In these opening sentences of
one of the great works of literatureWalden, or Life in the
Woodswe have the major concerns in the writer's
intellectual and imaginative world: Solitude, self-reliance, nature,
and economy. This work, which consists of 18 essays, is based on the writer's life
at Walden Pond where he lived in a cabin for two years, two months and two days.
In the month of March in 1845, when the ice in the pond had not yet
dissolved, when the pleasant spring days had set in so that "the winter of man's
discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid
began to stretch itself," a young man
borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond with the intention
of building a house for himself. His name was Henry David Thoreau.
His ideal was "a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity,
and trust." And the reason why he went to the woods was because he "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 come to die, discover that I have
not lived." This experience at Walden became the basis of his
masterpiece Walden. It was a deliberate and
sustained effort to free himself from the trappings of civilization.
The questions that he poses at the beginning of the book are pertinent
even today: "But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run
out? What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are
we sure there is none of it in our own
lives?" What follows is an elaboration on
what he regards as the essentials of human existence.
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