Walden
1854
- biography
- homes and haunts
- american authors
- social life and customs
- solitude
- natural history
- wilderness areas
- philosophy
- english essays
- wildnerness areas
The story
Walden first published in 1854 as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is a book by American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon the author's simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and—to some degree—a manual for self-reliance. Walden details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau makes precise scientific observations of nature as well as metaphorical and poetic uses of natural phenomena. He identifies many plants and animals by both their popular and scientific names, records in detail the color and clarity of different bodies of water, precisely dates and describes the freezing and thawing of the pond, and recounts his experiments to measure the depth and shape of the bottom of the supposedly "bottomless" Walden Pond. (Source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden))
What it’s like
Slow, observant prose that moves like a long walk through pine and birch: sentences that linger on the color of pond water, the crack and groan of ice thawing in March, the sound of loons and the smell of wet leaves in the woods. The voice is dry, witty and quietly argumentative, sliding between close field notes on loon calls and bean rows, sharp aphorisms about useless possessions, and long meditative drifts about time and self. Good for a slow Sunday with the window open, a cup of tea going cold, or a seasonal reread in late autumn when the light goes thin. The pacing is unhurried and episodic, built from chapters on economy, reading, visitors and the changing seasons rather than any plot, and the emotional register is calm, bracing and faintly humorous, with an undertone of restlessness about how people waste their lives. Its arc is an inward one: a man stripping his life down to essentials and slowly finding the world more vivid for it. Violence and sex are absent; the only danger is cold, hunger and the ordinary tedium of a village. For readers who love nature writing, American essays, and anyone who wants to feel the quiet of a woodland season without a single cliffhanger.
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