The Effects Of Living At Walden

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Recommended: Thoreau's View of Life

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 to live deliberately because he believed that the way we live in society is not really living, it is superficial. It is superficial because of our dependence on material things that in Thoreau’s mind don’t really matter and can be sacrificed without risking what Thoreau would call actual living. Thoreau believes our dependence on material items is so great that we do not see the majesty of what this world has to offer, we cannot experience the grandeur of nature. So the living “deliberately” would mean to live with the basic essentials, building a little shelter to shield from harsh elements, living off the food we can grow or gather, and to cut ourselves off from immense contact with society in order to figure out our real purpose in the world.

I would argue that Thoreau not only truly lived deliberately and became better versed in the ways of society, but also more versed in alternative ways of viewing something that is common in life, the human brain for example. Living deliberately is show...

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... side was spiritual, not unlike the spiritual retreats or pilgrimage of religions. The third side is more neurological, reaching into his own mind and into those of his readers. After spending time in the woods, it would appear that Thoreau reached more insight into his own mind and its inner workings, developing something most people don’t have. I believe it would be safe to assume that almost no one would take the sight of a thawing bank and compare it to the neurological workings of the brain.

Works Cited

“Brain” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 11 Nov. 2008, 13:21 UTC. 11 Nov. 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brain&oldid=251094037

Thoreau, Henry David, William John Rossi, and Henry David Thoreau. Walden ; and, Resistance to Civil Government: Authoritative Texts, Thoreau's Journal, Reviews, and Essays in Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.

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