Walden - Part One

We've already briefly touched on Thoreau earlier this year, but he's always a welcome visitor in my neck of the woods.

It's everyone's favorite
weird-facial-hair-having
philosopher!

We begin our journey to Walden with Where I Lived and What I Lived For, most of which tackles the very mundane matter of Thoreau's attempt to buy a farm or plot of land to live on during his Walden project. Once he does so, he begins to wax philosophical (as is like Thoreau) and he writes perhaps one of my favorite lines in all of Walden.

"I 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."

Here Thoreau answers the "what I lived for" section of the piece. We already know where he lives, this is a very simply and concrete thing; "I live outside of town," or "I live very far from a post office," or "I live near a pond." Answering "what I lived for" comes down to the dissection of this text. 

Thoreau mentions "living deliberately", which can be taken a few ways. First, Thoreau wishes to live independently, away from the prying eyes of society and according to his own decisions. Now, this is not to say that he acts as a misanthrope in his adventures. As we see in The Village, Thoreau often makes trips to the nearby town of Concord and socializes with the townsfolk. In fact, he leaves his possessions unlocked and welcomes all sorts of visitors, only having a volume of Homer stolen from him. He says that theft only exists where "some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough." I mean, this guy gets arrested for not paying taxes and doesn't seem all that upset about it. So clearly Thoreau doesn't harbor a huge amount of ill will towards his fellow man and is not "living deliberately" in an attempt to slight society as a whole. 

Now we need to look deeper into "living deliberately." Because do any of us really do that? Do any of us chose to be brought to life? Do we seek to be brought into existence before we exist? Is that even possible? In that case, why do people say they wish they'd never been born? In Sounds, Thoreau interprets the hooting of an owl as "Oh-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n," and remarks that the owl is vocalizing what humans chose not to. Interesting debate there. (For a more humorous outlook on this question, see this tweet.) It's amazing to me that Thoreau can conjure these existential questions just by recounting his time in the woods. Really makes you wonder about the power of nature, doesn't it?

He does this again with the phrase "the essential facts of life." This could be referencing essential things like eating, which he speaks about in The Bean-Field, but it could also be talking about the purpose of human existence, about the core of the human soul. 

I definitely didn't mean to write about this one sentence for so long, but I just love it so much! 

Write to you soon.

Danielle K.