Collect Walden Crafted By Henry David Thoreau Depicted In E-Text

read Walden in a high school Lit class, and this was my first time revisiting at the recommendation of a former lit teacher friend who felt like it would be calming and easytoread in the early days following the loss of my dad.
She was absolutely right.

Thoreau had me swept up in the simple beauty of the words and the time and place, Perhaps it was dry at times, but there was comfort and reassurance in the routine, There was also hope imbued throughout, which is also what I needed,

Dad was an English major and bibliophile, and Im certain he read Walden, though I cant place a memory of him sharing his thoughts with me, like he did with so many other works.
Im seeking any connection to Dad, any remembrance, and I embrace finding that through books and our love of the written word,

Thanks to my dear friend, Pat, for the recommendation,

Many of my reviews can also be found on my blog: sitelinkwww, jennifertarheelreader. com and instagram: sitelinkwww, instagram. com/tarheelreader Book
Walden, an American classic, . . few of us have likely read allpages, unless you were an English major, For most, perhapspages in high school or a college literature course introduced you to Thoreau and Walden, Famed philosopher and thinker, it's a book that transports you to nature and the simplicities of life, . . helping to discover who you are, what you want and where things are going, A bit of an existential crisis, so to speak, It's a good book. I have nothing against it, but it didn't resonate with me as much as I'd have liked,

I tend to be character and plotbased, when it comes to literature I enjoy, The main character, besides Thoreau, was passion/life/searching, . . it's not a work of fiction, tho some may take it that way, Perhaps a collection of essays, early journal writing, Blogging

All in all, beautiful language, Great images. Lots to think about. Worth reading thosetopages, But unless you are into philosophy, it'll be a hard read, I'm a thinker, but not in this way, I'm glad I read the full text, . . and a few pages several times for comparative purposes in different courses, Take a little on for yourself,

About Me
For those new to me or my reviews, . . here's the scoop: I read A LOT, I write A LOT. And now I blog A LOT, First the book review goes on Goodreads, and then I send it on over to my WordPress blog at sitelink com, where you'll also find TV amp Film reviews, the revealing and introspectiveDaily Challenge and lots of blogging about places I've visited all over the world, And you can find all my social media profiles to get the details on the who/what/when/where and my pictures, Leave a comment and let me know what you think, Vote in the poll and ratings, Thanks for stopping by. Note: All written content is my original creation and copyrighted to me, but the graphics and images were linked from other sites and belong to them, Many thanks to their original creators,

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polldaddy pollFIVE EXPANSIVE BOOKS SET IN CLOSE QUARTERS

This summer, the Wall Street Journal asked me to pick five books I admired that were somehow reminiscent of A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW.
To that end, I wrote on five works in which the action is confined to a small space, but in which the reader somehow experiences the world, Here is:

Ironically, one of the most timely pieces of closequarters literature is a work written overyears ago in which the author voluntarily commits himself to a oneroom cabin on the outskirts of town.
In Walden Henry David Thoreau isolates himself in the woods to avoid the distractions of modern life such as the headlines of newspapers, the gossip of neighbors, and the endless desire for possessions.
What he finds in his isolation is not a cessation of life, but a bounding of the spirit, By dampening the insistent noise of the town, he frees himself to dwell on nature, poetry, mythology, philosophy or, in a word, eternity, If Thoreau shook his head with dismay at the distractions in Concord circa, imagine what he

would think of our world today! With ahour news cycle, voracious social networks, and vast libraries of entertainment downloadable in the instant, there has never been greater merit in retreating from daily life, if even for an hour.
But if reading Walden from endtoend is not your cup of tea, fear not, Reading a few pages of the book at random can provide the perfect antidote to a hectic day,
Thoreau and I have an essential difference of philosophy: I am an Epicurean, and he's an asshole,

A puritan may go to his brownbread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle, Not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten, It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors,

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Walden has some great moments, I appreciate that Thoreau was not just the original hippie, but the original of a particularly cool kind of hippie: the practical kind, I grew up around people like this in Western Mass people who were really running small farms, building their own shit, forging their own ways hippies with skills, as opposed to sitelinkthe groovy kind.
They're a terrific sort of people, Doing the stuff of life yourself is great,

And I've always loved that most famous quote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, " No matter what's going on for me, it makes me feel good, When things aren't going well, it makes me feel less alone, When things are going great it makes me feel smugly superior, and that's nice too,

I heart introverts
I liked parts of the Solitude chapter, Everyone's probably heard this quote:

To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating, I love to be alone, I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude,

But here's a passage I like even more:

We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other, We meet at meals three times a day,and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are, We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war.

Ha "give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are, " Awesome.

