what does thoreau say is the purpose of his essay

• print archive
• digital archive
• book review

Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau by Ben Shattuck (Tin House, 2022)

Contributor Bio

David rompf, more online by david rompf.

• When Tarzan Met Leonardo
• Once More to the Pond

Walking with Thoreau: A Review Essay

By david rompf.

The longest single walkable distance on Earth is a little more than fourteen thousand miles, between Cape Town, South Africa, and the Russian port city of Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk. Google Maps has confirmed this pedestrian possibility. It is not an officially recognized path like, for example, the Trans Canada Trail, a network of pathways that twist and turn across ten provinces and three territories, but rather an intercontinental route that can be traversed without the help of a car, train, or boat. If you walked eight hours a day, the trip could be completed in five hundred days. Near the halfway point, you could eat one of your knapsack lunches at the Great Pyramid of Giza; after the triumphant last step, you might write a book about your adventure. Why did you take that walk? Was it a spiritual pilgrimage? Did you do it for the sheer physical challenge, for a deep and thrilling sense of accomplishment? For the anticipation of discovering something new about the world, about yourself?

If those fourteen thousand miles were lined with bookshelves, a good number might be stocked with the many existing volumes related, in one way or another, to walking and walkers—narratives that meanderingly explore nature, the soul, philosophy, religion, history, love, mystery, addiction, grief, joy, aches and pains, vexing and dangerous interferences, and countless other dimensions of human experience. Books about walking published in the past two decades alone are plentiful. Rebecca Solnit threw her ample intellectual net around the history of walking in Wanderlust , a robust guide to the evolutionary, philosophical, literary, religious, and political underpinnings of her subject (which, as she points out, is one that is always straying). In the aftermath of a breakup, Olivia Laing packed her oatcakes and cheese for an excursion on foot along the Ouse River, where Virginia Woolf, stones in her pockets, drowned herself. Lucky for us, Laing doesn’t follow suit, instead delivering alluring and crystalline prose in To The River . Robert Macfarlane follows ancient paths in The Old Ways , which, he stresses in a note, could not have been written standing still. In Flâneuse , Lauren Elkin charts the course of famous literary and artistic women walking the streets of Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, while Edmund White, in The Flaneur , ambles exclusively through the City of Lights. Speaking of straying, I would be remiss not to mention Wild , Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of trekking the Pacific Crest Trail alone, more than one thousand miles from the Mojave Desert to Washington; it may be the only New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club pick with a long, hard hike as its narrative spine. The list goes on, including books on the lost art of walking, the philosophy of walking, the science and literature of pedestrianism, walking through biblical lands, across deserts high and low, walking—improbably enough—around the notoriously unwalkable Los Angeles.

In Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau , Ben Shattuck embarks on his own version of this walking-and-writing tradition—which, if not a genuine “tradition,” has been a recurring obsession among an illustrious roster of writers and thinkers going back to the peripatetic philosophers. With that well-beaten track behind him, Shattuck walks with hefty literary baggage on his shoulders, not to mention the personal baggage he seeks to lighten. As if walking and writing aren’t hard enough, his particular walks demand emotional fortitude for mining past pain and present vulnerabilities, and also require a certain literary gumption, owing to their weighty associations with Thoreau—his extensive journals, his essays about walking, Walden , Civil Disobedience , and books about his expeditions to Cape Cod and the Maine woods. Shattuck, by implication, mingles with all the pilgrims who ever lived, all the nature writers and self-seeking walkers who have ventured out with purposes big and small.

What is Shattuck’s purpose? In the first few pages of Six Walks , we learn that he first came up with the idea to follow one of Thoreau’s walks when he was haunted by dreams of an ex-girlfriend. “This was years ago, in my early thirties,” he writes, “when I couldn’t find a way out of the doubt, fear, shame, and sadness that had arranged a constellation of grief around me.”  Walking, then, is a way of throwing off that burden. While showering at dawn, Shattuck envisions a young, bearded man standing on a beach, “wind whipping his coattails, the ocean pounding in front of him.” Unlike the author, that man is happy. In his mind’s eye, Shattuck also observes him writing in a journal and wading through dune grass. The fellow glimpsed through the mists of shower and imagination is Henry David Thoreau. Shattuck, while living on the southern coast of Massachusetts, has been reading Cape Cod every night for a week when, suddenly, impulse and inspiration take hold. He puts on a bathing suit and sweater, downs a cup of coffee, fills a backpack with bread, cheese, apples, and carrots, and sets out for the Cape by foot. “I would walk the outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertips,” he writes, “as Henry had done.”

Thus begins Shattuck’s journey: not just with a footstep but also with the decision to refer to Thoreau as Henry throughout these chronicles. The choice seems, at first, unusual, and it takes some getting used to. “Henry” is quaint, and perhaps a bit precious, but as we travel along with Shattuck this first-name basis humanizes the literary giant, yanks him down from the pantheon to the fertile, buggy earth he once trod, reminding us that he was a man who drank from the pond he bathed in. “Henry,” on the page, also has the inexplicable effect of suggesting that Shattuck might find what he’s looking for on these six walks, discoveries that could soothe and surprise the twenty-first-century acolyte—and maybe the reader, too. Henry is like a sage old friend who, though long gone in body, still walks among us as a companion.

Shattuck’s initial three walks, in Part One of the book, take us to Cape Cod, Mount Katahdin in Maine, and Wachusett Mountain in Massachusetts. Before setting out for the Cape, he puts a notebook in his backpack, “not because I ever journaled or made sketches, but because Henry had, and I wanted to try someone’s habits for a few days.” Part Two spans new geographical and emotional terrain, with a sixteen-mile pilgrimage from the author’s childhood home on a saltwater river to a peninsula isolated by the sea in Sakonnet, Rhode Island, where his great-great-great-grandparents summered away from their home in Chicago. This is Shattuck’s version of the southwest walk that Thoreau discusses in his famous essay “Walking.” The Sakonnet outing is followed by a journey to The Allagash in Maine, and the final walk is a do-over to Cape Cod, this time accompanied by his fiancée, whom he refers to only as “Jenny” but who is identifiable as Jenny Slate, the actress, author, and former cast member of Saturday Night Live . Both parts include off-trail interludes that allow Shattuck to wander without walking and to provide the backstory behind his quest for self-understanding. In the first of these, he visits a hypnotist in an effort to halt the nightmares that end up propelling him to take these walks. In the second, he visits Walden Pond.

Six Walks contains no map of Shattuck’s—or Thoreau’s—travels, as one might expect. Unfamiliar with much of the terrain, I began to toggle between the book and Google Maps in a mostly futile effort to visualize Shattuck’s routes. I soon gave up this disjointed exercise when I realized that the omission of maps—like calling Thoreau “Henry”—was probably a deliberate choice. After all, this book isn’t really about tracing the land journeys. It isn’t a guide for planning your own walks in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau. The itinerary here is a circuitous one to Shattuck’s interior, a compass of the soul. Eschewing maps, I was happy to find, in these pages, some of the simple but exquisite black-and-white drawings that Shattuck, an artist and curator as well as a writer, made during his walks. Many, like “A Stone on the Beach,” “Light in the Grass,” and “Bullfrog on River Path,” reflect, even in their titles, a Zen aesthetic of understated elegance.

