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Loading... Walden: or, Life in the Woods (original 1854; edition 2017)by Henry David Thoreau (Author)54. Walden by Henry David Thoreau OPD: 1854 format: public domain Kindle ebook (~280 pages) acquired: May 2 read: May 2 – Oct 3 time reading: 16:01, 3.4 mpp rating: 3½ genre/style: classic essays theme: Naturalitsy locations: Concord, MA around 1850 about the author: 1817-1862. American naturalist, essayist, poet, philosopher, and a leading transcendentalist. so, hmm. Part of me wants to rant at poor Thoreau, gut all his arrogance, or worse, faux-humble arrogance. That's my emotional reaction. It's not a fair reaction. This stands as an emblem for nature writing, and for independent spirit, and for combining the two together. I like the nature writing effort, and the touches of history, and the attempts at an open mind, the perspective of an abolitionist during deep slavery. I didn't like the independent mind. It was incoherent to me and much too...maga-like. Maybe I would have felt differently ten years ago. As an aside, I hadn't really thought about how tightly these two ideas are interwoven in nature writing - this bond with nature tied to an angry independence of spirit. Edward Abbey was like this. It's a long trail. But, back to this book. It has interesting aspects and high points, especially when he ponders deep winter and his isolation, or he rapturously captures Spring; and it has its natural observations and local character observations. But largely it's about guy randomly doing stuff in a self-made hut a short distance out of town. It's random and wandering. A lot more sane than [Desert Solitaire]; and more optimistic than most latter nature writing, usually having a nature-is-doomed stuff aspect, like [Goodbye to a River]. The prose of its time and softens a lot of the literary drama. It moseys along. Maybe that's ok. Somehow I was hoping for something more. 2023 https://www.librarything.com/topic/354226#8262291 A classic first published in 1854 - Not a book for your average reader. Evidently, I’m just your average reader. I couldn't understand half of what I was reading, only got the gist of the meaning some of the time. I find he's a vain and pompous writer. It turns out I'm not the only one thinks this. At the back of the book E.B. White, writer and author of "Charlotte's Web", wrote that many readers found it "a rather irritating collection of inspirational puffballs by an eccentric show-off." (p. 199) E.B. White found it enlightening. Christopher Thomas Knight, the last true hermit of Maine, an avid reader, said this was the only book he never finished. He was disgusted with Thoreau! "Walden" is somewhat a memoir, but mostly it's Thoreau's so-called "philosophical" thoughts on the fast-pace and wastefulness of social life while he was living a couple of years in solitude, all taken from his journal log, which is online at The Walden Woods Project: https://www.walden.org/what-we-do/library/thoreau/thoreaus-log/ Originally published August 9, 1854 and set on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. This pond was located "about a mile and a half south of the village Concord...in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground." Thoreau’s original cabin site on Waldon Pond was discovered in 1945, and since, several replicas have been built as a museum at the Waldon Pond State Reservation in Concord, Massachusetts. Waldon Pond was actually owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, another writer of the times and a good friend of Thoreau, who gave him permission to build a small cottage, 10 ' wide by 15' long, and to conduct his temporary experiment of solitude living. He lived deliberately and ethically at Walden Pond for 2 yrs, 2 mths, and 2 days. I believe Thoreau was a bit lost inside his own head and considered himself a great philosopher. He believed reading newspapers a complete waste of time, and that merely reading of murders, a house burned, a shipped wrecked here or there, etc., did nothing to enhance one's life. He believed post offices receiving and sending letters from person to person were unnecessary and a waste of time, except for the two times HE used postage to send letters. Of course, he wrote two letters "...that were worth the postage." (p. 62)...you know, him being the "great philosopher" and all... Thoreau was big into reading, but considered anyone who didn't read and study ancient poetry or mythology a little ignorant and uneducated. Several times he mentions the reading of any of Homer's works, such as "The Iliad and the Odyssey" as a standard of just how educated a person really is, or isn't. Thoreau says he wanted to strip down to the basics and essentials of life in food, shelter, clothing, and food, and get rid of all the extra luxuries of having more, and bigger and better. The basics simply keep you "warm", which is the number one human desire. He notes that the cost of a thing is the amount of what he calls life (everyone else calls it work), which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. (p. 25) He minimalized his food choices and sold his gun before entering his 2 years of solitude. He believed that man would eventually improve his eating habits by finally giving up the killing and eating of animals, just as the savages gave up cannibalism when introduced to more civilized man and environment. Thoreau asks "Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?" (p. 28) I actually agree with this. The point is if you are always looking to obtain more things in life, you will never be satisfied or happy, and you will always feel poor compared to the man next to you. To do this, he went into living a life of solitude...or so he says. But, how can it be called a life of solitude when he states that he had all sorts of people stopping by, some strangers passing through, others were friends who had come out for a visit, and every day or two he took a stroll to the village to catch up on the latest gossip. The workers who worked on the railroad that ran below and on the other side of the pond where he would walk to town, knew him by name and, Thoreau joked, they thought he was part of the crew they crossed paths so often. And, at one point, he admitted there were twenty-five people crammed in his little cabin for a meeting of some sort. So a life of solitude? Hmmmm... He felt youth could have been more profitable through the experience of life rather than merely boggling the mind and simply filling it with the facts of life, for instance, through extended education. I think he probably struggled with this himself. He wanted to live and experience the different aspects of life, not just write about it. But, hey, to each his own. Every man is different and has different desires, and different strengths and weaknesses. Thoreau didn't believe in charity. He thought it enabled the poor. On page 50, he states, "Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it." He didn't give anything to the poor because he had nothing to give. But, if I understood it correctly, what Thoreau detested most was the flaunting of giving and the recognition and praises others received by giving. Obviously, money left a bad taste in Thoreau’s mouth. He only worked and earned just enough to get him enough food to sustain him through the year. He never wanted to earn more than that, and he especially didn’t want to earn enough to pay the government their taxes, for which he was once incarcerated for not paying. But, in all this, there is a caveat. While Thoreau slanders others who go to work, pay mortgages, have large farms with debt attached to it, he was a squatter on a friend’s property and had free labor from friends and other locals, and permission to chop a few trees down off his friends property by the pond to build himself a small house. It's not like this was something of his own earnings. He was using his friend. His friend worked hard to own all that, right? And here we have Thoreau knocking it, but using it. He brags that he's not "anchored" to a home. If his home burned down, he can walk away without much loss and even considered himself better off than most. (p. 39) Well, duh! That's because he has no investment in it. And he praised himself saying he left the land enhanced. By whose standards, I wonder? He did cut down trees and he lived and used that piece of property. Thoreau's greatest skill was to want little in life (p.47) and to collect nothing but the essentials. Therefore, he valued his free time and found that he could work about 6 weeks to support himself for the rest of the year to devote to his studies. (p. 48) Well, good for him. It's easier if you have friends you can mooch off of. After reading Into the Wild, where this book gets a fair bit of mentioning, one just had to see what all the fuss was about. It certainly starts off incredibly well with the first 25% of the book -- being mostly one chapter titled, "Economy" -- explaining the ins and outs of what leads Thoreau to Walden Pond and away from a normal life and the cost of doing so. And it is very clear in this first quarter that Thoreau is a very capable writer who can get straight to the heart of the matter and keep the reader's attention. But then we begin the second chapter, "Where I Lived and What I Lived For", and thus the tedium begins: word after word of pointless, boring tedium. Was it so utterly dull for him sitting by the pond, day after day after day with no one to talk to, that he just sat and wrote words for hour upon hour and simply spewed them forth upon pages enough to make up a reasonable amount to call it a book in order to sell it so he didn't have to get a real job? I just found myself reading paragraph after paragraph with a totally numbed out mind, noticing only a few words of interest here and there but mostly it's just babble: babble, babble, babble, babble, blah, blah, blah. I tried, i really did, but i just cannot see why people so rave about this book. Maybe chapter 3 onwards is back to the standard of chapter 1, but i simply could not get through chapter 2. And so, inevitably, it got ... ... deleted. oh my gosh, i had to type a fake review just to point out that i have noticed that i rated this book one star AND i have cleared the rating altogether. so dramatic! i think i still get mad about Walden because i thought i was the one who always found a way to like required texts, and though many tested me, this one just totally beat me. oh well. other people get some real nice stuff out of it, so that's cool. Thoreau can be pretentious, out of touch, and extremely frustrating at times. Occasionally he rambles, or goes so in-depth into a description that you lose a full understanding of what is really going on. However, he makes up for this—and is at his best—when he shows his pure