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."