I grew up in New England near Walden Pond and first read Thoreau's "Walden" at Bates College in the Maine woods. Since then, "Walden" has had a deep, abiding influence upon my life.

Henry David Thoreau is best known as an American writer and transcendentalist who wanted first-hand to experience intuitively and understand profoundly the rapport between man and nature.

In a sense Thoreau is Adam after the Fall living East of Eden as a bachelor in a humble cabin built by his own hands with tools borrowed from his Concord neighbors beside Walden Pond and sustained by the fruits of the bean field sown in his garden and those resources yielded up to him by the wilderness. He wants to transcend inauthentic, everyday life in Concord and awaken his soul to the beauty and harmony of life by living mindfully in every moment in the subtly beckoning arms of the woods, ponds, rivers, seacoast and mountains of New England.

“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,” Thoreau writes in "Walden" in his "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For."

This deliberate action to immerse himself in nature would pulsate with a circular rhythm throughout his brief, vibrant life as he canoed the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, walked the beaches of Cape Cod and traveled in the wilds of Maine with Native American guides.

Thoreau studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837. Living in Hollis Hall, he studied rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics and science. He was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club.

He and his brother, John, opened a grammar school in 1838 in Concord Academy. The school ended when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving: John died in Henry's arms.

In Concord he met Ralph Waldo Emerson, who took a paternal interest in Thoreau and introduced him to local writers like Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, Ellery Channing and indirectly to his future literary representative, Horace Greeley.

Thoreau worked in his family's pencil factory, which he continued to do for most of his adult life. He rediscovered the process to make a good pencil out of inferior graphite.

In April 1844 he and his friend, Edward Hoar, accidentally set a fire that consumed 300 acres of Walden Woods.

In March 1845 Ellery Channing told a restless Thoreau, "Go out, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you."

Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in living simply on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a modest cabin that he constructed on 14 acres of land owned by Emerson on the shores of Walden Pond.

As a protégé of Emerson, Thoreau transforms into a supremely self-reliant individual, which is a core value of transcendentalism.

Transcendentalists hold that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or overcomes, the physical and empirical world around us and that one achieves insight through personal intuition. Nature is the outward manifestation of one’s over-soul by expressing the "radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts," as Emerson wrote in "Nature" (1836).

At Walden, Thoreau seeks a deep dive into the over-soul like a wood duck on a tranquil pond at dawn and he finds the engine of this crossing-over into a transcendent understanding of life by his immersive communion with nature in all of its pure manifestations.

In solitude Thoreau distances himself from others, not only by a few miles of geography to the purity of the shores of Walden Pond, but also by a worldview intent upon surveying the botany of the Garden undistracted by the common, quotidian pursuits of his Concord neighbors.

As he confronts his most basic need for shelter in the woods, he writes, “Before winter, I built a chimney.” He borrows an axe from a neighbor but returns it sharper than when he borrowed it.

Upon confronting a replica of Thoreau’s cabin of two years at Walden, one is immediately struck by its diminutive size: it is a minimalist but sturdy, wooden, micro-cabin with a brick chimney and one room with a single bed, stove, desk for supper and study, lantern, fireplace and some wooden chairs. “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” he writes.

Outside, he built a small, open shed to store wood and keep it dry for cooking, and to keep the sub-zero, New England winter at bay. He sows beans into his garden, picks wild blueberries and raspberries, brews tea of diverse conifers and fishes for the occasional pickerel inhabiting his pond.

His survival as a self-reliant individual depends upon the offerings which nature yields up to him. He is ardently studious about how to live off the land by harvesting only the essentials that he needs. A vegetarian, he once described his extreme craving for red meat and coveted a woodchuck in the neighborhood of his woods.

This great American naturalist could observe a stand of trees and tell by sheer scrutiny the forces of man and nature it had experienced.

He observed the various colors of pickerel in Walden Pond and the ice in winter and listened with disdain to the sound of the Concord & Fitchburg Railroad as it roared and hooted past Walden Pond. As civilization intruded inevitably upon his quietude in his Eden, he speculated what the railroad’s busy passengers were really going to and coming from.

Thoreau considered the townspeople of Concord to be self-indentured slaves chained absurdly of their own free will to their farms, livestock, fields and houses. He considered the price of something to be the amount of irretrievable time that one is willing to trade for it. He said that a man is wealthy in proportion to what he can afford to live without.

He viewed his neighbors as possessed by a certain blindness and even madness in the way in which they slaved from dawn to dusk to acquire and maintain material possessions that they did not really need to sustain themselves.

In "The Maine Woods" he writes of an Indian guide who ventured alone for the pure wilderness of Moosehead Lake and Mt. Katahdin over an entire summer carrying only an axe, a knife, a gun and a blanket: such minimal provisioning deeply impressed Thoreau as indicative of a particularly independent fellow.

