by many readers to be his best, reveals him in a more reflective, less oppositional mood and might well be regarded as his final dilation on the nature of life.

Henry Claridge

Further Reading

Bridgman, Richard. Dark Thoreau. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982

Buell, Lawrence, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973

Cavell, Stanley. The Sense of ‘Walden’. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981

Gatta. John. Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004

Harding, Walter. The Days of Thoreau. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965

Hochfield, George, ed. Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists. New York: New American Library, 1966

Howarth, William. The Book of Concord: Thoreau’s Life as a Writer. New York: Viking Press, 1982

Krutch, Joseph Wood. Henry David Thoreau. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1948

Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.

Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941

Meyer, Michael. Several More Lives to Live: Thoreau’s Political Reputation in America. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977

Miller, Perry, ed. Consciousness in Concord. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958

Myerson, Joel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995

Paul, Sherman. The Shores of America: Thoreau’s Inward Exploration. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958

Peck, Daniel H. Thoreau’s Morning Work. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990

Richardson, Robert D. Jr., Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986

Rose, Anne C. Transcendentalism as a Social Movement. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981

Sattelmeyer, Robert. Thoreau’s Reading. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988

Sattelmeyer, Robert. ‘The Remaking of Walden’ in James Barbour and Tom Quirk, eds., Writing the American Classics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990

Sayre, Robert F. Thoreau and the American Indians. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977

Sayre, Robert F., ed. New Essays on ‘Walden’. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992

Shanley, J. Lyndon. The Making of Walden. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957

Tauber, Alfred. Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001

Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

A Note on the Texts

Walden was first published by Ticknor & Fields in Boston on 9 August 1854. The first edition sold around 2,000 copies, most of them in the first year of its publication, but it was never reprinted in Thoreau’s lifetime. The manuscript is held at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. Thoreau’s own copy of the first edition of Walden, including his corrections and additions, is held at the Abernethy Library at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. ‘Civil Disobedience’ was first delivered as a lecture entitled ‘The Relation of the Individual to the State’ at Concord Lyceum on 26 January 1848. In Spring 1849 it appeared as an essay in Aesthetic Papers, edited by Elizabeth P. Peabody, under the revised title of ‘Resistance to Civil Government’. After Thoreau’s death in 1864 it was reprinted in A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers, published in Boston by Ticknor & Fields in 1866, under the title ‘Civil Disobedience’, the name by which it has become generally known, though some scholars favour the title under which it appeared in Thoreau’s lifetime. ‘Slavery in Massachusetts’ was delivered as a lecture in Framingham, Massachusetts on 4 July 1854 and was first published in The Liberator, the anti-slavery periodical, on 21 July 1854. ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’ was delivered as a lecture at Concord Town Hall on 30 October 1859 and afterwards appeared in Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, a collection of poems and essays about John Brown edited by James Redpath, published in 1860. ‘Life without Principle’, regarded by many as one of his greatest essays, was published in Atlantic Monthly in March 1863, shortly after his death.

Walden

I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as Chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbours up.

Economy

When I wrote

Reviews for Walden

[7dognight · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Walden is perhaps the most self-indulgent piece of tripe I've ever had the displeasure of reading.

[sweetiegherkin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Thoreau set aside all worldly things and spent time in a small self-made home along the large pond known as Walden. Here he wrote down his musings on the natural world and everything else after spending so much time in near solitude.This book is a classic and one of the titles on the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list, so it was only a matter of time before I finally got around to it. I had been looking forward to it as well, and perhaps that was my downfall. Quickly I learned that this wasn't really the book for me. Thoreau does make some excellent points about living a simpler life and being more concerned about a person's character than their clothing (and other worldly trappings). However, he goes a great deal further than I think most of us would agree with -- for instance, he seems to think furniture and coffee are among the needless luxuries we all indulge in far too much. True, these aren't strictly necessities, but I don't think many of us really want to part with them unless we absolutely had to do so. In a similar vein, he sneers at the education provided by colleges and pretty much dismisses them as useless; while I agree that practical skills are needed as well, I don't think we need to get rid of education all together!In fact, it was too difficult for me to not get frustrated by Thoreau's perceived superiority in doing this little experiment. He struck me as someone who would fit in perfectly today as the stereotypical hipster mansplaining why his lifestyle is the best and only way. Not everyone is able to just squat on another's land without getting shot by the police; not everyone is physically able to build their own home or live in relative isolation away from access to doctors among other things; and while Thoreau claims he could be left alone with just his thoughts forever (a point which I highly doubt or he would never have returned to society), there are few people who could get by without other human interaction. At one point, Thoreau essentially mocks the builders of the pyramids for being slaves who obeyed their masters rather than revolted -- as if things were as simply cut and dry as all that.The audio version of the book I had was read by Mel Foster who did an adequate job -- nothing to write home about, but not bad either.

