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Henry David Thoreau: Walden or Life in the Woods 1862
In a period when Wild, pristine America was being ravaged and the Buffalo, the Beaver and other species were fast disappearing, Thoreau retreats to Walden Pond in Massachusetts, builds himself a log cabin, and lives off the land and his own labour for 2 years and 2 months. “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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise 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. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” (from Walden, chapter 2)
Thoreau’s famous book about his retreat from modern civilisation traces his experience living in the woods near Walden Pond, Massachussetts for ‘two years, two months and two days’ - felling trees, hauling timber and building his own cabin, and acquiring and tending animals, chickens, foraging and growing crops etc. Thoreau was an active anti-slavery campaigner - jailed for with-holding his taxes because the state condoned slavery. He was a teetotaller and (mostly) a vegetarian. In Walden, he mixes a transcendentialism - a spiritual understanding - with scientific observation, experiments and practical invention. His work is a lesson in living sustainably in America at a time when the Continent was still largely virgin territory, the beaver and buffalo numbered in their millions. It is reminder, like the contemporary paintings of native Americans of George Catlin, of what was threatened or lost as America was ‘civilised’.