Walden ( ; first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods ) is a book by renowned transcendentist Henry David Thoreau. Text is a reflection of simple living in the natural environment. This work is part of a personal declaration of independence, social experimentation, spiritual discovery, satire, and - to some extent - a guide to self-reliance.
First published in 1854, Walden specified Thoreau's two-year, two-month, and two-day experience in a cabin he built near Walden Pond in the middle of a forest owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord , Massachusetts. Thoreau used this time to write his first book, A week on the Concord River and Merrimack . This experience then inspired Walden, where Thoreau solidified the time into a calendar year and used the four seasons to symbolize human development.
By immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hopes to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Simple life and independence is Thoreau's other goal, and the whole project is inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, the central theme of the American Romantic Period.
Thoreau makes a proper scientific observation of nature as well as the use of natural phenomena metaphorically and poetically. He identified many plants and animals with their popular and scientific names, recording in detail the colors and clarity of different water bodies, exact dates and describing pond freezing and liquefaction, and retelling his experiments to measure the depth and basic shape of Walden Pond that should " without foundation ".
Video Walden
Plot
I went to the forest because I wanted to live deliberately, ahead only the important facts of life, and see if I could not learn what to teach, and no, when I came to die, found that I was not alive. I do not want to live what is not life, life is so dear; I also do not want to resign, unless it is very necessary. I want to live in and suck all the marrow of life, to live so strongly and simply as to get rid of all that is not life, to cut swaths and shaves, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to the lowest, and, if proven to be evil, why then to get the whole and the real cruelty, and publish his cruelty to the world; or if it is noble, to know it based on experience, and can give a correct report about it in my next journey.
The memoir and the spiritual search section, Walden opened with the announcement that Thoreau spent two years at Walden Pond living a simple life without any support. The reader is reminded that at the time of publication, Thoreau returned to live among the civilized again. The book is divided into specific chapters, each focusing on specific themes:
Economy: In this first and longest chapter, Thoreau describes his project: two years, two months and two days in a comfortable place, " and plastered ", English style 10 'ÃÆ'â €" 15' in the forest near Walden Pond. He did this, he said, to illustrate the spiritual benefits of a simplified lifestyle. He easily supplies the four necessities of life (food, shelter, clothing, and fuel) with the help of family and friends, especially his mother, his best friend, and Mr and Mrs Ralph Waldo Emerson. The latter gives Thoreau an exchange of work - he can build a small house and plant a garden if he cleans some land in woodlot and does other chores while there. Thoreau carefully records his expenditures and income, demonstrating his understanding of the "economy", as he builds his home and buys and fosters food. For home and freedom, he spent only $ 28.12½, in 1845 (about $ 867 in 2017 dollars). At the end of this chapter, Thoreau inserts a poem, "The Pretensions of Poverty", by the seventeenth-century English poet Thomas Carew. The poem criticizes those who think that their poverty gives them an insurmountable moral and intellectual superiority. Much attention is paid to the skepticism and astonishment that city dwellers welcome both him and his project as he tries to protect his view of the townspeople who seem to view society as the only place to live. He tells the reasons for moving to Walden Pond along with the detailed steps back to the construction of his new home (method, support, etc.).
Where I Live, and What I Live for: Thoreau recalled the places he lived before choosing Walden Pond, and quoted Roman Catosopher Cato's suggestion "consider buying a farm very carefully before signing the newspaper. "The possibilities include a nearby Hollowell farm (where the" wife "suddenly decides she wants to keep the farm). Thoreau takes to the jungle dreaming of the existence of free of obligations and full of spare time. He announced that he was away from the social relations represented by the letter (post office) and most of the chapters focused on his thinking while building and living in his new home in Walden.
Reading: Thoreau discusses the benefits of classical literature, preferably in original Greek or Latin, and complains about the lack of sophistication in Concord that is evident in the unsophisticated popularity of literature. He also likes to read books by world travelers. He missed the moment when every New England village supported the "wise men" to educate and thus glorify the population.