An intense yearning to get close to Henry is palpable at every turn. Shattuck’s goal on day one of his first Cape Cod walk is to visit the oysterman’s house in Wellfleet where Henry slept for a night. When he finds it, finally, with the help of a local couple, he peers through the windows. Our hearts sink even before Shattuck reveals his own reaction, because by now we recognize the tenacious grip of his sadness. “I felt no connection, no insight, no sudden power,” he writes. Henry’s spirit is nowhere to be found. Continuing on his walk toward Provincetown, Shattuck picks up a wedge of red clay that has tumbled down to the beach from the cliffs of Truro. It’s as big as a slice of wedding cake, he tells us, and he gives in to the urge to take a bite. “The chunk dissolved, milk-chocolate like, when I massaged it with my tongue into the roof of my mouth.” Denied even a morsel of fulfillment at the oysterman’s digs, he can, as consolation, consume a helping of earth once touched by Henry. It is a poignant moment that shows the depth of Shattuck’s hunger.

The hankering for Henry—as an ideal, a symbol, a literary mirror—recurs. After Shattuck is swarmed by blackflies in Maine, he quotes Thoreau’s Maine Woods : “I now first began to be seriously molested by the blackfly!” Shattuck applies DEET while Henry dabs on his own compound of turpentine, spearmint, and camphor oil. Shattuck is awakened by loons singing to each other, a sound he exquisitely describes as being “like a flute somehow played underwater”; Henry, too, hears the voice of the loon in the middle of the night. Shattuck sees a rainbow and we are offered a rainbow from Henry’s journal. In less talented hands, this one-to-one correspondence might come off as gimmicky: a writer dipping into Thoreau to pluck out tidbits of look-alike experience. Here the symmetry seems natural, organic even—there’s no pretense of seeing himself in Thoreau, or Henry in himself.

In the Walden Pond interlude, Shattuck’s pursuit of Henry and all that his walks stood for—happiness, freedom, truth of the soul, a return to childhood—takes a brief, engrossing detour into the realm of paradox. He enters the replica of Thoreau’s cabin and sits in the replica rocking chair next to the replica woodstove. Soon a tourist walks in with her young son. “Oh, look, there he is,” she says to the boy. “Ask him a question.” Shattuck, too, has become a replica, a realization that seems to stun him. “No,” he says to them. What have they encroached on—an image of Henry? A communion with Thoreau on sacred ground? He abruptly gets up and leaves. Reflecting on this discomfiting interaction, Shattuck speculates that “maybe my leaving was in character.” He means Thoreau’s character, of course, and specifically his overblown reputation as a recluse who shunned society. But maybe his leaving also revealed a sharp sliver of Shattuck’s own character, or a hybrid of his and Henry’s. Though he balks at the idea of playing along with the mistaken identity—that of reenactor—his walks are essentially, and self-admittedly, reenactments, for that is what it means, in part, to follow in someone else’s footsteps.

Is Shattuck questioning his mission, recognizing a certain futility in the walks? His self-doubt prompts an ongoing interrogation of his very being, which is what makes this book so relatable and compelling. It is not the trudges along the New England seaboard or up a mountain, but rather Shattuck’s probing odyssey, however it might unfold, into despair and his search for a way out that grips us as readers. A wise cliché tells us that it is the journey, not the destination, that counts. Shattuck’s particular journey—inward and outward—avoids self-absorption. As the French philosopher Frédéric Gros argued in A Philosophy of Walking , “By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history.” Perhaps this explains the unnerving brush at Walden Pond. Shattuck bristles at being ascribed an identity—Thoreau in the boy’s mind, a reenactor for the mother. The attempt at shedding his identity, if just for a few days, is under threat. The tiny cabin and its trespassers are too close for comfort.

On his walk to Wachusett Mountain, Shattuck takes MDMA, which is in the last stages of clinical trials for the treatment of PTSD. “I’d wanted to feel some of the transcendence in nature that Henry felt,” he writes, “and which I hadn’t really yet experienced in the walking, and thought the pills might help.” Shattuck goes on to describe Henry’s own drug experience when he was thirty-four, citing an entry in Thoreau’s journal documenting the effects:

By taking the ether the other day I was convinced how far asunder a man could be separated from his senses. You expand like a seed in the ground. You exist in your roots, like a tree in the winter. If you have an inclination to travel, take the ether: you go beyond the further star.

Thoreau, however, didn’t get high on ether as a means of enhancing his walks or achieving transcendence; his dentist administered it—once—before extracting some bad teeth. In his account of ascending Wachusett Mountain, Shattuck intersperses several Thoreau quotations describing the same walk, allowing the reader to mistakenly infer that Henry, too, was under the influence at the time. But Thoreau’s three-day walk to the mountain summit occurred in 1842 and his essay, “A Walk to Wachusett,” was published in The Boston Miscellany in January 1843; his dentist gave him ether in 1851. A clarification could have cleared up the confusion and, in turn, spotlighted a more salient, ironic link between the author and Henry: both have taken a drug in order to suppress an ache, and to make an experience more pleasant.

Throughout Six Walks , and especially in Part One, Shattuck’s anguish seems stubbornly intractable. While a drug might offer only a temporary transcendence, it’s easy to sympathize with Shattuck’s desire for relief. We feel for him when he asks himself whether Henry, whose brother John died six months before Thoreau’s Wachusett walk, was “doing the same thing I was doing? Walking to husk the dead skin of grief? Looking up to feel the comfort of one’s own smallness in the world, to displace bulging selfhood, under the shadow of such urgent beauty as the night sky?”

Ten years pass before Shattuck begins the walks and the writing of Part Two, and a lot has happened in that time. His anxiety and distress have subsided. He gets engaged to Jenny. He no longer feels the urgency to leave home. Reading Thoreau, however, has been a constant, and in this new era of love, maturity, and greater perspective, he still feels the impulse to replicate some of Henry’s journeys. If there’s one thing he’s learned from reading Thoreau’s journals, “It’s that stepping out your front door gives you an offering in all seasons and moods. Something would come from continuing to follow him.”

In the first summer of the pandemic, Shattuck heads on foot from the house where he grew up to an ancestral home in Rhode Island, a route marked by reminders of his childhood: “Past the pond where I used to go duck hunting with my dad. Past the bushes of wild hazelnuts my mom and I picked when I was boy—the memory of which so quietly imprinted itself in my mind that I had forgotten we’d done that until I walked past them one day, saw their frilled encasings dropping by the footpath, and thought of my mom.” And then: “To the beach where my grandmother, mother, and I all played as kids in our own times, the beach surrounding the farmland my great-grandfather bought in the early 1900s. The outgoing tide had left a trim of folded particulate—seaweed and flecks of stone—that looked like a line of drawing of distant mountains.” In the fuguelike passages of this “Southwest” walk, Shattuck hits a Proustian stride. The prose is lilting and graceful here in a book of already lush prose.

Thoreau, in his seminal essay, “Walking”—published in the Atlantic Monthly a few weeks after his death in 1862—declared that when he left his house for a walk, he inevitably headed southwest, “toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. [ … ] The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side.” In Part Two, one key to Shattuck’s future is found not by heading southwest but by recounting the uncomplicated pleasures of his youth. Therein lies one of the most striking affinities with Henry and his walks—a craving for an infinity of childhood freedom. While Thoreau’s obsessive, hours-long walks and his essays on the subject are often automatically associated with Nature—with all that the word has come to signify: ecological awareness, preservation, a romantic return to the pastoral, and “nature writing,” to name a few—or with a supposed rejection of society, the expression of his true purpose in sauntering can be found in his journal entry of July 21, 1851, three years after abandoning his Walden Pond cabin and eleven years before succumbing to tuberculosis. That long, rhapsodic entry, shortened here, can be read as a manifesto for Shattuck:

Now I yearn for one of those old, meandering, dry, uninhabited roads, which lead away from towns, which lead us away from temptation, which conduct to the outside of earth, over its uppermost crust, where you may forget in what country you are travelling; where no farmer can complain that you are treading down his grass [ … ] along which you may travel like a pilgrim, going nowhither; where travellers are not too often to be met; where my spirit is free; where the walls and fences are not cared for; where your head is more in heaven than your feet are on earth [ … ] where travellers have no occasion to stop, but pass along and leave you to your thoughts; where it makes no odds which way you face, whether you are going or coming, whether it is morning or evening, mid-noon or midnight [ … ] where you can walk and think with the least obstruction, there being nothing to measure progress by; where you can pace when your breast is full, and cherish your moodiness [ … ] by which you may go to the uttermost parts of the earth. [ … ] There I can walk and stalk and pace and plod. [ … ] That’s a road I can travel [ … ] There I can walk, and recover the lost child that I am without any ringing of a bell [ … ] There I have freedom in my thought, and in my soul am free.

