Walden Where I Lived What I Live For

Towards the end of Walden the author Henry David Thoreau is speaking about how you don't need a lot of money to enjoy life. You should slow down and enjoy the world as it presents itself. The little things in life are most important. You can interpret this from page 413 because Thoreau includes “It is life near the bone where it is sweetest”. The deeper meaning of the quote is that life is most enjoyed when you only focus on the bare necessities, and not indulge in the extra things, the material and superficial things. Spiritually you have to be content with yourself and that will make you happier than superficial item.

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

The essay by Henry David Thoreau, “Where I lived and What I Lived For” tells Thoreau beliefs of how society should live. He asks deep questions such as, “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” to encourage the reader to contemplate their lives and values. He said, “Our life is frittered away by detail.” and goes on to emphasize the value of, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Thoreau states simplicity and self sufficiency are virtues society should live by; however, they potentially jeopardize the community and are consequently not viable today.

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.

Unlike the caricature of the wilderness recluse, Thoreau’s views on nature and civilization were more complex. Thoreau’s retreat to the woods was for both spiritual and intellectual inspiration. Even though he spent two years in the woods, he preferred to only be there occasionally: “The poet must, from time to time, travel the loggers path and the Indian’s trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, in the far recesses of the wilderness” (Thoreau, The Maine Woods). Thoreau purposefully used the phrase “time to time,” to show he preferred his time in the wilderness in mild doses. In The Maine Woods he expresses his preference for “partially cultivated country,” which explains his time traveling around Concord. Thoreau found a middle ground: permanent residence in the “partially cultivated land,” with occasional trips into the city and wilderness for inspiration. Schulz belittles Walden as simply “cabin porn,” comparing Thoreau’s time in the woods to Laura Ingalls Wilder time spent in the woods. She believes that Wilder lived what Thoreau “merely played at,” and that Wilder’s stories were more harrowing. However, Thoreau did not live, nor did he recommend, a life fully detached from society. In fairness to Schultz, most people

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau gave us what would become his most famous non-fiction book, Walden; or life in the Woods. In this, Thoreau describes his project at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau decided that he was going to live “deliberately” in the woods for over two years and live off of a limited economy and isolate himself from society in order to gain a more objective understanding of it. But one has to ask the question, what does Thoreau mean that he wants to “live ‘deliberately’”? Thoreau himself said that he wanted 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.”(Thoreau, 61) He wanted

Writer Henry David Thoreau wrote about his time spent alone with nature in the woods near Walden Pond in Concord, MA. His writing of his simplified, solitary life for two years, two months and two days is what earned him to be one of the famous Transcendentalist writers of the nineteenth-century. He started this journey with no personal material items and no money. Yes, he even began building his home with a borrowed axe. The materials he had to purchase were very minimal. Not needing much in materialistic items, he didn’t have a lot of furniture and he even made those. He did have three chairs because company may stop in and visit.

The chapter starts with Thoreau talking about his search for the land where he would build his house. The readers already know he decides to live at Walden Pond, but he takes his time to recount the various other properties he looked at. He talks about a warning that Cato, a roman philosopher, had said about being careful when buying a farm. The first estate he had wanted to buy ended up not being sold to him, so he continued his search. When he finds the perfect place for him he is ecstatic over the fact he is far from the post office, because he deems it unnecessary for communication. Thoreau is very happy and pleased with his home building at Walden Pond and deems it as a philosophical event, and proof of him freeing himself from society.

In Walden, he questions the lifestyles that people choose. He makes his readers wonder if they have been chosen the kind of life that will really offer them happiness. Are they merely living a career or some other narrowly routine or is a worthwhile life being lived. Thoreau wonders if the truly valuable elements of life are being taken advantage of if a person is not living simply. If a person is so caught up in working or never having enough in life, one wonders, and satisfaction are difficult to obtain. As he states in the beginning Walden, "most men, even in this comparatively free country, though mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that is finer fruits cannot be plucked by them" (Thoreau 6). This means that people care more about the finer things in life and easier work instead of nature's gifts and hard work. Thoreau draws a parallel between others preoccupation with money and his own enjoyment of non-monetary wealth.

He lived simple and plain. So simple and plain in fact, that he even chose to leave society and almost become a hermit. In his piece, Walden, or a Life in the Woods, he has chosen to build his own shelter. “I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long...The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which was done by myself was in all $28.00” (Thoreau 236). Throughout the passage, Henry also tells about the patches he plants for food. This is complete and total self reliance. You are on your own for food, water and shelter, and Thoreau pulls it off with little hastle. He even claims to have “done better than any farmer in Concord that year...” (Thoreau 163). Thoreau has proven to himself and society that he can be independent, in growing and catching his own food, and building his own

Thoreau was trying to re-discover the wildness in life through living in radically reduced conditions, but Lowell saw it a different way than Thoreau. Lowell pointed out that the land Thoreau was living on was not his own, it belonged to another man (Emerson’s). The tools Thoreau used to build his cabin and hunt for foot and chop his firewood were essentially borrowed and were made using the same luxuries he was trying to forego. Most everything Thoreau used during his time at Walden had some ties back to civilized urban living. Lowell pointed out that as hard as one may try, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to escape any remanence of superfluous luxuries, even in a remote area like Walden Pond.

Thoreau wants us to live a a life which is more private& inside driven and not much influenced by the outside materialistic world. To do this experiment, he went into the woods in Concord and lived a life detached from mainstream society. He lived in woods on the bare minimum commodities and practiced the art of thinking. However, during his stay in woods, he allowed guests to meet him and he too went to meet society in some

I have always been told that success comes from hard work and dedication. If this is true, then we have to take on responsibilities and integrate ourselves into society in order to find our place and leave our mark. For these reasons, I must disagree with the values held in Walden. In Walden, it says, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand…” (383). The main drawback I find in this statement is that living a simple life is complicated in today’s world. In today’s world, food isn’t automatically put on a plate. Houses aren’t given to everybody. Clean water isn’t available at anyone’s convenience. All of these items require a source of money and this money can only come from

Although some critics may treat Walden as simply a text on the love of nature, Thoreau's message, and indeed philosophy, seems to lay deeper. Although he never openly criticises the state of America, there are certainly references to suggest that this text is somewhat a social commentary or criticism of the society in which he lived. For example he suggests `Better if [men] had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in' . Through this extract, and indeed through much of the text, we can see that Thoreau uses the image of nature to suggest his own ideal of society. It seems that by isolating himself from civilisation, he begins to understand himself through self-realisation and thus establishes his own identity. From the question, `Why should they begin digging their own graves as soon as they are born?', we learn a little of Thoreau's philosophy on life: he disagrees with the collective identity of the increasingly capitalist America in which he lives, asking why should we passively comply with a capitalist machine?