Walden

Henry David Thoreau was, among other things, an American author, poet, abolitionist, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist. Thoreau is best known for his book Walden and his essay Civil Disobedience. Thoreau wrote his book Walden about the times he had living in a cabin near Walden Pond. Thoreau said, ""I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived" (Wayne).

Wayne says,

his most lasting literary legacy would in fact be the account of his stay at Walden, an account that has come to represent the core of a Transcendentalist perspective on self-reliance, frugality and economy, humanity's relationship with nature, and environmentalism. In going to Walden to live alone in a one-room cabin, Henry David Thoreau sought to separate himself from what he and other Transcendentalists saw as the increasing materialism and commercialism guiding antebellum American life. Thoreau wanted to get back to the basics and live in the simplest manner possible so as not only to remove himself from those negative values he associated with a capitalist economy but to look within himself and to nature for his physical as well as spiritual and intellectual needs (Wayne).

From this account, I would believe that Thoreau was a true Transcendentalist because he wanted to isolate himself to ponder the real meanings of life. He wanted to live a simple life in order to see what was really important to him.

Wayne continues to say, "Thoreau, of course, intended to spend his free nonworking hours and days in bettering himself through study and through spiritual communion with nature. It was as a poet, one who drew his inspiration from self-sufficiency and from nature, that Thoreau was most effective in presenting the main theme of Walden" (Wayne).

I would have to agree with Wayne here. I think that because Thoreau isolated himself so much and thought about the real meaning of life all day made him a more effective writer. I do not think that someone who just decided to write about Thoreau's topic, and did not go through what he did, would be as effective as Thoreau was.

So says Wayne,

Walden Pond itself served as the best example of Henry David Thoreau's dual perspective of nature as having both physical and spiritual aspects, but also of having both knowable and unknown qualities. The pond itself is the symbolic center of the text, a place that Thoreau had known as a child and thus was, in a sense, part of his own self that he had come to learn about in new ways. The pond symbolized for Thoreau the human spirit or soul. Local legend was that the pond was bottomless, but Thoreau had set out first to measure the pond's depth—which he found to be more than 100 feet—and then to see that not as a limitation but as representative of holding specific identifiable truths that just have not yet been fully comprehended or mined. The fact that these truths remained unseen, in this case literally underwater, was the source of their mystery (Wayne).

I thought this quote was very interesting, which is why I put it in my blog. I did really think about the symbolism of the pond or anything, so I thought Wayne had a good grasp on what everything meant, which helped me to understand the story a little bit better.

Wayne, Tiffany K. "Walden." Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2006. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= ETRA402&SingleRecord=True (accessed November 17, 2010).