“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” — Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American poet and naturalist, who was born in Concord, Mass. in 1817 as the son of a pencil-maker. He studied at Harvard College, taught school, and worked in his father’s pencil factory.
Walden was first published in 1854. This book is a reflection upon the author’s simple living in natural surroundings. His experiences were over the course of two years, two months, two days, in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Thoreau made precise scientific observations of nature as well as metaphorical and poetic uses of natural phenomena. He identified plants and animals and recorded in detail the color and clarity of different bodies of water. He writes precise dates and describes the freezing and thawing of the pond.
Some said that this experiment was a “report in transcendental pastoralism.” Thoreau had two powerful and opposing drives which was a desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the record straight of Walden Pond. He wanted to learn if he could survive, even thrive, by “stripping away all superfluous luxuries, living a plain, simple, life in radically reduced conditions”? He wrote that he wanted to “anticipate not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself.”
And from his journal February 27, 1860, at age 42 he wrote “I must walk when I can see the most water as to the moist living part of nature. This is the blood of the earth and we see its blue arteries pulsing with new life now.”
Thoreau would partake of bread and butter for his dinner as he sat amid the green pine boughs. He was working on his hut which had a stove by now, a bed, and a place to sit. He had dug its cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south where the potatoes would not freeze in any Winter. “There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building it own nest,” he wrote.
He spent a total of $28.12 on various materials to build his house, including nails, boards, windows with glass, hinges and screws, chalk, and roof shingles. He did not include the timber, stones, and sand, which he “claimed by squatter’s right.” He noted that he had a small wood-shed adjoining and made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house.
His farm land was about a third of an acre and garnered him $71 for 12 bushels of beans, 18 bushels of potatoes, some peas and sweet corn. He spent $10.40 for oil and household utensils.
Thoreau’s account of his immersion in solitude is considered a signpost for the modern mind in an increasingly-complex world. He advocated civil disobedience to unjust laws. He passed this life May 6, 1862 of tuberculosis.