by Henry David Thoreau
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Posted in: ENGL 340 S26 Geneseo
In this paragraph, Thoreau urges readers to “advance confidently in the direction of their dreams” and to live deliberately, even if their path looks unconventional. This echoes the message he introduced much earlier in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” where he talks about stripping life down to its essentials so he can truly live intentionally rather than being tied to a routine or society’s expectations.
Thoreau returns to this same language in Conclusion, but he shifts its purpose. Instead of just simplifying life, he now pushes the reader to act boldly and trust that a more intentional and thoughtful life will open new possibilities. He begins the book by describing his own deliberate living and in the end turns outward and speaks to the reader. What began as a personal experiment in simplicity and finding onesself becomes a broader philosophy of action.
Walden has honestly been such a pleasure to read, and I’m shocked to realize it’s become one of my favorite books. The themes of living intentionally and refusing to let society’s expectations dictate your choices really speak to me, especially at a time when it feels like everyone (myself included) goes through life so carefully, aware of how we might be perceived. Thoreau’s perspective feels liberating because he encourages people to live for themselves, not for an audience. Reading Walden has me want to be more intentional about the way I live and more thoughtful about my choices. Am I doing something because it genuinely aligns with who I want to be and what my values are, or because I feel pressured to?
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Posted in: ENGL 340 S26 Geneseo
I absolutely love this paragraph and think the idea of every new day being a fresh start is incredibly important. So many people get stuck in a loop of negativity, letting the weight of one bad day spill into the next. The ability to let go, reset, and start fresh each morning sounds simple, but it’s actually a skill many people struggle with in practice. Learning to release yesterday’s mistakes and allow new “sprouts” of goodness to grow is a powerful form of resilience, and in my opinion, self love.
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Posted in: ENGL 340 S26 Geneseo
Thoreau’s description and metaphorical use of the pond conveys many themes about change and how even the most stable of, the most set in our ways, can have our perspectives, values, and ideas altered. Thoreau really emphasizes a sort of cycle here with the pond as it thunders in the morning, goes quiet in the afternoon, and thunders again as the sun retreats into the night. This cycle, along with many different analogies, demonstrates the persistence of change and the ‘ponds’ way of reacting to this change. In many ways Thoreau’s cycle can illustrate a form of changing, existing, and then changing again. This cycle is one that everything in the universe undergoes, constant unescapable change, and Thoreau does an incredible job as using Walden pond as a surrogate to portray how change effects everything, including large almost immovable bodies of water. Further down in the paragraph Thoreau states, “Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive?”, in many ways the pond can serve as a parallel for Thoreau and his journey to discovering deeper meaning of life through living at Walden pond. Thoreau came to the pond searching for deeper meaning, at the beginning of his journey he was not as affected by nature, but overtime grew a deep admiration and affinity for all that existed around him in the environment. I think this paragraph was a really beautiful analogy for change and ties directly into the chapter name, “Spring”.
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Posted in: ENGL 340 S26 Geneseo
[ We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty]
This entire chapter rightfully reads as a goodbye to Walden pond, but this sentence in particular really sticks out. This is why Thoreau moved out to Walden in the first place. It was to live in the moment, to escape the constant rush forward of modern society and find out what truly mattered to him. I believe the documentary also mentioned he was grieving a sibling, which may be alluded to in the part about not “atoning for the neglect of past opportunities”.
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Posted in: ENGL 340 S26 Geneseo
@ekclodfelter: I take him to mean both—that is, the particular robin sitting on a particular twig that he heard on a particular summer day.
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Posted in: ENGL 340 S26 Geneseo
[and then steered straight to Canada, with a regular honk from the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier pools. ]
Funny callback to the previous chapter.
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Posted in: ENGL 340 S26 Geneseo
[If I could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig. ]
Is he wishing to locate the twig or the robin? Thoreau has lost me.
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Posted in: ENGL 340 S26 Geneseo
[Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? ]
I feel like this is a metaphor for Thoreau himself after spending his time being a “hermit” out in nature reconnecting with himself and his purpose after the passing of his brother.
