Oh fuck off, Thoreau.

You were ~a total mountain man hippie living off the land~ that was in reality your bro Ralph Waldo Emerson’s backyard WHILE YOUR MOM DID YOUR LAUNDRY AND YOUR FRIENDS CAME OVER FOR TEA.

HOKAY. Uh huh. Sure, Jan.

Sometimes you read a book and desperately want to love it because you know, based on its reputation, that it's clearly a great work of literature. And I so wanted to love this. But it never quite happened. Yes, there are parts of the book which provide some truly exquisite prose but then there are parts that detail the intricate qualities of planting beans. Such is life. Like most people, I was aware of the book before reading it, almost felt I had, in fact, already read it, and sure enough my expectations were probably much higher than they needed to be. The story of a man (Henry David Thoreau) who chooses to live in seclusion for two years and, in doing so, gives us his thoughts on the experience, and on life itself.

My first problem (and this becomes more apparent as you read) is that he doesn't really live in any kind of meaningful seclusion; at worst, he lives at the end of a long street from the main village and even then still encounters rail workers, fisherman, and general passers-by. This slightly alters the experiment of living alone in the wilderness. Not that it matters because the book isn't really about that, it's about his worldview, his philosophy, his relationship with nature. As far as that is concerned, Thoreau is clearly a brilliant man, with a wonderful intellect and a poetic soul. Some of his wisdom is probably already familiar to you.

"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,"

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

The book had moments that were truly amazing to read, sections where it felt like I was reading some of the most accomplished and beautiful sentences imaginable. But again, for every page where that was the case, there were six or seven pages where the book became rather dry and hard to engage with, walls of text that offered no respite or elevation. And yet you keep reading hoping that you don't miss the next moment of magical prose or some profound insight into the human condition. If I were to read this book again (or recommend it to others), I would probably dip in and out of it, without worrying about chronological order, fully ingesting the words, before putting the book aside for a while, and repeating the process. That way you can more thoroughly immerse yourself in the language and enjoy the stand-out moments with greater pleasure.

"Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint's Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red alderberry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild holly berries make the beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste."

Moments like the above are found within a swamp of text that too often doesn't allow you to fully appreciate what you're reading. Or it becomes lost amid a series of dry reflections that lack as much bite. As such the book failed to entirely entertain me but was one which I will probably revisit again in the future, and probably on more than one occasion. There is obviously something great here even if I couldn't fully embrace it this time round. But that's alright because if I did not like the book as much as others then perhaps this is because...

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer."

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