Analysis Of Where I Lived And What I Loved For By Henry David Thoreau

What does it mean to live? Does it mean that you are merely alive and breathing, or can it be defined by possessions and money? While living the life everyone else is living, has everyone forgotten how to be truly alive? Has the ability to be independent and make the discoveries to make their lives worthwhile instead of a clone of the societies around the world been buried beneath the need for progression? In “Where I Lived and What I loved For,” by Henry David Thoreau, Thoreau reflected on his time living alone in the forest and what he learned throughout this experience in order to answer these questions. Living isn’t just being alive; it is making choices to make one 's life something other than a replica of the thousands of lives that

“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself” (Thoreau, 2,3). Thoreau starts off this statement by referring every morning as a cheerful invitation; which, I believe, means that he looks at it as a welcomed opportunity to accomplish his goal in making his life of “equal simplicity”. This means that he doesn’t need the luxuries associated with life today. Instead, he only needs the necessities that can be provided by nature itself if order to be happy. He continues by striving for the innocence that is provided by nature, without the corruption of the constantly progressing world. Thoreau finishes by capitalizing Nature, I feel that he is showing his large amount of respect towards Nature and making it clear that he does not take Nature for granted. Throught his experience living in the forest I believe that he discovered just how pure nature was and the way society has corrupted the world. Thoreau then continues by explaining his reasoning for going into the forest which further supports his earlier criticism of society and his respect for nature. “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.” In other words, he went into the woods to learn how to live with a purpose that was different from the commonly held believe that life is meant to be lived in order to progress society. By embracing the answers that nature had to give, he relocated how to live with the essential facts of life, rather than what society has promoted such as money and possessions. This led into another example of the lack of independence of thought produced by the people of society. “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for the