[solitaryfossil · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I live in a suburban neighborhood, it’s quiet and the lots are a nice size. The lot has a small tract of woods beyond the back yard, and the property ends at a creek. So even though I’m in a suburban neighborhood, It’s easy for me to imagine (I pretend a lot) that I’m in or near the woods and alone, as I never see, and hardly ever hear, the closest human neighbors. As I was reading Thoreau, I realized that this is my Walden. This book is amazing, and I was struck by how coincidentally similarly I’ve been considering the natural goings-on in my yard and woods while I pass much of my day on the porch. Especially the local wildlife that visits here: the crows, the squirrels (my favorite to watch), deer and their young feeding just beyond the fence, owls during the night, the occasional armadillo (always seen or heard at night). And now the songbirds are returning, too. It’s been nice to have such activity, easily observed from the porch.

Reading this book put me in a very relaxed, calm state. Reflective and undisturbed, easy to think or not think and just watch the natural world going about its business. Thoreau is wonderful and I highly recommend this book. I know it is one I will frequently re-read.

[msarki_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"What nature provides is scale and context, ways to figure out who and how big we are and what we want. It provides silence, solitude, darkness: the rarest commodities we know. It provides reality, in place of the endless electronic images and illusions that we consider the miracle of the moment."___Bill McKibben from the Introduction to Thoreau’s WaldenSimply put, I am humbled by the reading experience. Not only was Thoreau a smart and gifted writer, but he had enough courage to experiment and live alone, in the woods, and off the land. Even though the span of two years does seem brief, it was long enough for Thoreau to accumulate wisdom to share. And it seems we all could use a bit of that these days."…Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality…"There were chapters extremely difficult to stay interested in. At times I doubted the book’s ascribed greatness. But the conclusion found in the last chapter was worth the trouble and the time it took to get me there. "If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies…If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,—that is your success."A relaxed reading of four to six pages each morning was my practice and my meditation. Rewards, though never frequent, did surprise me and gave me much to think about on any given day."…We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor…We need to see our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander…Compassion is a very untenable ground."No one can accuse me of exhibiting too much compassion. I am guilty of other transgressions, far too numerous to list on this page. But Thoreau offers us a yardstick from which we might measure our growth as individuals. "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…I learned this, at least, by my experiment that 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…"Here, here. I concur and continue to go boldly for my grave.

[bnielsen_30 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Indeholder "Jacob Paludan: Om Thoreau", "Økonomi", "Hvor jeg levede, og hvad jeg levede for", "Læsning", "Lyde", "Ensomhed", "Gæster", "Bønnemarken", "Landsbyen", "Søerne", "Baker Farm", "Højere Love", "Dyrene som Naboer", "Indflyttergæstebud", "Tidligere Beboere og Vintergæster", "Vinterdyr", "Søen om Vinteren", "Foraar", "Slutning", "Ole Jacobsen: Noter"."Jacob Paludan: Om Thoreau" handler om ???"Økonomi" handler om ???"Hvor jeg levede, og hvad jeg levede for" handler om ???"Læsning" handler om ???"Lyde" handler om ???"Ensomhed" handler om ???"Gæster" handler om ???"Bønnemarken" handler om ???"Landsbyen" handler om ???"Søerne" handler om ???"Baker Farm" handler om ???"Højere Love" handler om ???"Dyrene som Naboer" handler om ???"Indflyttergæstebud" handler om ???"Tidligere Beboere og Vintergæster" handler om ???"Vinterdyr" handler om ???"Søen om Vinteren" handler om ???"Foraar" handler om ???"Slutning" handler om ???"Ole Jacobsen: Noter" handler om ???

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In al zijn onvolkomenheid toch een werk dat je niet loslaat. Thoreau wilde niet zozeer weg van de beschaving, hij deed wel een spirituele zoektocht naar zichzelf, met innige contact via de natuur. De zwakheid van het werk is dat het eerder een compilatiewerk is, er is geen coherent grondplan, en soms onmogelijke metaforen. Desondanks intrigerend.

