Walden

Walden is Henry David Thoreau’s account of the two years he spent living in a small cabin he built himself beside Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. Published in 1854, it is a reflection on simple living, nature and independence, and one of the classics of American writing. This Atlas Media edition also includes Thoreau’s essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.

Thoreau moved into the cabin on 4 July 1845. The land belonged to his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. He stayed two years, two months and two days, though the book compresses that time into a single year, following the seasons from summer to spring.

The long opening chapter, Economy, sets out his purpose. Most people, he argues, spend their lives working to pay for things they do not need, and so lead lives of quiet desperation. He lists the exact cost of building his cabin, down to the nails, to show how little a person truly requires.

In the chapter Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, Thoreau explains that he went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to face only the essential facts of life and learn what it had to teach. He wants to strip life back to see what is left.

Much of the book is close observation of nature. Thoreau describes the pond in every season, its colour and clarity, the sounds of birds and animals, a battle between red and black ants, and the loon that dives and calls across the water. He measures the depth of the supposedly bottomless pond and records exactly when its ice forms and breaks.

He also writes about reading, solitude and visitors. He reads the classics, tends a field of beans, talks with a woodcutter and passing travellers, and walks to the village for news. He argues that solitude need not be lonely, and that the company of nature can be enough.

In winter he describes ice cutters harvesting the pond and the cracking and booming of the ice. In the chapter Spring, the thaw and the flowing sand and clay of a railway bank become an image of renewal.

In the conclusion Thoreau explains why he left: he had several more lives to live. He urges readers to explore their own inner world and to follow their own path.