Sound: Thoreau encourages readers to "forever alert" and "always see what to see." Although truth can be found in the literature, it can also be found in nature. In addition to self-development, the advantage of developing a person's perception is his tendency to reduce boredom. Instead of "looking abroad for entertainment, community and theater", Thoreau's own life, including activities that should be boring as housework, is a source of entertainment that "never ceases to be a novel." Likewise, he gained pleasure in the sounds ringing in his cabin: church bells chiming, coaches wagging and rumbling, cows bellowing, poor whips shouting, owls hooting, frogs boasting, and chickens crowed. "All voices are heard at the most likely distance," he argues, "produce one and the same effect." Equating the commotion of a train with the tail of a comet and its commotion to the "eagle's scream", the train became homologous with nature and Thoreau praised his trade associated with his company, courage, and cosmopolitanism, stating: "I watched the hallway the morning cars feeling the same as I do when the sun rises. "
Loneliness: Thoreau reflects the feeling of solitude. He explains how loneliness can happen even in the middle of a friend if one's heart is not open to them. Thoreau meditated on the fun of escaping from society and the small things the community caused (gossip, fights, etc.). He also reflects on his new friend, an old settler who arrives nearby and an elderly woman with an extraordinary memory ("memory goes further than mythology"). Thoreau repeatedly reflects on his natural benefits and deep fellowship with him and states that the only "medicine he needs is a morning air draft".
Visitors: Thoreau talks about how he enjoys friendship (apart from his love for solitude) and always leaves three chairs ready for visitors. The whole chapter focuses on coming and going visitors, and how he has more arrivals in Walden than in the city. He received visits from people living or working nearby and paid special attention to a Canadian logger named Alec ThÃÆ' Â © rien. Unlike Thoreau, ThÃÆ' Â © rien can not read or write and is described as leading "animal life". He compared ThÃÆ' Â © rien to Walden Pond himself. Thoreau then reflects on women and children who seem to enjoy swimming more than men, and how men are limited because their lives are taken away.
The Bean-Field: Reflections on Thoreau's planting and his enjoyment of this new job/hobby. He touched the excitement of his surroundings, the sights and sounds of nature, but also the military voice nearby. The remainder of this chapter focuses on his income and the cultivation of his crop (including how he spent just under fifteen dollars for this).
Village: This chapter focuses on Thoreau's second bath and on his reflections on the journey he takes several times a week to Concord, where he gathers the latest gossip and meets the townspeople. On one of his journeys to Concord, Thoreau was arrested and imprisoned for refusing to pay electoral taxes to "a country that buys and sells men, women and children, like cattle at the doors of his senate home".
The Ponds: In the autumn, Thoreau discussed the countryside and wrote his observations about the geography of Walden Pond and its neighbors: Flint's Pond (or Sandy Pond), White Pond, and Goose Pond. Although Flint's is the largest, Thoreau's favorites are Walden and White Ponds, which he describes as lovelier than a diamond.
Baker Farm: While one afternoon rambling in the forest, Thoreau was caught in a rainstorm and took shelter in a dirty and dirty hovel in John Field, without money but hard-working as an agricultural laborer Ireland, along with his wife and children. Thoreau urges Field to live a simple yet independent and satisfying life in the woods, thereby freeing himself from his employers and creditors. But the Irish will not give in to the aspirations of luxury and the quest for American dreams.
Higher Law: Thoreau discussed whether hunting wild animals and eating meat was necessary. He concludes that primitive human sensuality drives people to kill and eat animals, and that one who transcends this tendency is superior to those who can not. (Thoreau eats fish and sometimes salted pork and woodchuck.) In addition to vegetarianism, he praises holiness, work, and teetotalism. He also admitted that Native Americans must hunt and kill deer to survive in the "Maine Forest", and eat deer on their way to Maine when he lives in Walden. Here is the list of laws he mentioned:
- Someone has to love the wild just like loving a good person.