[jimocracy · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

pretentious drivel

[dianaleez · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I first read Henry David Thoreau's 'Walden' as a college senior. And I've gone back to it over the years, something I can't say about far too many of my college assignments. But as Bill McKibben points out in his introduction, Walden's message is as important now as it was in 1854 when it was published.We talk about 'centering' ourselves, finding an inner core, getting in touch with nature. Thoreau accomplished all that and more in Walden Pond. With the perspective that distance granted him, Thoreau saw that his society was too separated from nature, that it had lost the ability to understand man's place in the natural order. Sound familiar?'Walden' contains eighteen simple chapters, written in a simple, straightforward style. Thoreau is far from bombastic or didactic. I find that reading 'Walden' is a way to get in touch with myself, to reconnect with the world, and, unfortunately, to understand that now is the time to save the world that I love.

[parker_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don't think I can really review Thoreau; Walden is a pillar of the Western canon, worth not just reading but re-reading. The choice for the reader is really which edition, or why this edition? This paperback is printed on heavy, acid-free, creamy ecru paper stock and laid out in a crisp digital typeface. The introductory essay (23 pp) by Bill McKibben is thoughtful but I suspect most readers are more interested in Thoreau. His annotations are provided as footnotes and include a mix of cross references to sources of Thoreaus quotations and allusions plus un-sourced thoughts from McKibben. The cross references are brief and thankfully not terribly numerous; one could imagine an annotated version of Walden with annotations taking up more space than the text, as in some versions of scripture. The observations from McKibben, which center around desire to modernize the perspective of the text, are often less welcome. For example, when Thoreau addresses the reader, "I have no doubt that some of you who read this book ... come to spend borrowed time, robbing your creditors of an hour," McKibben notes, "The average American household now spends 14% of its income to pay off debts." What is the source for that statistic? And why, with an average of one note per 3-4 pages of Walden, does this aside merit a note? Ultimately, that is the conundrum with an annotated version: a fully annotated version would take up at least as much space as Walden itself and would get in the way of reading the text. There is certainly a place for such a version, next to a readable, unadorned copy of Walden, even if Thoreau himself would deride the idea. This edition is too sparsely annotated to be the former but too cluttered to be the later.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When I first read this, in high school, I underlined a few epigrammatic quotes that summed up for me then all the wisdom of the world. Now I appreciate the small details of life in a semi-rural area: birds, the changing seasons, chopping wood, etc.

[kimaoverstreet · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had never read Walden prior to receiving this edition- though I have frequently used quotes from it that showed up in online searches! I can't compare this edition to previous ones, though as a novice reader, I can hardly imagine a better one. Bill McKibben's introduction and footnotes, are a wonderful bridge between the ideas and practicalities of 1854 and those of 2017. Walden is basically a series of essays, Henry David Thoreau's contemplations on the time he spent in seclusion, living off the land, while writing a novel. It is a beautiful meditation on simplicity and mindfulness. I am struck by the problems that seem timeless - Thoreau thought people in his time were overly materialistic! I read it rather quickly, so I could complete this review; now I plan to keep it at my bedside, and study a page each day in more depth.

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This classic work of 19th century American literature concerns the author's two year period living in the relative wilderness of the woods outside Concord, Massachusetts in the late 1840s. I enjoyed his descriptions of the peace and serenity he got from his solitude and his closeness to nature. As an introvert myself, this appeals to me, though I wouldn't begin to have the author's skills to make this work in practice. He makes the classic statement of the introvert, recharging his personal batteries to replace the energy drained by too much social contact, with what we would now call "down time": "I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers."I enjoyed somewhat less the lengthy self-sufficiency descriptions, which became a bit repetitive, and the occasional lapse into slightly tiresome sermonising. It's worth remembering that Thoreau's isolation was his choice of lifestyle; in his words "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". In fact he lived near enough to Concord to walk there regularly and had frequent contact with people there and visitors to his hut.The book is very well written, with a precise use of language normal for the time in which it was written; Thoreau has a rich understanding of plant and animal life and the ebb and flow of the seasons during his time in the woods. His writing is also rich in classical allusions (" For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed"), that he generally assumes his readers will understand, quite a common feature of 19th literature.This edition also includes the author's essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience", which describes his libertarian philosophy that rejects government in principle as an oppressive force. He embraces the nostrum "That government is best which governs least"; and would like to see this taken to its natural conclusion that "That government is best which governs not at all". His main reason for this is the US government's support for the institution and practice of slavery, which he considers provides a justification for those concerned with true justice to oppose the government, including through the use of force if necessary. At the same time, his philosophical antipathy to the whole notion of government (though he makes certain pragmatic concessions to it) allows him to concede no place at all for a liberal government as a potential force for good in the social arena. Interesting stuff, even if his philosophy seems too simplistic to me.