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Posted in: ENGL 340 S26 Geneseo
@courtneygoodwin: You pose a great question here about how Thoreau sees humans relative to (other) animals. He certainly makes it clear that there are times that he prefers solitude to human company, and that in these times he isn’t without company since he has the company of so many other living things. And he’s certainly troubled by the extractive and instrumental approach that so many humans take towards nature: for example, cutting the ice out of the pond to sell it. But he also celebrates many of his human companions, such as the visitors to his cabin and some of the “former inhabitants” of Walden Woods that he describes in the chapter by that name. And he recognizes that animals aren’t always peaceful: consider the war of the red and black ants. His chapter “Higher Laws” is interesting for its complicated exploration of the higher and lower elements in humans; it seems important to Thoreau for humans to rise above their animal nature in some respects.
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Posted in: ENGL 340 S26 Geneseo
These are great observations, @averyw. Thoreau was a close observer of nature all his adult life, but he certainly did get more systematic, detailed, and scientific in his observations over time, and especially beginning in the early 1850s. I love your point about the interplay of scientific observation and metaphor here. I don’t know if it’s possible to say which is his starting point in this case. I agree that his point here is partly to chide his fellow humans for accepting myths that they could easily test with simple measurement, and one of the best things in this paragraph is his pun on bottom/foundation in making this point: “There have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves.” But it appears Thoreau isn’t totally down on those who believe the myth of the pond’s bottomlessness, since he ends the paragraph by saying that “I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.” He seems glad that the myth reflects the human urge to believe in the infinite.
Where I Lived, And What I Lived For 13-23 (1 comment)
I love the connection you make here between Thoreau’s desire to avoid “hurry” and his “appreciation for the dawn,” @rlf9 (Beck). In both, there’s an escape from ordinary time; if you “Renew [yourself] completely each day”—”again, and again, and forever again” (as he describes in paragraph 14, quoting the words that he says were engraved on the tub of Tching-thang), you’re living in circular time, rather than the linear time that he envisions as an endless “stream” (see paragraph 23) running constantly away. This repeating circle essentially makes time stand still.
In her comment on Thoreau’s critique that the nation “lives too fast”, @daphnepl writes that “I deleted social media a few months ago and I have never been happier because my free time is filled with my own thoughts, interactions, and creativity rather than consuming the experiences of strangers on the internet or idea that we need to be ever improving beings.” How do you feel, yourself, about the role that technology, in particular social media, plays in making life feel excessively hurried?
Economy 71-81 (1 comment)
This is a great question, Hannah. Thoreau’s relationship to technology is definitely a complicated one. As a land surveyor, he relied heavily on the surveying technology of his day. As a member of a family that manufactured pencils for a living, he was very interested in the technology of pencil-making and contributed his own important developments to that technology. And he said this about the railway: “What right has a man to ride in the cars who does not know by what means they are moved?” Of course, you’re also asking about his attitude toward linguistic invention. I suspect his attitude here would be complicated as well. In paragraph 10 he writes: “Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.” An excellent book on how the internet has affected language, by the way, is linguist Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet. It puts to rest many myths about how “lol” and other expressions — especially the myth that these expressions are born of laziness.
House-Warming 10-19 (1 comment)
I think this is exactly right, @jaidyn. We could add the axe in paragraph 15, above, as another example of the kind of simpler technology Thoreau values.
Some readers make the mistake of thinking that Thoreau is anti-technology, but that’s clearly not right. Fireplaces and axes are technologies. Thoreau isn’t anti-technology but instead mindful of various technologies’ uses and effects. It would be odd for someone who made his living as a surveyor (an occupation that requires specialized tools) and who worked in the family business manufacturing pencils, to be oppposed to technology.
Thoreau was in fact deeply interested in technology of all kinds, including the railway (for all his criticism of it) and factories. Writing in 1849 to George Thatcher, husband of his cousin Rebecca Billings, about Thatcher’s son George Augustus, Thoreau wrote that “It should be a part of every mans [sic] education today to understand the Steam Engine. What right has a man to ride in the cars who does not know by what means he is moved?” (The Correspondence of Henry D. Thoreau, Volume 2: 1849–1856, Princeton UP, p. 3). In 1851, he got a tour of a gingham mill in Clinton, MA and wrote extensively about it in his Journal.
One of the most useful things Thoreau does in writing about simple tools like the wood stove is to make us aware that they, too, are technology. The same is true of the Thoreau pencils. This isn’t an observation he makes explicitly, but it’s an inescapable conclusion, as is the conclusion that sometimes the simplest technologies are among the most powerful and effective.
What Thoreau clearly cares most about, when it comes to technology, is how its use affects people’s lives (“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us”) and whether the purpose it accomplishes is valuable. (“We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”)
As we’ve discussed in class, these seem like timely questions to ask in assessing the most talked-about technology of the moment: AI.