And he doesn't fuck around
My edition includes On Civil Disobedience, wherein Thoreau who, as you may know, went to jail for refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the criminal Mexican War does some pretty fire and brimstone shit:

When a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military laws, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.
What makes this duty so much more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army, . . Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it, It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail, A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority, There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men,

Kinda makes you feel like a wiener, still complaining about Al Gore, right Thoreau was a badass,

But he's sortof obnoxious
I think one thing that bugs me is, he's constantly banging on about how easy life would be if everyone just did like he did.
And partly, as he says himself, that's because he "simplifies" he gives up almost every luxury, so it's much easier to meet his needs, I don't think he even has the internet, so that alone saves him likea month, But partly it strikes me as dishonest,

There's a smugness about Walden that puts me off, It's particularly grating in the Baker Farm chapter, where he lectures a poor guy with a wife and three kids about how much easier life would be if they just did it Thoreau's way.
And I was like a what if this dude thinks his kids should eat anything besides beans and b if you get cold you just go to your mom's house for the weekend, so your whole shtick is a little bit disingenuous, homie.
Thoreau has a big safety net, Even the land he's living on is borrowed from Emerson, The poor Irish guy has no such advantages,

There may be a reason for his weirdness, My book club got in a long and interesting discussion of whether Thoreau may have had Asperger's Syndrome, More on that sitelinkhere and sitelinkhere, and if you Google "Thoreau Asperger's" you'll find plenty more, There's even a whole book called sitelinkWriters on the Spectrum: How Autism and Asperger Syndrome Have Influenced Literary Writing that throws in Dickinson, Yeats and Melville for good measure.
I don't consider myself qualified to have an opinion about this, but it's a fun thing to bring up at your next dinner party,

And he's pretty longwinded
I mean, at one point towards the end he goes on for like five pages about sand, "I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body.
" Whaaaat the fuck, Thoreau, shut up,

So it's tough to know what to make of this book,
I rarely enjoyed reading it, but I underlined like half of it, Okay, sometimes it was just so I wouldn't forget what an asshole he is, He's often right, but always annoying, There's a lot going on here, and much of it is worthwhile, but I can't exactly recommend it to you, because I doubt you'll like it, I didn't. I respected it. But I didn't like it, I had high hopes for this book written by a selfimposed hermit living in the woods, However, this is actually just the thoughts of an ignorantly privileged dude who thinks there's only one correct way to live your life and won't shut up about it.
Whilst Thoreau had many ideas that horrifyingly still apply to our lives today,years later, he presents them with a defensive and pompous tone, It was probably to the detriment of Walden that Thoreau published his thoughts almostyears after living in the woods, The essays, instead of being beautifully in the moment, seemed contrived and uppity, His writing style was not easy to follow as he bewilderingly blended verbose nature writing with mathematical figures and preachy ideals in difficult prose, I could not tell you what most of the essays contained as I had trouble focusing and wasn't motivated to concentrate, Perhaps I'll get more out of this one day, but for now Thoreau and I are not friends, I've read Walden many times now since that first time in high school, I will always love this book, and it reveals itself anew with each reading,

When I first encountered Thoreau in high school, his words rang in my soul like a prophet's manifesto, I admired what seemed to be his unique courage and absolute integrity, He inspired me to want to "live deliberately," but I knew that a solitary life in a cabin was beyond my abilities, His will seemed so much more resolute than anything I could ever be capable of,

That was a couple of decades ago, What struck on this latest recent reading is just how much this is a young man's book, The voice is that of an idealist, a passionate and lonely misfit who longs for a better way to live and for more authentic relationships with others as well as with himself.
I know now that Thoreau lived more like an energetic slacker than a true renunciate, He was too principled to work as a schoolmaster he refused to beat his charges, and there wasn't much he cared to do apart from reading, writing, and observing nature closely.
He didn't have a family to take care of, and his parents were indulgent of his wishes,

His life at Walden was bracing, but it wasn't filled with hardships, His cabin was just a short walk from Concord, and Thoreau went home for Sunday dinners and stayed at the Emersons' place when it got too cold, His folks took care of his laundry, His life of simplicity was strictly voluntary, and he had numerous safety nets, While these facts make Henry David a bit less intimidating, they also make him more recognizable as a human being,

I like this young man, with his snobbery and his idealism, but I know that as a fleshandblood person he would have been hard to get to know, and even harder to love.
He was probably afraid of intimacy, and even more afraid of failing to live up to his exacting standards, Thoreau was fascinated with purity, His disgust for "brute" appetites is something that we now think we understand as related to a fear of sexuality, He was deeply interested in Hindu dietary laws, and had an aversion to all forms of consumption, For him, the ideal was to become so pure that a few drops of nectar would be sufficient sustenance, Like Thoreau, I'm an ethical vegetarian, so I understand somewhat that urge toward purity, But my appetites are huge, and my life is in many ways a big, sloppy, comfortable mess, In contrast, Thoreau wanted to be free of all social constraints, free of the taint of commerce, free to be "wild, " But his vision of wildness was of a clean, solitary life, He didn't want to merge or mingle with anything or anyone,

The descriptions of Walden and the surrounding landscapes are sublime, They will never get stale, and I enjoy them even more now that I live a few miles from Concord and have visited the pond in different seasons,

I look forward to reading this beautiful book again in a few years, I wonder what I'll notice next time





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