Rhetorical Analysis On What I Lived For

Henry David Thoreau was an ascetic, and considered the ownership of unnecessary material possessions to be an obstacle rather than an advantage in life. He took notice that people were beginning to measure their worth in terms of what they owned (Witherell). In “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”, Thoreau describes how living in the wilderness had altered him, stating “I went to the woods because I 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 came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Thoreau 1101). In the woods, Thoreau was driven to the realization of the world’s current means of living – that no one is really awake, alive, and valuing their surroundings.

However, Thoreau doesn’t propose a lifestyle, he proposes change in ones mindset. “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look” (Thoreau 1101). To live a simple life we just need to readjust our eyes and mind onto greater thinking and realize that we governor what will become of our lives for the individual benefit in realization of what is of importance in our

In the essay, Thoreau states “Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow” (1103). Many people plan their lives as if they know they will survive past noon without perishing, either by pushing back everything of importance to the last minute or by trying to complete and obtain everything within a minute without looking up from their detail-oriented lives to realize that we are all merely specks of dust destined for decay. If we move through life slowly, we may miss the opportunity to wake from our slumber and experience what could have been, since it has become a habit to brush obligations to the last possible moment. Yet if we move through life too fast, we cannot cherish what universe has offered us as we rush through our means to move on to the next priority. Once someone finds the right pace, they have the ability to appreciate and experience everything the universe graciously offers. But to find this ideal pace one must learn to “reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep” (Thoreau 1101) by narrowing down their