- What man has known instinctively is true humanity.
- Hunters are the greatest animal companions hunted down.
- No man is older than a teenager who does not want to kill any creature that worships his own life just like the murderer.
- If day and night make people rejoice, one succeeds.
- The ultimate form of self-control is when one can live not on other animals, but from plants and plants cultivated from the earth.
Brute Neighbors: is a simplified version of one of Thoreau's conversations with William Ellery Channing, who occasionally accompany Thoreau on a fishing trip when Channing comes from Concord. This conversation was about a hermit (himself) and a poet (Channing) and how the poet was absorbed in the cloud while hermit was busy with a more practical task of getting fish for dinner and how eventually the poet regretted his failure. to catch fish. This chapter also mentions Thoreau's interaction with a living rat, a scene where ants fought with smaller ants, and often met with cats.
House-Warming: After picking berries in the forest, Thoreau added a chimney, and eventually plastered the walls of his sturdy house to prevent the coming winter cold. He also has a good supply of firewood, and expresses compassion for wood and fire.
Former Residents; and Winter Visitors: Thoreau tells the story of the people who used to live around Walden Pond. Then he talked about some visitors he had received during the winter: a farmer, a carpenter, and his best friend, poet Ellery Channing.
Winter Animals: Thoreau consoled herself by observing wildlife during the winter. He recounts his observations of owls, rabbits, red squirrels, rats, and various birds as they hunt, sing, and eat the rest and corn that he spends on them. He also explained the passing hunt of foxes.
Swimming in Winter: Thoreau describes Walden Pond as it emerged during the winter. He said he had sounded his depth and found an underground outlet. Then he told how 100 workers came to cut huge blocks of ice from the pool, ice to be sent to Carolina.
Spring: When the spring comes, Walden and other pools melt with rumbling and loud roar. Thoreau likes to observe the dilution, and grows happy when witnessing the rebirth of green. He sees the geese moving north, and an eagle plays himself in the sky. Because nature is reborn, the narrator implies, as well as he. He left Walden on September 6, 1847.
Conclusion: This last chapter is more passionate and urgent than its predecessor. In it, he criticizes the conformity: "If a man does not follow his friends, maybe it's because he hears a different drummer, let him step into the music he hears, regardless of whether measured or far away." By doing so, men can find happiness and self-fulfillment.
I'm not saying that John or Jonathan will be aware of all this; but that is the nature of the busyness that is only an interval of time that can not happen until dawn arrives. The light that blows our eyes is darkness for us. Only that day we just woke up. There are more days to dawn. The sun is just a morning star.
Maps Walden
Themes
Walden is a book that is hard to read for three reasons: First, written in older prose, using the correct language, allegorical metaphors, long and complex paragraphs, and clear, detailed, and profound descriptions. Thoreau does not hesitate to use metaphors, satire, statements, hyperbole, personification, irony, satire, metonymy, synecdoche, and oxymorons, and he can move from a scientific point of view to transcendental in the middle of a sentence. Second, the logic is based on a different understanding of life, in stark contrast to what most people call common sense. Ironically, this logic is based on what most believers say. Thoreau, recognizing this, fills Walden with sarcasm, paradox, and double entenders. He likes to tease, challenge, and even deceive his readers. And third, quite often words will not be enough to express Thoreau's many non-verbal views of truth. Thoreau must use non-literal language to express these ideas, and the reader must reach to understand.
Walden emphasized the importance of solitude, contemplation, and proximity to nature in overcoming the existence of "despair" which, according to him, is most people. This book is not a traditional autobiography, but it combines autobiography with social criticism of Western consumerist and contemporary materialist behavior and its distance from and destruction of nature. That this book is not only a critique of society, but also an attempt to engage creatively with the better aspects of contemporary culture, is well recommended by Thoreau's that is close to the Concord community and by its admiration for classical literature. There are signs of ambiguity, or attempts to see the other side of something common. Some of the main themes in the text are:
- Independence : Thoreau constantly refuses to "need" the companionship of others. Though he realizes his meaning and importance, he thinks that it is not necessary to always look for him. Independence, for him, is economic and social and is a principle in which financial and interpersonal relationships are more valuable than anything else. For Thoreau, independence can be both spiritual and economic. Connection to transcendentalism and Emerson's essay.