On his last walk—his second to the Cape—Shattuck and his fiancée, Jenny, stay in an old shack in Provincetown. Fitted out with a hand pump for water, an outhouse, and lanterns, the shelter seems more like Thoreau’s original cabin than its replica at Walden Pond. Shattuck doesn’t make this explicit comparison; he doesn’t need to. His masterful approach to past and present evokes a place that no longer exists and the profound satisfaction he takes in the night’s ramshackle accommodations. No reenactments required. In speaking with someone he loves, Shattuck has found the real thing. “I didn’t want to walk anymore,” he writes. “I didn’t want to sleep in a stranger’s house. I didn’t want to wake up before dawn to hike up Mount Katahdin or take MDMA under a chairlift or empty my breath and be pressed by the weight of Walden Pond.” Transcendence, then, is felt when it’s least expected—when we aren’t looking for it or following someone else’s lead.

The epigraph for Six Walks is a definition: “Footstep (‘fóot, step): A step taken by a person in walking, especially as heard by another.” In these pages we hear an echo across time, terrain, and imagination: Thoreau rustling in the distance as Shattuck moves forward with his life. You might read this book because you’re a fan of Thoreau, or because you’re an ardent walker and nature-lover. Or you might just read it to wander in the generous presence of Shattuck. You might cross the finish line, as I did, thinking of him as Ben.

Published on June 30, 2022

Like what you've read? Share it!

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

• What is Transcendentalism?
• When did American literature begin?
• Who are some important authors of American literature?
• What are the periods of American literature?

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Humanities LibreTexts - From Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)
• Internet Archive - "Walden; or, Life in the woods"
• Indiana University Pressbooks - Henry David Thoreau – Walden, or Life in the Woods

Walden , series of 18 essays by Henry David Thoreau , published in 1854. An important contribution to New England Transcendentalism , the book was a record of Thoreau’s experiment in simple living on the northern shore of Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts (1845–47). Walden is viewed not only as a philosophical treatise on labour, leisure, self-reliance, and individualism but also as an influential piece of nature writing. It is considered Thoreau’s masterwork.

Walden is the product of the two years and two months Thoreau lived in semi-isolation by Walden Pond near Concord , Massachusetts. He built a small cabin on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and was almost totally self-sufficient, growing his own vegetables and doing odd jobs. It was his intention at Walden Pond to live simply and have time to contemplate, walk in the woods, write, and commune with nature. As he explained, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” The resulting book is a series of essays, or meditations, beginning with “Economy,” in which he discussed his experiment and included a detailed account of the construction (and cost) of his cabin. Thoreau extolled the benefits of literature in “Reading,” though in the following essay , “Sounds,” he noted the limits of books and implored the reader to live mindfully, “being forever on the alert” to the sounds and sights in his or her own life. “Solitude” praised the friendliness of nature, which made the “fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant.” Later essays included “Visitors,” “Higher Laws,” “Winter Animals,” and “Spring.”

Relatively neglected during Thoreau’s lifetime, Walden achieved tremendous popularity in the 20th century. Thoreau’s description of the physical act of living day by day at Walden Pond gave the book authority, while his command of a clear, straightforward, but elegant style helped raise it to the level of a literary classic. Oft-repeated quotes from Walden include: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”; “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”; and “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

Henry David Thoreau online

by Henry D. Thoreau

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,--to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who had a genius, so to speak, for _sauntering_: which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going _a la Sainte Terre_" to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a _Sainte-Terrer_," a Saunterer,--a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from _sans terre_, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,--prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,--if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order,--not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,--not the Knight, but Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.

Thoreau’s Writing

How did Thoreau become a writer?

“‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day” (Thoreau 3). Thus begins the writings of Henry D. Thoreau. In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson encouraged the 20 year old Henry to begin writing a journal, a practice he would continue for the rest of his life. Thoreau was a prolific writer; and in 1906, the two million word journal was published in its entirety in 14 volumes. Henry’s journal was his most prized possession and the only one he kept locked up when he went out for walks while living at Walden Pond. The scratched green paint around the keyhole on his desk exposes its heavy use.

Henry experienced his first success publishing his writing in The Dial, a journal started by the Transcendentalist Club in Concord and first edited by Margaret Fuller. Its prospectus stated its purpose, “The DIAL, as its title indicates, will endeavor to occupy a station on which the light may fall; which is open to the rising sun; and from which it might correctly report the progress of the hour and the day” (Woodlief par. 10). The Transcendentalists needed an outlet for their writing since other journals were not as open to their ideas. It eventually failed after four years in 1844 due to the amount of work it took to maintain and the lack of sufficient revenue from subscriptions.

His early success in The Dial exposed Thoreau to the idea of being a writer, a vocation he identified with very seriously thereafter. In fact, his writing ambitions were a major reason for his move to Walden Pond. He had for some time wanted to create a book from his boating trip with his deceased brother John, but was too easily distracted by his mother’s boarders and living in town. Living by himself at a distance and simplifying his life would allow him the opportunity to finally write his first full book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers .

What was Thoreau’s usual method of writing?

Thoreau’s writing went through several stages and many drafts before it became the works that you read today. A basic flowchart of his writing would start with field notes, which were then recorded as journal entries, next transformed into a lecture, afterwards an essay, and eventually part of a book. Though we often think of journals as recording our immediate experience, in Henry’s case the journal was a more deliberate creation. He took his field notes with him on walks in nature but typically did not record his experiences as journal entries until that night or even a few days later. The thoughtfulness and quality of his journal writings enabled him to reuse entire passages from it in his lectures and published writings. In his early years, Thoreau would literally cut out pages or excerpts from the journal and paste them onto another page as he created his essays.

Before publishing his writing, Thoreau typically presented his essays in the form of a lecture. The Concord Lyceum, which he had attended even in youth, provided the opportunity for him to test out his ideas in front of a live audience, though he did not always appreciate the reception. Thoreau expressed his frustration in his journal, writing “I am disappointed to find that the most that I am and value myself for is lost, or worse than lost, on my audience. I fail to get even the attention of the mass. I should suit them better if I suited myself less” (79).

Henry D. Thoreau turned the content of his lectures into his essays, such as “Walking,” “Civil Disobedience” and “Slavery in Massachusetts.” Some of his essays he eventually incorporated into books, such as the essay about the trip he took during his Walden Pond years to Mount Katadhin that eventually became a part of   Maine Woods .

How did Thoreau create the story of his experiment at Walden Pond?

“I heard that some of my townsmen had expected of me some account of my life at the pond,” Thoreau wrote in his journal (485). The book Walden began as an answer to the inquiry of his neighbors about his life in the woods. As with his other works, Thoreau kept journal entries throughout his experiment with the intent of developing them into lectures and a book. He wrote the first draft of Walden while living in his house by the pond. Henry was a very active writer during those two years, writing  Walden concurrently with the writing of his other book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers . His night in jail and trip to Maine also occurred during his sojourn in the woods. He began to write “Ktaadn,” an essay about his experience hiking the mountain in Maine, while still living at the pond. Consequently, Walden is not a chronological account of his time at the pond, but a deliberate selection of content suited to the chosen themes of the work.