[rontyler-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I live in a suburban neighborhood, it’s quiet and the lots are a nice size. The lot has a small tract of woods beyond the back yard, and the property ends at a creek. So even though I’m in a suburban neighborhood, It’s easy for me to imagine (I pretend a lot) that I’m in or near the woods and alone, as I never see, and hardly ever hear, the closest human neighbors. As I was reading Thoreau, I realized that this is my Walden. This book is amazing, and I was struck by how coincidentally similarly I’ve been considering the natural goings-on in my yard and woods while I pass much of my day on the porch. Especially the local wildlife that visits here: the crows, the squirrels (my favorite to watch), deer and their young feeding just beyond the fence, owls during the night, the occasional armadillo (always seen or heard at night). And now the songbirds are returning, too. It’s been nice to have such activity, easily observed from the porch.

Reading this book put me in a very relaxed, calm state. Reflective and undisturbed, easy to think or not think and just watch the natural world going about its business. Thoreau is wonderful and I highly recommend this book. I know it is one I will frequently re-read.

[denverbook · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A great contemplative book, I would consider this a fine example of a self help book for those who want to take a step back from the hustle of modern America.

[homeschoolmimzi · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

UPDATE 2/19/2107Oh I know this is a favorite, a classic . But I could not stomach any more of Thoreau. His tone is condescending, snobby and totally off-putting. I'd hoped maybe I could glean something worthwhile, something inspiring, but no. This man hadn't an ounce of humility. How can someone impart wisdom without humility? My last attempt was last night, I read a few more pages of Economy where Thoreau, among other annoying comments, criticizes a 'scrubby Irish laborer' No thanks. Goodbye Thoreau. 8/19/2016 I thought Walden would be a good book to read over the summer. So I just picked it up yesterday , expecting to be uplifted . I must say, so far I'm finding Thoreau to be very haughty and full of himself. I know this work is highly acclaimed, assigned as mandatory reading in schools across the country, but so far I'm not impressed. Right from the start, on p.6, Thoreau begins a diatribe of why learning from the elderly is pointless:What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.... Practically, the old have no very important advice to give to the young, their own experience has been so partial... they are only less young than they were."Oh really now? So advice from the older generation has no importance? Well, according to Thoreau's philosophy, he is beyond old age now himself, dead and buried, so perhaps his musings have no value to anyone in this current age.Nonetheless, I will give this book a chance. If I can get through it.

[librisalexandria · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The most beautiful edition of this classic so far. Profusely and exquisitely illustrated.

[jbarr5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Walden by Henry David ThoreauLike how the sections are divided up into chapters.Each concentrates on its theme and he talks about the surrounding farmers and his beliefs.We have visited Walden Pond and was able to walk around visiting the garden area and where he stayed-it's just a small shed.Loved hearing of his crops and how he does accounting for everything he built or planted. I recall the railroad also as we hiked to the top of the hill.Enjoyed this book although it's not written in today's language, have to read into it.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Henry David Thoreau travels to Walden Pond and spends two years in a cabin in the woods, writing, visiting friends, and pondering what it means to truly live.It's the great American classic we all read in school, right? 2017 is the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth, so I reread it as part of a Massachusetts Statewide Read. This time it wasn't for school, and I was determined to give it a fair shake. I found his attitude really grating and, at times, boring. I think Thoreau was really trying to shake people up and get them to argue with him, which he does successfully. I definitely wanted to argue with him, so I was in a bad mood reading most of the time. But, it's an important piece of American literature historically and I'm glad I read it.

[jawalter · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

eBook

I feel guilty for not liking this. I managed to avoid reading this during school, but it still seems like one of those books that high schoolers are forced to read, yet never appreciate. SIt always embarrasses me to agree with the high schoolers, but I can't help but find Walden vastly overrated, both as a book, and as an exploration of the American character.