and unadulterated excitement for what is around him. This appears specifically when he is nature writing. One can feel the joy and appreciation radiate off the page, and it fills you with the desire to see the world in a more Thoreauvian way. I appreciate his “deliberate” and simpler perspective to life, especially in a time of my life that has been chaotic and somewhat arduous. I hope some of the messages of this book stick with me for the years to come. Especially, “time is but a stream I go a’fishing in.” Henry leads off pretty deeply against farmers, many of the pre-corporate ones who may well have been happy with their lives. (Had to look up "Flying Childers.") He is rightly hard on greed and excessive money-making, while expressing many contradictions on the virtues or vices of hunting as opposed to his often professed compassion for animals unless they are fish or worms or sometimes even birds. Also, he offers nothing of the horrors of animal trapping, which some will excuse as just a sign of his times except that he then promotes a Vegetarian diet! The stories of the Ants and the woodchuck were horrible while the railroad sand was amazing. Yes, he lectures, but only because his experiences have convinced him of the truth of his observations, as "...the day is an epitome of the year." He often refers to the Hindu Bhagvat-geeta, and also delivers the Buddhist perspective: "We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us..." He moves on with intriguing ideas for students to build their own schools, a plan which Booker T. Washington greatly expanded! In another time and if in the same place, Henry David Thoreau would have been a great family friend. So much of what he addresses in Walden resonates deeply with my dad and I. We frequently discuss the bizarre inconsistencies and illogical manners of much of society, speculate hows and whys as well as alternatives, and enjoy extensive hours sitting in our silence among the sounds of wild critters and the weather. Walden has given me ideas for how to get the deluge of information in my head into a pleasant and intellectual format in the physical world. That is what this book is: Thoreau writing his contemplations on human behavior and resident natural history. Why are philanthropists idolized more than other productive endeavors? After all, a Newfoundland dog can save you from your troubles if you are drowning or freezing. Why dedicate years of monetary savings to take a train to your chosen destination when you can walk there without the years of savings, and meanwhile partake in the idiosyncrasies of the world along the journey? Why stay locked in your house on a deep, snowy day when you have an appointment with a beech tree? Thoreau brings up both "big" things and "little" things that mainstream society either avoids addressing or regards worthless because it does not add to a human's prestige or pays the bills. If you are the sort that never floated with the stream but instead investigated other shores or the depth of the river, this book will likely intrigue and flatter your mind. It is the second time I took the book from the shelf and put it back again, unread, although this time I got as far as the second chapter. The language, in particular when he ‘lectures’, does not agree with me, I find the word-choice and writing often laboured, far from natural and sounding to me at times even pretentious [because it was written almost 200 years ago? Has Melville’s style comparably aged? I must re-read him.]. This critique applies less to more natural sounding sections e.g.: „When first I took up my abode in the woods, …“ (chapter ‘Where I lived’) even with the archaic and formal-sounding ‘abode’. Perhaps one day, I will pick it up again and have another try. The quality of binding, paper, … and editing of this Everyman’s 1992 edition is exemplary and includes a Chronology of the Author’s life, Literary context, and Historical Events (X-22) Ifjúkorom nagy kudarca volt ez a könyv, egyáltalán nem boldogultam vele. Kimegy a csávó az erdőbe, és még egy medvével se találkozik – hát mit érdekel ez engem? Érett (bár sosem elég érett) olvasóként most ismét nekifutottam, hátha sikerül törlesztenem a régi tartozást – és lőn. El van olvasva a Walden. Hurrá. Belátom, ez a szöveg tele van olyan értékekkel, amelyek anno elkerülték a figyelmemet. 1.) Thoreau egész egyszerűen káprázatos nyelvérzékkel van megáldva. Csak kapkodja a fejét az ember ezeken a tündökletes megfogalmazásokon, amelyek gondolati mélységükön túl még kristálytisztára csiszolt lírának is bizonyulnak – bizonnyal akad amerikai barátunknál szabatosabb és tömörebb gondolkodó, de olyan, aki ilyen szépen ír, kevés. 2.) A Walden egy egészen sajátos tempójú könyv – olyan, mintha az ember a fű növését nézné. Ifjúkoromban alighanem ez volt az, ami megakadályozta, hogy belefeledkezzem (akkoriban jobb dolgom is akadt, mint a fű növését nézni), de most kifejezetten élveztem. Lassan haladtam vele, az igaz, de néha nem rossz lassan haladni. (Bááár… néha igen-igen nehéz.) 