After leaving Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau gave a lecture entitled “History of Myself” at the Concord Lyceum. It was popular enough that he was asked to give it again the following week. Much of the speech evolved into “Economy,” the opening chapter of the book  Walden . For the next few years, Thoreau traveled the lecture circuit throughout New England giving talks that he revised to form chapters of the book. It took Henry nine years and seven drafts before he published the final version. With each new draft he cut and pasted sections from the previous one and added more writing.

Walden was published on August 9th, 1854. In his journal, Thoreau played down the event, writing only a few short phrases for the day, “‘Walden” published. Elder-berries. Waxwork yellowing” (429). Emerson, however, wrote in his own journal of Henry’s nervous pacing up and down the street. Perhaps Thoreau tried not to get his hopes up too much for the success of the book. After all, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was initially an abysmal failure. Henry was forced to take back the books that were not sold, totaling 706 out of the 1,000 originally printed. Writing humorously of the event in his journal, he quipped, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself” (Thoreau 459).  Walden , in contrast, was a relatively successful book, though it took most of the rest of Thoreau’s life to sell the 2,000 books of the first edition. The second edition of Walden came out after Henry died, and the book has never gone out of print since.

Works Cited

Thoreau, Henry David. “I: 1837, Oct. 22 .” The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau:   Journal I,  edited by Bradford Torrey. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1906.

—. “ IX: 1837-1847. ” The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau:   Journal I, edited by Bradford Torrey. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1906.

—. “ IV: December, 1854, Dec. 6. ”  The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau:   Journal VII,  edited by Bradford Torrey. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1906.

—. “ IX: August, 1854, Aug. 9. Wednesday.”  The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau:   Journal VI,  edited by Bradford Torrey. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1906.

—. “VIII: October, 1853, Oct. 28 .” The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau:   Journal V,  edited by Bradford Torrey. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1906.

Woodlief, Ann. “The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion History.”  American Transcendentalism Web.  Virginia Commonwealth University, par. 10,  archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/index.html . Accessed 31 Aug. 2016.

• English Literature
• Short Stories
• Literary Terms
• Web Stories

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Essay Summary By Henry David Thoreau

Table of Contents

“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” is an essay written by  Henry David Thoreau , first published in 1854 as part of his book “Walden.” Thoreau was an American philosopher, naturalist, and transcendentalist who spent two years living in a small cabin near Walden Pond, Massachusetts.

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Essay By Thoreau- The essay explores Thoreau’s experiences and reflections during his time in the cabin, where he sought a simpler and more meaningful existence. Thoreau emphasizes the importance of living deliberately, rejecting the distractions of modern society, and reconnecting with nature.

In the essay, Thoreau describes his decision to live a solitary life in the woods, where he could have a direct and unmediated experience with nature. He reflects on the tranquility and beauty of the natural world, finding solace in the simplicity and harmony he observes.

• The Superannuated Man Essay Summary By Charles Lamb
• On Going a Journey Essay Summary By William Hazlitt
• Areopagitica Essay Summary By John Milton
• The Anatomy of Melancholy Essay Summary By Robert Burton

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Essay By Thoreau- Thoreau also contemplates the concept of material possessions and their role in human life. He argues that people often become enslaved to their possessions, spending their time and energy acquiring and maintaining them. Thoreau advocates for a more minimalistic lifestyle, free from unnecessary belongings and focused on spiritual and intellectual growth.

Furthermore, Thoreau questions the values and pursuits of society, criticizing the pursuit of wealth, social status, and conformity. He encourages individuals to discover their own purpose and meaning in life, rather than blindly following societal expectations.

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Essay By Thoreau- The essay concludes with Thoreau’s belief in the importance of self-reliance and self-discovery. He suggests that by simplifying our lives and connecting with nature, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and find true fulfillment.

“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” is a philosophical exploration of the relationship between humans and nature, the pursuit of a meaningful existence, and the importance of individuality and self-discovery. It continues to be celebrated as a classic work of American literature and an influential piece in the field of environmental philosophy.

About Henry David Thoreau

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Essay By Thoreau- Henry David Thoreau was an American philosopher, essayist, poet, and naturalist who lived from 1817 to 1862. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in American literature and a leading voice of the transcendentalist movement. Thoreau’s writings and ideas continue to inspire readers and thinkers to this day, and his work remains a cornerstone of environmental philosophy.

Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, to John Thoreau, a pencil manufacturer, and Cynthia Dunbar. From a young age, Thoreau showed a deep connection with nature and a strong sense of individualism. He attended Harvard University, where he studied classics and philosophy. During his time at Harvard, he became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, a prominent transcendentalist thinker, who would have a significant influence on Thoreau’s life and work.

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Essay By Thoreau- After graduating from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau briefly worked as a schoolteacher but soon decided to pursue a different path. He and his brother John opened a school in Concord, but the venture lasted only a few years. Thoreau then turned to his true passions: writing and nature. He embarked on a period of intense self-study and exploration, delving into various philosophical and literary works while spending significant time in the natural world.

In 1845, at the age of 27, Thoreau built a small cabin near Walden Pond, a serene and secluded spot in Concord. This experience would become the inspiration for his most famous work, “Walden.” For two years, Thoreau lived a simple and solitary life in the cabin, immersing himself in nature and reflecting deeply on the human experience. He aimed to live deliberately, intentionally simplifying his life and questioning the values and pursuits of society.

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Essay By Thoreau- “Walden” was published in 1854 and remains Thoreau’s most renowned book. It describes his time at Walden Pond, providing vivid descriptions of the natural surroundings and offering philosophical musings on topics such as individualism, self-reliance, and the significance of nature in human life. Thoreau’s observations and insights in “Walden” continue to resonate with readers, inspiring a sense of connection with the natural world and prompting reflection on the pursuit of a meaningful existence.

In addition to “Walden,” Thoreau is known for his essay “Civil Disobedience,” which was published in 1849. In this essay, Thoreau argues for the importance of individual conscience and resistance against unjust laws. He famously refused to pay a poll tax as an act of protest against the Mexican-American War and slavery, leading to his arrest and a brief imprisonment. Thoreau’s ideas on civil disobedience would later influence significant figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Essay By Thoreau- Thoreau’s writings often celebrate the beauty and harmony of nature while critiquing the materialistic and conformist tendencies of society. He believed that modern life had become too complex and detached from the natural world, and he called for a return to simplicity, self-reliance, and a deep connection with nature. Thoreau sought to inspire individuals to live intentionally, to question societal norms, and to seek their own path to fulfillment.

Beyond his writing, Thoreau was also an avid naturalist. He meticulously observed and recorded the flora and fauna of the Concord area and maintained detailed journals. His observations of the changing seasons, the behavior of animals, and the intricate patterns of nature enriched his writings and contributed to a broader understanding of the natural world.

“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” by Henry David Thoreau is a profound essay that encourages individuals to seek a simpler and more deliberate way of life. Thoreau’s experience living in solitude near Walden Pond serves as a backdrop for his reflections on the importance of connecting with nature, rejecting materialism, and questioning societal expectations.

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Essay By Thoreau- Thoreau’s call to live deliberately and to explore the depths of one’s own existence resonates with readers, urging them to examine their own lives and values. He challenges the pursuit of wealth, status, and conformity, suggesting that true fulfillment comes from living in harmony with nature, finding one’s purpose, and embracing self-reliance.