Considering the paucity of his possessions at Walden, Thoreau whittled the necessities of life down to the barest essentials. He refused to spend vast tracts of his life at meaningless labor to chase material goods, possessions, luxuries and wealth that he did not want or need and weren’t worth the trade-off in time.

Most people in Concord engrossed in the business of their everyday lives never had Thoreau’s epiphany that the pursuit of material wealth and the search for meaning are entirely separate ventures.

Further, wealth provided no guarantee that one lived well the one brief gift of life, nor whether one lived it either nobly or meaningfully. Thoreau instinctively knew this transcendental truth.

Because he did not pursue a traditional living at Walden, then economy became vital to his lifestyle as a nonconformist. Thoreau was concerned with living frugally by extreme thrift by budgeting his modest means. The payoff for his radical economy was that, unlike his overburdened Concord neighbors, Thoreau was free to spend his valuable time almost entirely as he pleased, opportunistically and unfettered by the everydayness of business.

In the woods Thoreau grew totally immersed in the process of living deeply each day: he watched red and black ants fight an epic battle, which he described as portraying the most profound depths of Homeric valor.

He drifted in solitude in a crude wooden boat on Walden Pond and fell asleep upon its floorboards curious and delighted to learn to which shore the winds have sent his drifting vessel. He sailed in pursuit of a diving loon. He surveyed Walden’s depths.

He communicated with “society” in a chance visit by a humble woodchopper passing by his cabin.

He always finds ample time for reading classical literary works and for documenting what the woods have whispered to his soul in his transcendental journey. Throughout his lifetime, he wrote prolifically in books, articles, essays, journals and poetry totaling more than 20 volumes.

He tended his garden and eagerly foraged in the woods for herbs, teas, roots, barks, berries and fruits to supplement his frugal diet and keep him healthy amid the robust rigors of New England in all seasons.

He marvels at the blossoming of the woods in springtime after the thundering ice goes out from Walden Pond and the woods are enriched by the sounds of migrating geese and wild creatures, which inhabit the environs of his little cabin.

Thoreau maintained keen observations on Concord's natural lore, recording how the fruit ripened over time, when the ice left the pond in spring, many elegant botanical findings and mapping the fluctuating depths of Walden.

Thoreau’s modest life as a naturalist, it turns out, is full and rich, and well lived. He valued most of all his cheerful trade of the pursuit of wealth and material goods for living simply at Walden as it informed his immortal legacy.

At Walden Pond, he completed a first draft of "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and an elegy to John depicting an 1839 trip to the White Mountains. Thoreau did not find a publisher for this book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense, though fewer than 300 were sold. Thoreau self-published on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson's own publisher.

Thoreau challenged pervasive social views of his time: he was deemed a non-conformist, abolitionist and, some would argue, an anarchist. As a pacifist he failed to see what was gained by the loss of life, treasure, humanity and time to engage in war.

His positions on civil disobedience later influenced the philosophy and politics of influential figures like Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jack Kennedy.

"Civil Disobedience" called for improving rather than abolishing government: "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government." He was a proponent that a “government is best which governs not at all.”

Thoreau spent one night in jail for refusing to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes used to finance the Mexican-American War and slavery. He was outraged when someone, possibly an aunt, anonymously paid his taxes, a considerable sum at the time, and he was freed from jail against his wishes.

In August 1846 Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Maine to Mount Katahdin, which in an indigenous language means “highest land” -- a journey recorded in "The Maine Woods."

He became a land surveyor and kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source of Thoreau's late natural history writings, such as "Autumnal Tints", "The Succession of Trees" and "Wild Apples," an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.

He traveled to Quebec once, four times to Cape Cod and three times to Maine where these landscapes inspired his "A Yankee in Canada", "Cape Cod" and "The Maine Woods."

In 1859 following a late night outing to calibrate the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined over three years until he became bedridden. Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly "The Maine Woods."

Thoreau's last words were: "Now comes good sailing," followed by two lone words, "moose" and "Indian." He died on May 6, 1862 at age 44. Thoreau's political writings had little impact during his lifetime as his contemporaries viewed him simply as a naturalist.

They put less stock in his political essays, including "Civil Disobedience." The only two complete books published in his lifetime were his observations as a naturalist and transcendentalist in "Walden" and "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" (1849).

Even "Walden" won few admirers, at first, but downstream his critics recognized its true value as a classic American work of literary genius.

Thoreau is profoundly wise and an earnest reading of "Walden" yields within its pages the power to change one’s perspective for the better through a deeper, new recognition of the wholeness, harmony, simplicity and radiance of life. At least, I was never the same after becoming existentially transformed by my first reading of Walden and have re-read it many times since college.

You may become transcendent, if you read "Walden" mindfully, and may come to understand the true meaning of marching to the tune of a different drummer.

+ + +

Born in Woburn, Massachusetts, David B. Lentz graduated from Bates College and has written professionally for more than 35 years. He is a member of the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association, the Center for Fiction in New York and the Royal Society of Literature in London.