Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David ThoreauMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Neat: Don Henley founded and funded The Walden Woods Project to preserver more of the sacred land around the pond.
A great quote for a cantankerous Thoreau, "Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour ..." What would he think of NAFTA, the internet, and freeways! Still, I know his message which resounds clearly and eloquently here: the comforts of modernity relieve only those inconveniences it itself foments.
Thoreau's prose is crystalline and reasoned. His essay on Reading is a humbling lecture on the possibilities of books when approached reverently. Often he interrupts his prose with poetic quotes or his own verse, such as his paean to life as an inward voyage whereby we discover our potentialities, our unique possibilities for greatness:
"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."
You can certainly draw a line from the vociferous frugality and civility of Benjamin Franklin to Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists. How much we have changed from this spiritual side of the American experiment...
Of course, Thoreau was no hermit and could 'stroll' into town. His character sketches of human and fauna visitors as well as sketches of flora cultivated and encountered add depth to this work which has a cyclical arc. We start in this spring with the roughing in of his cabin and seasoned wit stories of the several years he enjoyed the location we end with the study of thawing as winter gives way to spring.
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