Through his vivid descriptions of the natural world and his introspective musings, Thoreau invites readers to contemplate their own relationship with nature and the choices they make in their daily lives. He reminds us of the beauty and tranquility that can be found in simplicity and the need to disconnect from the distractions of modern society.

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Essay By Thoreau- “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” continues to be revered as a timeless piece of literature that inspires readers to seek meaning and purpose in their lives, to cultivate a deeper connection with nature, and to live authentically and intentionally. Thoreau’s insights and ideas have had a lasting impact on environmental philosophy and continue to resonate with those who strive for a more meaningful existence.

Q: Who is Henry David Thoreau? 

A: Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American philosopher, essayist, poet, and naturalist. He is best known for his book “Walden,” which describes his experience living in a cabin near Walden Pond and reflects on themes of simplicity, self-reliance, and the relationship between humans and nature. Thoreau was also a leading figure in the transcendentalist movement, which emphasized individualism, intuition, and a deep connection with nature.

Q: What is the transcendentalist movement? 

A: The transcendentalist movement was a philosophical and literary movement that emerged in the mid-19th century in the United States. Transcendentalists, including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller, believed in the inherent goodness of humans and the importance of intuition, self-reliance, and a close relationship with nature. They rejected societal conventions and emphasized individualism, spiritual exploration, and the quest for truth and meaning.

Q: What is “Walden”? 

A: “Walden” is a book written by Henry David Thoreau, published in 1854. It chronicles Thoreau’s experiences and reflections during his two-year stay in a small cabin near Walden Pond, Massachusetts. “Walden” explores themes of simplicity, self-sufficiency, and the pursuit of a meaningful existence. Thoreau’s observations of nature and his contemplations on society and the human condition make “Walden” a classic work of American literature and an influential text in environmental philosophy.

Q: What is the main message of “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”? 

A: The main message of “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” is to encourage individuals to live deliberately, reconnect with nature, and question societal expectations. Thoreau advocates for a simpler, more meaningful way of life, free from materialism and conformity. He emphasizes the importance of self-discovery, self-reliance, and finding one’s own purpose. The essay serves as a call to examine one’s values, embrace simplicity, and seek fulfillment through a deeper connection with nature and a more authentic existence.

Q: What is the significance of “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”? 

A: “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” is a significant essay in American literature and environmental philosophy. It exemplifies the transcendentalist ideals of self-reliance, individualism, and the appreciation of nature. Thoreau’s reflections on the human-nature relationship and his critique of materialism and societal norms continue to resonate with readers, inspiring them to question their own lives and values. The essay has had a lasting impact on discussions of simplicity, sustainability, and the pursuit of a meaningful existence.

Related Posts

1500 words essay on earlier form of fiction with authors in english, 1000 words essay on ecosystem restoration in english medium for students, 1000 words essay on 14 august in english medium for students.

Attempt a critical appreciation of The Triumph of Life by P.B. Shelley.

Consider The Garden by Andrew Marvell as a didactic poem.

Why does Plato want the artists to be kept away from the ideal state

Do any of the characters surprise you at any stage in the novel Tamas

William Shakespeare Biography and Works

Discuss the theme of freedom in Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

How does William Shakespeare use the concept of power in Richard III

Analyze the use of imagery in William Shakespeare’s sonnets

Meg 05 literary criticism & theory solved assignment 2024-25, name an australian author known for their memoirs, what is the significance of the character “nathanial delaney” in “the secret river”.

Poem Summary Easter by Jill Alexander Essbaum Line by Line Explanation

• Advertisement
• Privacy & Policy
• Other Links

© 2023 Literopedia

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Remember Me

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Are you sure want to unlock this post?

Are you sure want to cancel subscription.

Why Thoreau Matters

Many readers are responding to our look back at Atlantic essays written by Henry David Thoreau, as well as Kathryn Schulz’s recent smackdown of the transcendentalist writer. Regarding the latter, a reader writes:

I never understood the accusation of “contradiction” of Thoreau. Should we throw away a whole philosophy because he didn’t always practice what he preached? That’s silliness. Also, I think what many people identify as contradictions are in fact misunderstandings of his ideas. For example, he enjoyed solitude and he enjoyed company. Those are not mutually exclusive in life, just at any given moment. I would never recommend him as a standup comic, but there is humor in his writing. It is all tongue and cheek, but it’s there. Most of all, Thoreau had far more guts than most people and questioned everything. In a time where people are being squeezed harder and harder financially, and when the latest electronic gadgets are considered to be a necessity rather than a luxury, Thoreau is a must read. He would have raged against our compulsion to respond instantly to every beep and buzz from our phones. Our devices have gone from convenience to burden.

On that note, the photo seen above was taken today by a good friend of mine, “one last pic before I hand over the phone” to begin a long meditation retreat located, as it happens, in the woods of Massachusetts less than an hour from Walden Pond. Another reader provides a meditation of sorts on Thoreau:

Addressing the many points and quotations Schulz’s essay takes out of context goes well beyond the scope of a letter. Instead, I offer this partial counterpoint, perhaps just as willful in its misreadings, but known and felt from years of reading and teaching Walden:

It is near the Ides of October, and, here in the northeast, we’ve begun our annual descent, which has many of us rising in darkness and heading home in twilight. Even as the trees pulse scarlet and yellow, even as the sky is often achingly blue, we feel an inward turn; we tend toward hunker. All of this is seasonal backdrop for a fractious, troubled world—our politics are those of clamor and calamity, we arm against ourselves, we seem to outnumber the very earth. In such a season, at such a time, many of us search for hope, for a voice that both admits and admires complexity and sees still through the turmoil to the delight of life, to a daily goodness and purpose. For me and for many, that voice carries over the years from Henry David Thoreau , whose 200th birthday ( 7/12/17 ) nears. How is it that a man dubbed by many as misanthropic and hypocritical ( The New Yorker touts Schulz’s long essay with the word “hypocrite” bolded in its title), a man often perceived to be a hermit, a man who never “made it” in his era and died young, offers such a lasting uplift for those of us who read him, and then, often follow him out the door? Perhaps there is a simple answer … with a complex explanation: In his mid-20s, as Henry Thoreau sought purpose and traction in his hoped-for profession as a writer, he took on an assignment for the short-lived transcendental journal, The Dial . In the resulting essay, “ The Natural History of Massachusetts ,” Thoreau ’s first foray into the style and content that would form his life’s work, he wrote the following passage: Surely joy is the condition of life. Think of the young fry that leap in the ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose scales worn bright by attrition is reflected upon the bank. Almost 20 years later, as he lay dying at age 44, Thoreau worked on his final essay, “ Autumnal Tints ”—a look at the leaves and the flaring season that ushers in the annual deaths of the world. A reader might expect dark tints, a gathering gloom; instead, affirmation rises the way light rises, sometimes unexpectedly, from the leaves lying on the dark forest floor. Sometimes in fall, your way is limned by these footlight leaves; light both falls from the sky and rises from the ground; the day is suffused with it. In “Autumnal Tints,” we find that joy is still the condition of life … and, even, death. That, I think, is Henry Thoreau ’s sustaining, daily vision. It survived a world as fractured as ours; it survived also Thoreau ’s own ferocious intelligence, capable of such piercing social criticism that it reads as fresh today; it survived every descent, even his own. For all of us “carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon [our] wings,” such a vision can hold daily darkness at bay; we can work forward in its spirit.

More of your emails to come. If you’d like to join them, just say hello@ .