- Simplicity : Simplicity seems to be a lifelong Thoreau model. Throughout the book, Thoreau constantly tries to simplify his lifestyle: he patches his clothes instead of buying new ones, he minimizes his customer activity, and relies on his leisure and on himself for everything.
- Progress : In a world where everyone and everyone are eager to progress in progress, Thoreau feels stubborn and skeptical to think that any increase in life can bring inner peace and satisfaction./li>
- The need for spiritual awakening : Spiritual awakening is a way of discovering and realizing the truths of life that are often buried under mounds of everyday affairs. Thoreau holds a spiritual awareness to be the most important component of life. This is the source from which all other flowing themes flow.
- Humans as part of nature
- Nature and reflection of human emotions
- Unfair and corrupt Country
- Meditation: Thoreau is a diligent meditator and often talks about the benefits of meditation.
Origins and publishing history
There are many suspicions why Thoreau went to the pond. EB White states on this note, "Henry went to battle when he went down into the woods, and Walden is a report of a man who was torn apart by two powerful and opposing urges - the desire to enjoy the world and the drive to set the world straight ", while Leo Marx notes that Thoreau who lives in Walden Pond is an experiment based on Emerson's" nature's methods "and that it is" an experimental report in transcendental pastorialism. "
Likewise others have assumed Thoreau's intent during his time at Walden Pond is "to experiment: Can he survive, perhaps even thrive, by disarming all the excessive luxuries, living a simple and simple life in greatly reduced conditions?" He considers it an experiment in "home economy". Although Thoreau went to Walden to escape from what he perceived as "excessive civilization," and sought "joy" and "savage pleasures" from the jungle, he also spent much time reading and writing.
Thoreau spent almost four times longer in Walden's manuscript when he actually spent time in the cabin. After leaving Walden Pond and at Emerson's request, Thoreau returned to Emerson's home and spent most of his time repaying the debt. During those years, Thoreau slowly edited and compiled what originally were 18 essays depicting his "experiment" in basic life. After eight drafts for ten years, Walden was published in 1854.
After the publication of Walden ', Thoreau saw his time at Walden as nothing more than an experiment. He never takes seriously "the idea that he can really isolate himself from others". Without resolution, Thoreau uses his "retreat into the forest as a way of framing reflection on both what diseases men and women are in their contemporary condition and what might be of assistance".
Reception
Walden enjoyed some success after it was released, but it still took five years to sell 2,000 copies, and then out of print until Thoreau's death in 1862. Despite the slow start, critics praised him as an American. a classic that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty. The American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book... he surpasses all that we have in America."
It is often assumed that criticism at first ignored Walden, and that those who reviewed the book were evenly distributed or slightly more negative than positive in their judgments. But researchers have pointed out that Walden is actually "better and more widely accepted by Thoreau's contemporaries than presumed now." Of the 66 initial reviews that have been found so far, 46 are "very profitable." Some reviews are rather superficial, only recommending a book or predicting its success with the public; others are longer, detailed, and nuanced with positive and negative comments. Positive comments include praise for Thoreau's independence, practicality, wisdom, "male simplicity", and courage. Not surprisingly, less than three weeks after the publication of the book, Thoreau's mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stated, "All Americans love Walden as much as they say."
On the other hand, the term "ancient" or "eccentric" appears in more than half of the initial book review. Other terms critical of Thoreau include selfishness, strange, impractical, privileged (or "born or born"), and misunderstandings. One comparison compares and contrasts Thoreau's life form with communism, perhaps not in the sense of Marxism, but instead of communal living or religious communism. While appreciating the freedom of property, Thoreau is not communal in the sense of practicing sharing or embracing society. So, communism "is better than our ascetic methods to get rid of the burden."
