“I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

Henry David Thoreau: Walden

July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862

American poet, essayist, and philosopher

Transcendentalist

Wrote Walden in 1854

Sweet beard, right?

Henry David Thoreau

TRANSCENDENTALISM

“We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Walden Pond: Concord, Massachusetts

“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, discovered that I had not lived.” - Thoreau

Thoreau’s view of the pond when he looked out his door

The path Thoreau would travel to his place of contemplation

Geographic location of Walden Pond

Walden

Personal introspection Solitude Contemplation Closeness to nature Simplistic lifestyle Rebellion of materialism Self-sufficient

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1. Modern Thoreau2. Overview of Thoreau’s Lifestyle

The Adoration of Jenna FoxPage 130: “I stare at the pond….”Page 196: “The floor of the forest is damp….”Page 214-15: “I stomp through our

eucalyptus forest…”

“It is life near the bone where it is the sweetest.”