About the Author

More Stories

The Surprising Revolt at the Most Liberal College in the Country

‘Trump Hasn't Been the Wrecking Ball I Anticipated’

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist whose major work, Walden , draws upon each of these identities in meditating on the concrete problems of living in the world as a human being. He sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a way of life, not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse. Thoreau's work was informed by an eclectic variety of sources. He was well-versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy, ranging from the pre-Socratics through the Hellenistic schools, and was also an avid student of the ancient scriptures and wisdom literature of various Asian traditions. He was familiar with modern philosophy ranging from Descartes, Locke and the Cambridge Platonists through Emerson, Coleridge, and the German Idealists, all of whom are influential on Thoreau's philosophy. He discussed his own scientific findings with leading naturalists of the day, and read the latest work of Humboldt and Darwin with interest and admiration. His philosophical explorations of self and world led him to develop an epistemology of embodied perception and a non-dualistic account of mental and material life. In addition to his focus on ethics in an existential spirit, Thoreau also makes unique contributions to ontology, the philosophy of science, and radical political thought. Although his political essays have become justly famous, his works on natural science were not even published until the late twentieth century, and they help to give us a more complete picture of him as a thinker. Among the texts he left unfinished was a set of manuscript volumes filled with information on Native American religion and culture. Thoreau's work anticipates certain later developments in pragmatism, phenomenology, and environmental philosophy, and poses a perennially valuable challenge to our conception of the methods and intentions of philosophy itself.

1. Life and Writings

2. nature and human existence, 3. the ethics of perception, 4. friendship and politics, 5. locating thoreau, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries.

Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817 and died there in 1862, at the age of forty-four. Like that of his near-contemporary Søren Kierkegaard, Thoreau's intellectual career unfolded in a close and polemical relation to the town in which he spent most of his life. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, he struck up a friendship with fellow Concord resident Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essay “Nature” he had first encountered earlier that year. Although the two American thinkers had a turbulent relationship due to serious philosophical and personal differences, they had a profound and lasting effect upon one another. It was in the fall of 1837 that Thoreau, aged twenty, made his first entries in the multivolume journal he would keep for the rest of his life. Most of his published writings were developed from notes that first appeared on these pages, and Thoreau subsequently revised many entries, so his journal can be considered a finished work in itself. During his lifetime he published only two books, along with numerous shorter essays that were first delivered as lectures. He lived a simple and relatively quiet life, making his living briefly as a teacher and pencil maker but mostly as a land surveyor. Thoreau had intimate bonds with his family and friends, and remained unmarried although he was deeply in love at least twice. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , was still a work in progress in 1845, when he went to live in the woods by Walden Pond for two years. This “experiment” in living on the outskirts of town was an intensive time of examination for Thoreau, as he drew close to nature and contemplated the final ends of his own life, which was otherwise at risk of ending in quiet desperation. Thoreau viewed his existential quest as a venture in philosophy, in the ancient Greek sense of the word, because it was motivated by an urgent need to find a reflective understanding of reality that could inform a life of wisdom.

His experience bore fruit in the 1854 publication of his literary masterpiece Walden , a work that almost defies categorization: it is a work of narrative prose which often soars to poetic heights, combining philosophical speculation with close observation of a concrete place. It is a rousing summons to the examined life and to the realization of one's potential, while at the same time it develops what might be described as a religious vision of the human being and the universe. Walden has been admired by a larger world audience than any other book written by an American author, and—whether or not it ought to be called a work of philosophy—it contains a substantial amount of philosophical content, which deserves to be better appreciated than it has been. Stanley Cavell has argued that Thoreau is an embarrassment to “what we have learned to call philosophy,” since his work embodies “a mode of conceptual accuracy” that is “based on an idea of rigor” foreign to the academic establishment (Cavell 1988, 14). One of the difficulties in coming to terms with Thoreau is that his philosophy, like Nietzsche's, has the character of “a system in aphorisms,” whose form is entirely appropriate to their content (Löwith 1997, 11). The challenge to the reader is to see the coherence of the whole philosophical outlook that is articulated in so many pithy fragments. Accordingly, this entry attempts to sort out and delineate the main themes of Thoreau's project, in the hope of serving as an aid and stimulus to further study. It draws upon Thoreau's entire corpus, including the works he left in manuscript which were published after his death.

In his essay “Nature,” Emerson asserts that there can be found in the natural world “a sanctity which shames our religions.” Thoreau would agree completely with this statement. But in the same essay Emerson also inclines toward Platonism, claiming that nature is “emblematic” of higher truths, and suggesting that the material world has value by virtue of being a subsidiary product of mental reality: each natural object is therefore “a symbol of some spiritual fact.” For the most part, Thoreau recoils from the idea that we could find some kind of higher reality by looking beyond nature: in the “Friday” chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , he asks: “Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?” As he sees it, the realm of spirit is the physical world, which has a sacred meaning that can be directly perceived. Accordingly, he seeks “to be always on the alert to find God in nature” ( Journal , 9/7/51), and to hear “the language which all things and events speak without metaphor” ( Walden , IV). Thoreau's metaphysical convictions compel him to “defend nature's intrinsic value and to explore immanent conceptions of deity—positions far removed from Emerson and most transcendentalists” (Cafaro 2004, 132–133).

To say that nature is inherently significant is to say that natural facts are neither inert nor value-free. Thoreau urges his reader not to “underrate the value of a fact,” since each concrete detail of the world may contain a meaningful truth (“Natural History of Massachusetts”). Note the phrase: the value of a fact . Thoreau does not distinguish between facts and values, or between primary and secondary qualities, since he understands the universe as an organic whole in which mind and matter are inseparable. When we perceive sights, sounds, and textures, we are not standing as disembodied consciousness apart from a world of inanimate mechanisms; rather, we are sentient beings immersed in the sensory world, learning the “essential facts of life” only through “the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us” ( Walden , II). The philosopher who seeks knowledge through experience should therefore not be surprised to discover beauty and order in natural phenomena. However, these axiological properties are not introduced from without, from the top down—rather, they emerge from within the various self-maintaining processes of organic life. And the entire environment, the “living earth” itself, has something like a life of its own, containing but not reducible to the biotic existence of animals and plants ( Walden , XVII). This is what he elsewhere describes as the “slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out” (“A Winter Walk”).

Thoreau remarks upon the “much grander significance” of any natural phenomenon “when not referred to man and his needs but viewed absolutely” ( Journal , 11/10/51). The world is rich with value that is not of our making, and “whatever we have perceived to be in the slightest degree beautiful is of infinitely more value to us than what we have only as yet discovered to be useful and to serve our purpose” ( Faith in a Seed , 144). It is when we are not guilty of imposing our own purposes onto the world that we are able to view it on its own terms. One of the things we then discover is that we are involved in a pluralistic universe, containing many different points of view other than our own. And when we begin to realize “the infinite extent of our relations” ( Walden , VIII), we can see that even what does not at first seem to be good for us may have some positive value when considered from a broader perspective. Rather than dismissing squirrels as rodents, for instance, we should see them as “planters of forests,” and be grateful for the role they play in the distribution of seeds ( Journal , 10/22/60). Likewise, the “gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me” ( Walden , V). Our limited view often keeps us from appreciating the harmonious interdependence of all parts of the natural world: this is not due to “any confusion or irregularity in Nature,” but because of our own incomplete knowledge ( Walden , XVI). Thoreau declares that he would be happy “if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state,” since in tampering with nature we know not what we do and sometimes end up doing harm as a result ( Walden , X). In many cases we find that “unhandselled nature is worth more even by our modes of valuation than our improvements are” ( Journal , 11/10/60).

