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- J.E Stanway
“Walden” and the Philosophies of Henry David Thoreau
“Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.”
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
This past December, I picked up Walden by Henry David Thoreau for the first time and finished reading with mixed emotions. Over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly more drawn towards naturalism, botany studies, and reading nature notes and journals. Walden is maybe the most famous book of nature studies ever written, with beautiful prose detailing the woodland surroundings of Walden Pond, while discussing the philosophies surrounding transcendentalism, minimalism, and a spirit of self-reliance.
While there are parts of this book that I thoroughly love, I derived little benefit from the chapters involving the bean field or Thoreau’s economic discussions. When readers walk into this book, they expect to read a deep study of nature, and, while there are many passages dedicated to such studies, there is also a lot of rambling and droning sentences that go on for so long, you start to forget what Thoreau was talking about in the first place.
Now, this isn’t to say this book isn’t worth reading. Indeed, despite the overlong paragraphs about all of Thoreau’s pretentious opinions and about exactly how much it would cost him to work his bean field and build a cabin, I fell in love with the beautiful way Thoreau was able to describe the nature all about him.
“I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have.”
In fact, there are some habits of describing the natural world that I myself have picked up from Thoreau's writing. The personification of Aurora, for example, is something that has stuck with me both in the way that I write about nature and the way I talk about it. After all, there's no joy like picking up a book, reading through its prose, and discovering the author feels about flora, the forest floor, and sparkling ponds the same way that you do.
I also thoroughly agree with his ideas of minimalism and self-reliance. The girls at The Postmodern Journal and myself frequently discuss our desire to take ourselves away to a cabin in the woods or a lighthouse by the sea and live simply with only our books and each other for company. Minimalism is something that today's world of mass-marketing and high-volume consumerism has nearly lost, and this book reminds us of the value of not relying on material things for peace and happiness but instead looking to nature to provide solace.
Nevertheless, I would recommend for readers who don’t want to file through the endless passages of economics and philosophy to instead read portions of Walden and not the entire book. My personal favorite chapters are Sounds, Solitude, and The Village, as they are filled with gorgeous reflections on the glory of nature and its place in human life.
For those of you who choose to brave the entire book, perhaps you will benefit more from the other themes that this book offers, such as Thoreau’s opinions on higher education, his belief that studying literature is essential to gaining self-knowledge, and that living in nature is healthier than living in society.
Perhaps Henry David Thoreau knew what he was talking about. After all, we developed the term “Thoreauean Philosophy” for a reason.
“There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
If you’d like to learn more about the themes and symbolism in Walden, I encourage you to watch CourseHero’s analysis video! I personally found it incredibly interesting and it helped me immensely with explaining the ideas of this book more thoroughly.