Certainly, there were lines, ideas, and passages that I enjoyed, and I'm not necessarily willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because the narrator is such a self-righteous prick. Maybe it's just because of what I've been reading recently, but it was hard to get past the flimsy nature of the man's entire worldview. A lot of my recent books have revolved around the theme of bullshit, and I can't say that I'm willing to exclude this one. Thoreau's pronouncements sound pretty enough, in the same way that the ramblings of a stoner can seem to uncover hidden truths, but after a while, context takes over. The difference between his self-perception and reality is just too wide to take him seriously.

[almirr_33 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Reading Walden makes you live only the present time. It's as dough you were at the lake's shore, seated, contemplating its vastness trough Thoreau's eyes.

[ctpress_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Some years ago I walked around Waldens Pond just outside Concord. A nice and sunny autumn day - imagining how it must have been for Thoreau back in 1845 to move into his tiny house he built with his own hands.He stayed there for two years - a self-imposed "exile" - leaving the bustling city behind, dedicated to a life of simplicity and solitude. This book is an exploration of his experiences and his many thoughts on life in general. It's more relevant than ever - thinking how much stress and unnecessary things that fill our lives and gives us constant worries.Rereading his book I feel much more alive again. It's brimming with curiosity, enthusiasm, individuality and the wish to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life".A mixture of philosophy, observations about nature, wildlife and crops, guidance on how to live life to the fullest, not following the crowd but being yourself, living in the present. This book has so much to offer - and completely deserves it's status as some of the finest american literature ever. Thoreau's unusual attention to ordinary things in life fills me with joy - just the pleasure he gains from a cold bath in the lake each morning and his way of putting it in a wider context of living is remarkable. As with so many other things. From the food on his table, to the birds in the air. Nothing escapes his keen eye for details we so often just ignore.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.

[mikemonkey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really did like this book. Thoreau's way of describing his solitude and the nature around him those two years is a poetical and philosophical masterpiece. The book must be read in a slow pace, but if you do that you will really feel as though you are there in the woods with Thoreau.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Henry David Thoreau begins Walden with an explanation, this was a brief respite from his "civilized life" that had taken up two years at some time in the past. Now he is once again a "sojourner in civilized life." Using the word sojourner suggests the association of material with civilization and provides a contrast with the natural life that he had experienced at Walden Pond. But the presence of nature does not prevent Thoreau from quickly turning his narrative to a discourse on his personal life and internal thoughts leading to the comment about philosophers quoted above. His life at Walden Pond appeared to provide simplicity and independence, two of the criteria listed, but the emphasis in "Economy"--the first chapter of Walden--is on the practical aspects of the life of the philosopher.These aspects are laid out in an orderly manner that begins with several pages about the "when", "what", and "how" of his life at Walden Pond. His simple life was one that included only the "necessities", noting that , "the wisest have ever led a more simple and meager life that the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, non so rich in inward." (p 14)While what he did, in addition to writing, included: "To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself!" . . . "trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express!"(p 17)His paean to nature passes and he continues an orderly disquisition on building his house, its design, his income and outgo, and baking bread. He describes making his furniture, once again with emphasis on simplicity: "a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs". Later, in the "Visitors" chapter, he will explain that his three chairs include "one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society." (p 140) Multiple visitors were invited to stand while they shared Thoreau's abode.The "Economy" section is by far the longest in the book and, while Thoreau discusses many more details of his life at the pond, he concludes with a meditation on philanthropy which he decides "that it does not agree with my constitution." The dismissal of philanthropy, at least for himself, seems curious for one who portrays himself as a philosopher. Philanthropy originates from the Latin "philanthropia", and originally from the Greek word "philanthropia", meaning "humanity, benevolence," from philanthropos (adj.) "loving mankind, useful to man," from phil- "loving" + anthropos "mankind". But perhaps Thoreau did not perceive the practice of philanthropy in Concord to coincide with this derivation. As he says "There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted." (p 74) He goes on to discuss the issue at length with a concluding and consistent (with his thought) riposte that seems apropos for the end of this first note on Walden."If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world."( pp 78-79)This then seems to bring together the simplicity and practice of the philosopher to be "well as nature ourselves."