In nature we have access to real value, which can be used as a standard against which to measure our conventional evaluations. An example of the latter is the value that is “arbitrarily attached” to gold, which has nothing to do with its “intrinsic beauty or value” ( Journal , 10/13/60). So it is a mistake to rush to California “as if the true gold were to be found in that direction,” when one has failed to appreciate the inherent worth of one's native soil ( Journal , 10/18/55). In the economy of nature, a seed is more precious than a diamond, for it contains “the principle of growth, or life,” and has the ability to become a specific plant or tree ( Journal , 3/22/61). The seed not only provides evidence that nature is filled with “creative genius” ( Journal , 1/5/56), but it also reminds us that a spark of divinity is present in each human being as well. One of Thoreau's favorite analogies—not only a metaphor, as he sees it—is that between the ripening of a seed and the development of human potential. “The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling” ( Walden , I). What he calls “wildness” is not located only in the nonhuman world; the same creative force is also active in human nature, so that even a literary work of art can reasonably be praised as a manifestation of wildness (see “Walking”). There is “a perfect analogy between the life of the human being and that of the vegetable” ( Journal , 5/20/51), and thoughts “spring in man's brain” in just the same way that “a plant springs and grows by its own vitality” ( Journal , 11/8/50 & 4/3/58). Thoreau's exhortations to follow the promptings of one's genius are based on the idea that by obeying our own wild nature we are aligning ourselves with a sacred power. What inspires us to realize our highest potential is “the primitive vigor of Nature in us” ( Journal , 8/30/56), and this influence is something we are able neither to predict nor to comprehend: as he describes it in the “Ktaadn” chapter of The Maine Woods , nature is “primeval, untamed, and forever untamable,” a godlike force but not always a kind one.

Needless to say, Thoreau is not the type of idealist who encourages us to go around “rejecting the evidence of our senses” ( Walden , XIV). On the other hand, he has nothing but scorn for the sort of materialism that fails to penetrate the inner mystery of things, discovering “nothing but surface” in its mechanistic observations ( Journal , 3/7/59). Instead, we must approach the world as “nature looking into nature,” aware of the relation between the form of our own perception and what we are able to perceive ( Correspondence , 7/21/41). There are reasons for classifying Thoreau as both a naturalist and a romantic, although both of these categories are perhaps too broad to be very helpful. His conception of nature is informed by a syncretic appropriation of Greek, Roman, Indian, and other sources, and the result is an eclectic vision that is uniquely his own. For this reason it is difficult to situate Thoreau within the history of modern philosophy, but he might be described as articulating a version of transcendental idealism. If Thoreau is indeed “the American heir to Kant's critical philosophy,” as he has been called (Oelschlaeger 1991, 136), it is because his investigation of “the relation between the subject of knowledge and its object” builds upon a Kantian insight that Emerson, who viewed the senses as illusory, arguably did not grasp (see Cavell 1992, 94–95). In order to understand why this might be an accurate categorization, we must proceed from Thoreau's metaphysics to his epistemology.

If one were asked to name the cardinal virtue of Thoreau's philosophy, it would be hard to identify a better candidate than awareness . He attests to the importance of “being forever on the alert,” and of “the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen” ( Walden , IV). This exercise may enable one to create remarkably minute descriptions of a sunset, a battle between red and black ants, or the shapes taken by thawing clay on a sand bank: but its primary value lies in the way it affects the quality of our experience. “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look” ( Walden , II). Awareness cannot be classified as exclusively a moral or an intellectual virtue, either, since knowing is an inescapably practical and evaluative activity. Thoreau has been interpreted as offering an original response to the major problem of modern philosophy, since he recognizes that knowledge is “dependent on the individual's ability to see,” and that “the world as known is thus radically dependent on character” (Tauber 2001, 4–5).

One of the common tenets of ancient philosophy which was abandoned in the period beginning with Descartes is that a person “could not have access to the truth” without undertaking a process of self-purification that would render him “susceptible to knowing the truth” (Foucault 1997, 278–279). For Thoreau, it was the work of a lifetime to cultivate one's receptivity to the beauty of the universe. Believing that “the perception of beauty is a moral test” ( Journal , 6/21/52), Thoreau frequently chastises himself or humanity in general for failing in this respect. “How much of beauty—of color, as well as form—on which our eyes daily rest goes unperceived by us,” he laments ( Journal , 8/1/60); and he worries that “Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her” ( Walden , IX). Noticing that his sensory awareness has grown less acute since the time of his youth, he speculates that “the child plucks its first flower with an insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent botanist never retains” ( Journal , 7/16/51 & 2/5/52). In order to attain a clear and truthful view of things, we must refine all the perceptual faculties of our embodied consciousness, and become emotionally attuned to all the concrete features of the place in which we are located. We fully know only those facts that are “warm, moist, incarnated,” and palpably felt: “A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it” ( Journal , 2/23/60).

Since our ability to appreciate the significance of phenomena is so easily dulled, it requires a certain discipline in order to become and remain a reliable knower of the world. Like Aristotle, Thoreau believes that the perception of truth “produces a pleasurable sensation”; and he adds that a “healthy and refined nature would always derive pleasure from the landscape” ( Journal , 9/24/54 & 6/27/52). Nature will reward the most careful attention paid by a person who is appropriately disposed, but there is only “as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more. The actual objects which one person will see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which another will see as the persons are different” ( Journal , 11/4/58). One who is in the right state to be capable of giving a “poetic and lively description” of things will find himself “in a living and beautiful world” ( Journal , 10/13/60 & 12/31/59). Beauty, like color, does not lie only in the eye of the beholder: flowers, for example, are indeed beautiful and brightly colored. Nevertheless, beauty—and color, for that matter—can exist only where there is a beholder to perceive it ( Journal , 6/15/52 & 1/21/38). From his experience in the field making observations of natural phenomena, Thoreau gained the insight “that he, the supposedly neutral observer, was always and unavoidably in the center of the observation” (McGregor 1997, 113). Because all perception of objects has a subjective aspect, the world can be defined as a sphere centered around each conscious perceiver: wherever we are located, “the universe is built around us, and we are central still” ( Journal , 8/24/41). This does not mean that we are trapped inside of our own consciousness; rather, the point is that it is only through the lens of our own subjectivity that we have access to the external world.

What we are able to perceive, then, depends not only upon where we are physically situated: it is also contingent upon who we are and what we value, or how our attention is focused. “Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them…. A man sees only what concerns him” (“Autumnal Tints”). In other words, there is “no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective ” ( Journal , 5/6/54). Subjectivity is not an obstacle to truth, according to Thoreau. After all, he says, “the truest description, and that by which another living man can most readily recognize a flower, is the unmeasured and eloquent one which the sight of it inspires” ( Journal , 10/13/60). A true account of the world must do justice to all the familiar properties of objects that the human mind is capable of perceiving. Whether this could be done by a scientific description is a vexing question for Thoreau, and one about which he shows considerable ambivalence. One of his concerns is that the scientist “discovers no world for the mind of man with all its faculties to inhabit”; by contrast, there is “more humanity” in “the unscientific man's knowledge,” since the latter can explain how certain facts pertain to life ( Journal , 9/5/51, 2/13/52). He accuses the naturalist of failing to understand color, much less beauty, and asks: “What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination?” ( Journal , 10/5/61 & 12/25/51)

Thoreau sometimes characterizes science as an ideal discipline that will enrich our knowledge and experience: “The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience” (“Natural History of Massachusetts”). Yet he also gives voice to the fear that by weighing and measuring things and collecting quantitative data he may actually be narrowing his vision. The scientist “studies nature as a dead language,” and would rather study a dead fish preserved in a jar than a living one in its native element ( Journal , 5/10/53 & 11/30/58). In these same journal entries, Thoreau claims that he seeks to experience the significance of nature, and that “the beauty of the fish” is what is most worthy of being measured. On the other hand, when he finds a dead fish in the water, he brings it home to weigh and measure, covering several pages with his statistical findings ( Journal , 8/20/54). This is only one of many examples of Thoreau's fascination with data-gathering, and yet he repeatedly questions its value, as if he does not know what to make of his own penchant for naturalistic research. At the very least, scientific investigations run the risk of being “trivial and petty,” so perhaps what one should do is “learn science and then forget it” ( Journal , 1/21/53 & 4/22/52). But Thoreau is more deeply troubled by the possibility that “science is inhuman,” since objects “seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant,” and this is “not the means of acquiring true knowledge” ( Journal , 5/1/59 & 5/28/54). Overall, his position is not that a mystical or imaginative awareness of the world is incompatible with knowledge of measurable facts, but that an exclusive focus on the latter would blind us to whatever aspects of reality fall outside the scope of our measurement.

