Walden: The Original 1854 Edition

by Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Walden. Leben in den Wäldern Edition Holzinger. Taschenbuch Berliner Ausgabe, 2015 Vollständiger, durchgesehener Neusatz bearbeitet und eingerichtet von Michael Holzinger Herausgeber der Michael Holzinger Viktor Harvion Gesetzt aus Minion Pro, 11 pt.

Genres: Nonfiction

228 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2023

About the author

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.

In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of Emerson, Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by Emerson, resulted in the classic, Walden: Life in the Woods (1854). During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins "from their own superstitions to new ones." In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, "because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced." (Cited by James A. Haught in 2000 Years of Disbelief.) When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: "One world at a time."

Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862.

More: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tho...

http://thoreau.eserver.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Da...

http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu....

http://www.biography.com/people/henry...

Reviews

[Joe Fiorentino · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been meaning to read Henry David Thoreau for quite a while. I was struck by the vivid and romantic way that life on Walden Pond was described. To be honest, I was expecting a lot more rational philosophy to be expounded here, but instead I found a poetic and rapturous account of a life (or at least 2 years) lived intentionally. For most of the book I was on the fence, as HDT said many things that I felt were unfair, exaggerative, and even just silly given historical context. But ultimately, I can see his point. He redeemed the work through his conclusion, I think, where he writes that not everyone must shun all of society and go to live in the woods, but you must live intentionally, you must attempt to disregard things which have no natural value, you must try to see things simpler and clearer. So I take away from this a certain sense of minimalism as important. I really enjoyed reading Walden, but at times it was a little bit tiring, like hearing him explain how he measured the depth of the pond, and his half-cocked theories about the world he extrapolated from that. Like seriously, there was 10 pages straight where he compared the purity of ice from his pond to other ponds. But with all that being said, the message truly stands, and Walden is worthy of reading because we really have strayed so far from its message. If what he preaches seems impossible in our time, I say that it is less impossible, and more improbable. By no means does a way of life being improbable, or unconventional, limit its validity or beauty.

I have my highlights posted here for anyone curious about what struck me most.

[Eva Malkki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insightful, with many hugely important points and clearly far ahead of his time, but I could have done without the opaque style and the holier-than-thou attitude. It's incredibly frustrating when he'll say something eye-opening and then go on in the same breath to write something incredibly self-congratulatory or disparaging of others' industry or ignorance. A lot of it seems very easy to say, knowing as we do that Thoreau always had his mother's house (20 minutes away) and, presumably, his own inherited wealth to fall back on when the Walden lifestyle got old.

In this day and age it's also hard to look past the absolute phallocentrism of works like these.