Walden or Life in the Woods: a book by transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau

Walden or Life in the Woods By Henry David ThoreauWalden is a book by transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon 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.First published in 1854 Walden details Thoreaus 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 used this time (July 4 1845 - September 6 1847) to write his first book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The experience later inspired Walden in which Thoreau compresses the time into a single calendar year and uses passages of four seasons to symbolize human development.The book can be seen as performance art a demonstration of how easy it can be to acquire the four necessities of life. Once acquired he believed people should then focus their efforts on personal growth.By immersing himself in nature Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreaus other goals and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy a central theme of the American Romantic Period.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 bottomlessI went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not when I came to die discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life living is so dear nor did I wish to practice resignation unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life to cut a broad swath and shave close to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms and if it proved to be mean why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it and publish its meanness to the world or if it were sublime to know it by experience and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.