In contrast to Thoreau's "male simplicity", almost twenty years after Thoreau's death, Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson assessed Thoreau's support for living alone in natural simplicity, apart from modern society, a sign of satureness, calling it "women's concern, something that is not manly, something that barely knows anything about lifestyle Poet John Greenleaf Whittier criticizes what he perceives as a message in Walden that humans should lower themselves to the level of woodchuck and walk on four legs He said: "Thoreau
Today, despite this criticism, Walden stands as one of America's most famous literary works. John Updike wrote about Walden, "A century and a half after his publication, Walden has become a totem of back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil disobedience mindset, and Thoreau is so alive as a protester, so perfect a crank and ascetic saint, that the book risks being as worshiped and unread as the Bible. "American psychologist BF Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Walden with him in and finally wrote Walden Two in 1945, a fictional utopia of about 1,000 members living together. in a community inspired by Thoreau.
Kathryn Schulz has accused Thoreau of hypocrisy, misrepresentation, and purity based on his writings at Walden, though this criticism is considered highly selective.
Adaptations
Video game
The National Endowment for the Arts in 2012 bestows Tracy Fullerton, the game designer and professor at the University of Southern California's Game Innovation Lab with a $ 40,000 grant to create, based on the book, the first person, an open world video game called Walden, a game , in which the player "inhabits an open, three-dimensional gaming world that will simulate Walden Woods geography and environment". Game production is also supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is part of Sundance New Frontier Story Lab in 2014. The game was released for critical acclaim on July 4, 2017, celebrating the day when Thoreau went down to the pond to begin his experiments and anniversary 200th birth of Thoreau. It was nominated for the Off-Broadway Award for the Best Indie Game at the New York Game Awards 2018.
Digitalization and scholarship
Digital Thoreau, a collaboration between the State University of New York at Geneseo, the Thoreau Society, and Walden Woods Project, has developed Walden fluid text editions in various versions of work to help readers track the evolution of Thoreau's classic works in the seven-stage revision from 1846 to 1854. In each chapter of Walden, readers can compare up to seven versions of the manuscript to each other, with the Princeton University Press edition, and consult critical notes drawn from Thoreau's experts, including Ronald Clapper's dissertation Walden Development: A Genetic Text (1967) and Walter Harding's Walden: An Annotated Edition (1995). Ultimately, the project will provide space for readers to discuss Thoreau at the edges of the text.
Influence
George Craighead's George's Trilogy My Side of the Mountain is very interesting from the theme expressed in Walden . The protagonist Sam Gribley was nicknamed "Thoreau" by an English teacher whom he befriended.
The second film of Shane Carruth Upper Color Features
Song R.E.M. "Finest Worksong" from 1987's Document has a reference to the author, in the thoreau and rearrange throw line.
The 1989 Dead Poets Society film highlights the quote from Walden as a motive in the plot.
The Finnish symphonic metal band, Nightwish, made several references to Walden in their eighth studio album Endless Forms Most Beautiful in 2015.
Investment research firm Morningstar, Inc. named for the last sentence in Walden by founder and CEO Joe Mansueto, and "O" in the company's logo shaped like a rising sun.
In the 2015 video game Fallout 4 , which takes place in Massachusetts, there is a location called Walden Pond, where players can listen to the detailed guided tours of the Thoreau Experience living in the desert. In the location stands a small house which is said to be the same house that was built and occupied by Thoreau.
Note
External links
- Download full text from Project Gutenberg
- Walden - Digital copy of first edition of Internet Archive.
- Ã, "Walden (book)". Encyclopedia Americana . 1920.
- Walden public domain audiobook on LibriVox
- "Walden - annotated edition" (toy hyperlinks, footnotes and scientific comments). R. Lenat (ed.). Thoreau Society Project and Iowa State University .
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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