3.) Thoreau szövegei (a Walden, valamint híres esszéje a polgári ellenállásról, ami szintúgy a kötetben található) éppúgy megkerülhetetlen alapművek az ember és társadalom modernitásbeli viszonyában, mint amennyire megkerülhetetlenek a kereszténység számára Szent Ágoston vallomásai. A szerző Marxszal egy időben rámutat a társadalmi elidegenedés veszélyeire – külön pluszpont, hogy nem pusztán az ipar, hanem a földművelés kontextusában is, hisz a tanyasi paraszt, aki látástól vakulásig dolgozik a piacnak, ugyanúgy rabja saját munkájának, mint a munkás. Thoreau ezen felül már azelőtt felhívja a figyelmet a minimalizmus, a visszafogott fogyasztás szükségességére, mielőtt egyáltalán kialakult volna a „fogyasztói társadalom” definíciója – ezzel pedig kábé 100-150 évvel megelőzte korát. De még ennél is fontosabb, hogy ezek az írások egy olyan erkölcsöt írnak le, ahol az egyén morális törvényei nem a közösségből, nem is az egyházból, hanem önmagából, saját szuverenitásából vezethetőek le – Kantéhoz mérhető erejű maximák ezek. Nem mindenben értünk egyet Thoreau-val, az biztos. A végtelen amerikai terek már eleve más válaszokat tettek lehetővé, mint amilyeneket a XXI. század kínál – ha én most például kimennék a Városmajorba, és elkezdenék magamnak egy rönkházat építeni, hamarosan tutira felfokozott rendőri jelenlétre kéne számítanom. De tagadhatatlan, hogy Thoreau-ban egy eredeti, impulzív, hogy azt ne mondjam: bájos gondolkodót ismertem meg. Kár lett volna kihagyni. Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" is in essence a love letter to nature. This book is remarkable as a piece of 19th century New England transcendental philosophy. Thoreau muses as he lives in the woods for a time, telling his reader of his views - he wishes for a slower, more simple life far more connected to the natural world than social constructs; he admires the animals and plants for living in the moment, and wishes they were not abused, even praising plant based diets. His attitudes are not always what a 21st century reader may wish - and while these passages can be critiqued, they also serve as insight into what a "progressive" man of the 19th century thought of his world. His encounters with neighbours and other inhabitants of the wood provide the reader a good understanding of this 19th century anglophone male perspective. Overall, this work is a phenomenal piece of literature, and I find new passages each time that stand out to me. However you wish to analyse and understand 'Walden', it will provide insight. This book connects to my human experience immeasurably. If you grew up in a conservative Christian environment the book will perhaps lead to a born-again experience and a baptism and resurrection to new life apart form popular forms of American religion. Thoreau's relationship with the divine is beyond the piety of any Christian I've met and the his wisdom pours out everywhere, like a new Jesus preaching the kingdom of heaven to come on earth. A man of deep spiritual insight into the natural world of all sorts of animals, especially of human animals, Thoreau recounts the insights he learned while living in the woods for a short time and rejecting common social conventions. Spirituality here is connected to the earth from whence it was created. Nothing is free of criticism, especially not even the pro-next, anti-this, life Christian religion. If you like this book, you might want to get a hold of "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" by the same author. There are books you realize you must read again, and this is one of them. "Walden" describes Henry David Thoreau's first year in the woods beside the Walden Pond. He built his house in the woods and settled into a comfortable routine. During this time, he grew his own food, mingled with a few neighbors, and reflected on life and nature. In this time and age, when we are obsessed with our gadgets and have little time for anything else, this book comes as a timely reminder that a simple life exists, and it is for us to find it. The concluding chapter sums up everything neatly and is a brilliant summation of the book, and how we should conduct ourselves. This is a book for our times, and not just the times he lived in, I love this book and have read it many times, I don't believe that any other book I've read has had as much influence over me. I remember reading it for the first time and just feeling that I knew exactly that what Thoreau was saying was true. A real minimalist before his time, not just for his economy however he knew how to spend the time that he had gained, luckily he realized this early in life as he didn't have nearly enough time. I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, I'm not a professional, but to me, it was a great work of literature and I enjoyed it's subtle language. It's not an easy work to read and it may feel boring at times when Thoreau goes on to sketch the very fine detail of all phenomena, but there is some beauty to that same fine grained penning. I personally love the idea of living in nature, so perhaps I felt quite acquainted with Thoreau. I picked the book up after watching 'Into The Wild', a movie on life of Christopher McCandless, who reads this book throughout and is heavily inspired by it. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumHenry David Thoreau's book Walden: With an Introduction and Annotations by Bill McKibben was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Current DiscussionsWalden by Henry David Thoreau – STEEL 2022 in Fine Press Forum Popular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)818.303Literature English (North America) Authors, American and American miscellany Middle 19th Century 1830-61LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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