I read this book in English class with a hated teacher who gave us an incredibly difficult assignment around Walden that I struggled with and for which he provided insufficient support. Additionally Walden is just super boring. I've also tried to read Emerson as he and Thoreau share some Transcendentalist ideas but alas I find them both super boring.

To borrow the environmental movements phrasing of 'act local, think global', I would sum up Thoreau's Walden as 'live simply and think hard'. So many of the trappings of our lives are unnecessary for our relationship with the land, each other and the larger world of ideas. Fashion, money, great houses, etc. do not bring inner peace or knowledge (p. 9). Books, time to contemplate and people to talk with are all we should need. He says so eloquently in his section on Civil Disobedience, "There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness."

This is my first time reading Walden, but I'm struck by how many excerpts I've heard over the years, without attribution. I think he'd like that, in that the knowledge lives on, not the one who put it on paper at one time.

I heard the following quote in the film Dead Poet's Society: "I went to the woods to live deliberately" (p. 66). What an amazing sentence and thought. It's structure is simple, its effect, on me, forceful and profound.

To end, I like his advice in his section of Civil Disobedience: "Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

i read this for class, in fact, I didn’t even read half of it...but it counts in my heart so idc. thoreau’s kind of an ass, but he made some good points i suppose.

*reread for class*
I liked this much more the second time around

Learned that Thoreau was a bit of Zen Buddhist! But, probably also Christian. Interesting experience and perspective he portrayed in this book while living a “homeless” life for a couple of years — in a small cabin he built next to a pond. Often I feel that mankind would be much better off if we lived the simple lifestyle he demonstrated instead of the pollution-creating, stressful, consumer-driven frantic lifestyle we currently covet.

Abhorred the excerpts of this in high school literature and thought ten years of life experience might warm me up to it. Nearly DNF’ed a few times this month, and I do have a more favorable view than I did in high school — some gems of wisdom in here — but it is desperately in need of an abridged version.

My senior year of high school, I took an elective unit of American lit, which was taught by a teacher who was really burned out and had no business still being in a classroom. After a couple of weeks of wrangling the class lunkheads, who were only interested in screwing around, one day she simply passed out a stack of "find-a-word" puzzles and stopped teaching entirely. For the rest of the term I spent my time either in the library or actually reading the textbook, which is where I first encountered "Walden." It was love at first read. I have a copy of "The Annotated Walden" that I got in the late '70s/early '80s, which was immensely helpful in understanding some of the more obscure references.

Come to think of it, I need to re-read Walden. And probably Emerson's essays, too. They were both books that moved the 17-year-old me beyond description.

At the beginning there were little nuggets of philosophy that I enjoyed but as the book went on it got more and more difficult to pick up and keep going because it is extremely boring with its overabundance of detail and lack of story.

It’s long and it’s dense and there are way too many filler episodes but the good stuff is beyond good. I was struck with such an inspiration to live in communion with nature, with less. and the ending is definitely the best part

A borefest with some brilliant snippets here and there. Review will follow when I've recovered.

the self made man is a myth