Product Description

Walden details Thoreau's experiment with self-reliance living by a pond near Concord, MA in 1845-46. His intent is to explore the spiritual benefits of a simplefied life. ""The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4058681 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-01
• Format: Large Print
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

About the Author
Henry David Thoreau, grandfather of the hippy movement, was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817. In the same town, on May 6, 1862, he died of tuberculosis. His death cleared the turf for his ideological seeds to sprout, and the many of our leftist tendencies?save the world, fight the man, seek nirvana?trace back to Thoreau. But the Walden part of his life, the principled, cheap, mindful living part, came after the Harvard part. After he and his brother opened a private school founded on Emersonian transcendentalism. After saving his father?s pencil factory by coming up with a form of graphite more stable than what had been the superior German material. After years of signing his name with an elegant ?Civil Engineer.? The Walden years changed everything, of course, and Thoreau continued his unconventional life once he rejoined society. In 1849, five years before Walden, ?Resistance to Civil Government,? which became ?On the Duty of Civil Disobedience? and eventually ?Civil Disobedience,? was his first big publication. He continued to write and publish?his later emphasis switching to abolition?while making money in the pencil factory or as a surveyor. He traveled through 1861, when he went to Minnesota to help alleviate his tuberculosis, and died in Concord in the spring of 1862. ?From the Introduction by Russell Richardson