Unexpected Critiques in Walden Essay

In “Walden”, Thoreau talks about his experience living at Walden pond for what he said was two years, two months and two days where he for the most part, isolated himself from civilization and supported himself with the help of no one else.

In Walden, Henry D. Thoreau presented a radical and controversial perspective on society that was far beyond its time. In a period where growth both economically and territorially was seen as necessary for the development of a premature country, Thoreau felt the opposite. Thoreau was a man in search of growth within himself and was not concerned with outward improvements in him or society. In the chapter entitled "economy," he argued that people were too occupied with work to truly appreciate what life has to offer. He felt the root of this obsession with work was created through the misconstrued perception that material needs were a necessity, rather than a hindrance to true happiness and the

An account of Thoreau’s experiences in his cabin during his retreat to the wilderness from society. Thoreau believed the Market revolution to be degrading to the Americans values and the Natural environment and that Americans should pace a life more attuned to the rhythms of Nature. Freedom lied not in the amount of goods accumulated but within.

In the book Walden and Resistance to Civil Government the author Henry D. Thoreau uses rhetorical strategies to convey his attitude towards life. In the last part of the chapter, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” Thoreau uses logos, pathos, and ethos rhetorical strategies to give the reader his opinion. Thoreau’s opinion is that we should live freely and deliberately like Nature, avoid conformity and not be any more busy than what is necessary.

Thoreau is a hugely influential character in the history of America, helping to define American thought and continue to inspire our modern ideas and authors. “Countless contemporary nature

Thoreau’s point in this is that man should go beyond conscious purpose, moral instinct, and spontaneous freedom. He suggests, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” The drummer mentioned in this quote is symbolic for ones’ intuition. The

Thoreau takes great pains to describe each character, even down to the farmer’s “wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed”[3] infant in chapter 10, “Baker Farm”. He makes sure his readers understand the unique attributes of each individual in his experiences. As Thoreau once said, “It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.”

Throughout “Solitude,” Thoreau uses a wide variety of rhetorical devices and complex diction to support his claims. Some of those rhetorical devices include: personification, simile, and rhetorical questions. These writing tools help Thoreau convey his message of living in solitude and self-reliance in nature. Thoreau uses massive amounts of complex diction throughout his writing.

Thoreau conducted his experiment to understand what it meant to lead a simple life. He wanted to grasp and live a life free of all unnecessary comforts and material attachments. He sought to understand what it meant to take hold of life on a daily basis and experience what it means to be truly alive without any of the conveniences that we take for granted. The “it” that Thoreau refers to is life. He comes to the conclusion that men in reality have no understanding of what “life” is really about or what it is to really live. In stating that men are “in a strange uncertainty about it…”, Thoreau reiterates his conviction that men lead lives on a day-to-day basis and accept good fortune and misfortune without any comprehension of how to truly experience life. Life is rarely uniform, but has ups and downs and is interspersed with evil and good. This uncertainty about our daily lives can lead men to question their circumstances. Depending on their state of mind and their convictions, men attempt to rationalize these uncertainties. Thoreau states that although men

     Furthermore, our lives are lived so shallowly and are filled with the frail, irrelevant things, and not the pulp of life. We think of time as the last peanut butter remaining in the jar we go scraping for, whereas Thoreau views time as “the stream I go a-fishing in. ( )” Thoreau stresses simplicity, yet we only feel important by living complexity. The people of Cary live lives almost equivalent to that of bees. We work hard, but relax almost never. We have five televisions, but not five minutes to spare. In the eyes of the people of Cary, complexity is modern.

Thoreau left society and went into the woods because he wanted to live life to the fullest and learn what life had to teach him, while Chris wanted to leave his problems at home. Thoreau was living in solitude in the woods. He liked living in solitude because he didn’t have to change his way of life to make others happy. He was also able to do his own work and did not have to worry about other people. Thoreau was not lonely in the woods because he was connected to nature like a flower is. He wanted to learn everything that the world had to offer by living with simplicity and focusing on his “needs” instead of his “wants”. We know this because Thoreau said, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Thoreau went towards solitude and fully

Nature has played an enormous part in our lives. From the childhoods of unwanted or loved trips to the country to the issue of climate change, we have all had our part to play in the matter. And yet it affects us as well. Without the presence of nature, we would not be able to survive. Both Rachel Carson and Henry David Thoreau understand the necessity of nature and humanity's lack of love for it. However, they are not without any dissimilarity. Carson's "A Fable for Tomorrow" and Thoreau's Walden are both serious, persuasive pieces that consider the current habits of the American people to be harmful and use pathos as one of their methods to convey this message. However, the differences in time periods, messages, rhetorical effects, and approaches reveal a clear rift between the two works.

For Thoreau, the escape from society was a way to deeply learn about himself and human nature. He writes, “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself” (Thoreau 72). This simple way of life allowed Thoreau to analyze himself and tendencies within society. He explains the effects of this solitary life on a person: “In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness” (253). Thoreau was able to discover flaws in society. He states, “... men establish and conform their daily life of routine and habit every where, which still is built on purely illusory foundations” (78). Unlike Hester and Sethe, the societal norms Thoreau experiences are not painful punishments or dehumanizing treatment. However, the “opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe … through poetry, philosophy and religion” (80), can still have a profound and often negative effect on individuals and society as a whole. Thoreau is able to overcome these societal norms because he separates himself from them. Thoreau explains of humankind, “When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence,-that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the

Thoreau wished to open the minds of many revealing the importance of nature “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails” (Thoreau II). In the quote, Thoreau discusses how he learned to live deliberately in nature encouraging other members of society to do the same. He has learned that it can lead to harmonization with oneself, to

Again in Walden, Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately” [1854]. It is quite strange that Thoreau had chosen to live in woods purposely. Perhaps one reason can be that he is a transcendentalist but one must not forget that he had discovered about the Walden Pond when he was deliberately living in the woods. However, another possible explanation can be that woods are not dominated or are controlled by anyone, nature lives freely in world. Therefore, a reader can