[britt84 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm a bit ambivalent on this one. Though I really liked pieces and I think Thoreau has a great writing style, I did also find it rather lengthy at times. The descriptions of the environment of Walden pond are beautiful, but they can become a bit much, for instance when he writes several times, multiple pages about how clear the water in the pond is... Though the novel has been an important inspiration for some philosophers, and I appreciate it's importance and the novelty of Thoreau's ideas at the time the book was written, I have to say I don't find his ideas very convincing. I think Thoreau doesn't realise that he might live a 'primitive' life quite easily when he has a civilized world surrounding him, but that this would not be possible if everybody would follow the lifestyle he promotes. For instance, he hires oxen and a plough to plough his fields, he borrows tools, he gets his clothing from the village... If everybody would live like he does though, these things wouldn't be possible. Also, he feels that poor people should be happy to live a simple life, but he doesn't seem to understand that poverty means hardship and despair, and that a simple life isn't much fun when you're starving. Likewise, he doesn't take into account that some people have wives and children they need to provide for.Besides, Thoreau comes across as an incredibly arrogant and patronizing man, who seems to think he is the only person whose intellect is advanced enough to see the truth and to really understand the world. He just looks down upon everybody, and I found this really annoying and insulting.The copy I have also contained the essay 'Civil Disobedience', which leaves me with the same feeling. It's rather easy to boast of not paying your taxes, if you don't actually need to spend time in jail for it because your family pays up for you. And it's also rather easy to say you don't need the state and are therefore not going to pay, if you can benefit from the state by living in it, even without paying. I am presuming that Thoreau does appreciate having roads and railroads, a police force and firemen, and all other commodities the State provides; if everybody would act the way he does, then all these things would disappear, and I wonder if that really is what he wants...

[harmoniumradio · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Excellent but Thoreau is a grouch

[cecrow · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A philosophical work, but not the outlining of a philosophy. Pro-nature and anti-materialism about sums it up. I had several objections to the opening chapter ("Economy"), but after that fell into the groove of his poetic praise of nature and simplicity, reflecting on many of my own pleasant encounters with Mother Nature. He was a very sharp observer, noting many details I'm sure I would have overlooked about his surroundings. I was impressed with his frequent quoting of eastern writers, surely unusual for his time, and his respect for America's indigenous peoples. While I can't swallow what he's selling wholesale, I've taken away many quotes that I'll consider further.

[seanj_26336 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Halfway through "Economy" I was ready to toss a few bare essentials into a rucksack and head to the nearest woods for more simple living. Not quite, but I did begin to reconsider some of the ways I'm spending my life--the things I'm spending it on--and that was good. I enjoyed the first half of Walden so much that it surprised me when reading the second half of the book became kind of a chore; in the end, I didn't make it to the end. I wish Thoreau would have applied his make-do-without-the-non-essentials philosophy to his writing: he can be pretty long-winded sometimes, and sometimes while reading I was more than ready for him to move on to a different topic. But there's a lot to like about Walden. And every time I pick it up, I feel (cue the cheese) motivated to go out and live more purposefully. I can't say that about too many books I've read.

[thatotter-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I didn’t know what I was getting into with this one. I expected an easygoing, Walt Whitman-y kind of vibe. I didn't realize Thoreau was going to be such a boring, priggish braggart. I can only imagine what it must have been like to have a conversation with the man and be lectured and scolded all evening.

The book is at its best when Thoreau is describing his observations of the natural world, and at its very worst when he's philosophizing and prescribing.

There are plenty of good lines, but I think most of the best are widely circulated, so you don't need to read the book to hear them. One that was new to me: "I love the wild not less than the good."

[lisa.johnson.james · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I can understand & appreciate why this book is considered a masterpiece, although quite honestly, to me, it just seems like the ramblings of an old man who has been vastly disappointed by his life in the "normal" world, during the 2 years he spent in solitude in the woods. Some of the things he had to say were still relevant today, & some weren't, even though they were highly relevant at his time of life. Interesting, yes, boring in a LOT of places, long winded & overly wordy for my personal taste. Guess I should have read the Cliff Notes :) I probably would have appreciated it more. I found this one a REAL struggle.

[jarvenpa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read Walden in a battered old hardcover, probably a Modern Library Edition, now far out of print, when I was a teen. A long, long while ago, when I was in love with the Transcendalists and seeking some sort of vision for a life well lived. Thoreau has walked with me through the decades of my life, a touchstone, a surly companion, a man who observes the ways of the plants and the weather and the world and does not compromise. Probably if we met in real life we would have hated each other; I get that Henry wasn't that comfortable with women, save the wife of his buddy Emerson and his mom and her cookies. But...you have to love him. And read him. And treasure him.