[12], After Walden's publication, Thoreau saw his time at Walden as nothing more than an experiment. "To be awake is to be alive. He becomes a friend of the pines, eating his bread-and-butter lunch in pitch-coated hands, while reading the newspaper at noon. He uses a multitude of classical allusions to mythological figures, comparing his neighbors' endless work to the labors of Hercules or personifying the dawn in the form of goddess Aurora. The American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America". At Walden he receives many visitors, however, as many as 30 at a time, including a Canadian woodchopper, an unsophisticated man who nevertheless impresses Thoreau. In the 1997 episode Weight Gain 4000 of South Park, Eric Cartman "writes" a prize-winning essay copied from Walden, replacing Thoreau's name with his own. Nonetheless, despite his criticism of Harvard for having considered him a student of navigation when he had never even taken a boat out on the harbor, Thoreau makes extensive use of his education through the literary, historical, and philosphical references which abound in this chapter. Thoreau here attempts to rewrite and undo that awakening, to free New Englanders from the shackles of thought forged by traditional religion and to awaken them to a more spiritually fulfilling reality. [7] Thoreau repeatedly reflects on the benefits of nature and of his deep communion with it and states that the only "medicine he needs is a draught of morning air".[5]. Furthermore, in assessing what the true necessities for survival are, he contends. Thoreau was attracted to the Hollowell farm because of its seclusion, its proximity to a river, its dilapidated condition, and fields of hollow apple trees. Walden: Themes. "[23], In contrast to Thoreau's "manly simplicity", nearly twenty years after Thoreau's death Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau's endorsement of living alone in natural simplicity, apart from modern society, to be a mark of effeminacy, calling it "womanish solicitude; for there is something unmanly, something almost dastardly" about the lifestyle. He says he has sounded its depths and located an underground outlet. The Ponds: In autumn, Thoreau discusses the countryside and writes down his observations about the geography of Walden Pond and its neighbors: Flint's Pond (or Sandy Pond), White Pond, and Goose Pond. The Question and Answer section for Walden is a great [5], Likewise others have assumed Thoreau's intentions during his time at Walden Pond was "to conduct an experiment: Could he survive, possibly even thrive, by stripping away all superfluous luxuries, living a plain, simple life in radically reduced conditions? One noteworthy thing that sets Thoreau's system of referents apart from other American writers that proceeded him is his reliance on Eastern philosophy as a means of considering the divine. Walden (/ˈwɔːldən/; first published in 1854 as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is a book by American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau says, "I went to the woods to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I coudl not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." He built a small cabin on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and was almost totally self-sufficient, growing his own vegetables and doing odd jobs. If they were to truly describe any building in the town, no one would recognize it. He relates his observations of owls, hares, red squirrels, mice, and various birds as they hunt, sing, and eat the scraps and corn he put out for them. while working in various odd jobs out of doors. The image of the slave was particularly powerful in Thoreau's time, when the debate about slavery in the South was continually escalating and during which the abolitionist movement was powerful in Massachusetts. Thoreau then reflects on the women and children who seem to enjoy the pond more than men, and how men are limited because their lives are taken up. Having seen other young men who have inherited farms enslaved and made a machine by the obligations of property, Thoreau sought to escape their plight through his life at Walden.

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