One thing we can learn from all of Thoreau's comments on scientific inquiry is that he cares very much about the following question: what can we know about the world, and how are we able to know it? Although he admires the precision of scientific information, he wonders if what it delivers is always bound to be “something less than the vague poetic” ( Journal , 1/5/50). In principle, a naturalistic approach to reality should be able to capture its beauty and significance; in practice, however, it may be “impossible for the same person to see things from the poet's point of view and that of the man of science” ( Journal , 2/18/52). In that case, the best we can do is try to convey our intimations of the truth about the universe, and be willing to err on the side of obscurity and excess: “I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in his waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression… . The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures” ( Walden , XVIII). We should not arbitrarily limit our awareness to that which can be described with mathematical exactitude: perhaps the highest knowledge available to us, Thoreau suggests, consists in “a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before … it is the lighting up of the mist by the sun” (“Walking”). And perhaps this is not a regrettable fact: “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable” ( Walden , XVII). By acknowledging the limits of what we can know with certainty, we open ourselves up to a wider horizon of experience.

As one commentator points out, Thoreau's categories are more dynamic than Kant's, since they are constantly being redefined by what we perceive, even as they shape our way of seeing (Peck 1990, 84–85). Every now and then “something will occur which my philosophy has not dreamed of,” Thoreau says, which demonstrates that the “boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations” ( Journal , 5/31/53). Since the thoughts of each knowing subject are “part of the meaning of the world,” it is legitimate to ask: “Who can say what is ? He can only say how he sees ” (11/4/52 & 12/2/46). Truth is radically perspective-dependent, which means that insofar as we are different people we can only be expected to perceive different worlds (Walls 1995, 213). Thoreau's position might be described as perspectival realism, since he does not conclude that truth is relative but celebrates the diversity of the multifaceted reality that each of us knows in his own distinctive way. “How novel and original must be each new man's view of the universe!” he exclaims; “How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact,” for it suggests to us “what worlds remain to be unveiled” ( Journal , 4/2/52 & 4/19/52). We may never comprehend the intimate relation between a significant fact and the perceiver who appreciates it, but we should trust that it is not in vain to view nature with “humane affections” ( Journal , 2/20/57 & 6/30/52). With respect to any given phenomenon, the “point of interest” that concerns us lies neither in the coolly independent object nor in the subject alone, but somewhere in between ( Journal , 11/5/57). Witnessing the rise of positivism and its ideal of complete objectivity, Thoreau attempts “to preserve an enchanted world and to place the passionate observer in the center of his or her universe” (Tauber 2001, 20). It is a noble goal, and one that remains quite relevant in the philosophical climate of the present day.

Thoreau's ethic of personal flourishing is focused upon the problem of how to align one's daily life in accordance with one's ultimate ideals. What was enthusiasm in the youth, he argues, must become temperament in the mature person: the “mere vision is little compared with the steady corresponding endeavor thitherward” ( Journal , 11/1/51 & 11/24/57). Much of our time ought to be spent “in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him… . The wisely conscious life springs out of an unconscious suggestion” ( Wild Fruits , 166). Character, then, can be defined as “genius settled”—the promptings of conscience in themselves are not yet moral, until we have integrated them into the fabric of our existence and begun to hold ourselves responsible for living up to them ( Journal , 3/2/42). Hence, we need to cherish and nurture our capability to discern the difference between the idea and the reality, between what is and what ought to be . It is when we experience dissatisfaction with ourselves or with external circumstances that we are stimulated to act in the interest of making things better.

It follows that the greatest compliment we can pay to another person is to say that he or she enhances our life by inciting us to realize our highest aspirations. So Thoreau views it as deplorable that “we may love and not elevate one another”; the “love that takes us as it finds us, degrades us” (“Chastity and Sensuality”). He speaks of “love” and “friendship” as closely related terms which are tainted by the “trivial dualism” which assumes that the one must exclude the other ( Journal , undated 1839 entry). Clearly, what he is concerned about is the kind of love the Greeks called philia —and in his sustained consideration of friendship, as in so many other respects, Thoreau is “squarely in the virtue ethics tradition” (Cafaro 2004, 127). In his ethical writings, the notion of wishing good on behalf of another person is often taken to a severe extreme, as if he does not think it possible to ask too much of love and friendship. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , he says: “I value and trust those who love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance” ( A Week , “Wednesday”). This is fair enough, but Thoreau may be going too far when he proclaims that a friend should be approached “with sacred love and awe,” and that we profane one another if we do not always meet on religious terms; it is no wonder that he finds himself doubting whether his “idea of a friend” will ever actually be instantiated ( Journal , 6/26/40). Nonetheless, Thoreau's discussion of love and friendship provokes us to reflect upon what we can and cannot expect from our closest human relationships, and on their role in a good life.

Thoreau is only half-joking when he tells us that, after becoming frustrated with society, he turned “more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known” ( Walden , I). Not only is it true that a degree of solitude and distance from our neighbors may actually improve our relations with them, but by moving away from the center of town we liberate ourselves from a slavish adherence to prevailing attitudes. “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad,” Thoreau claims, and he provides this kind of example: “If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen” ( Walden , I & “Life Without Principle”). This warped sense of value is all too common amidst the fragmentation and desperation of modern life, in its “restless, nervous, bustling, trivial” activity ( Walden , XVIII). Thoreau builds a critique of American culture upon his conviction that “the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality” (“Life Without Principle”): his polemic aims at consumerism, philistinism, mass entertainment, vacuous applications of technology, and the herd mentality that bows down before an anonymous “They” ( Walden , I). During his life he spoke out against the Mexican War and the subjugation of Native America, and campaigned in favor of bioregionalism and the protection of animals and wild areas, but the political issue that roused his indignation more than any other was slavery.

Thoreau was an activist involved in the abolitionist movement on many fronts: he participated in the Underground Railroad, protested against the Fugitive Slave Law, and gave support to John Brown and his party. Most importantly, he provides a justification for principled revolt and a method of nonviolent resistance, both of which would have a considerable influence on revolutionary movements in the twentieth century. In his essay on “Civil Disobedience,” originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government,” he defends the validity of conscientious objection to unjust laws, which ought to be transgressed at once. Although at times it sounds as if Thoreau is advocating anarchy, what he demands is a better government, and what he refuses to acknowledge is the authority of one that has become so morally corrupt as to lose the consent of those governed. “There will never be a really free and enlightened State,” he argues, “until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly” (“Civil Disobedience”). There are simply more sacred laws to obey than the laws of society, and a just government—should there ever be such a thing, he says—would not be in conflict with the individual conscience.

Political institutions as such are regarded by Thoreau with distrust, and although he probably overestimates the extent to which it is possible to disassociate oneself from them, he convincingly insists that social consensus is not a guarantee of rectitude or truth. One of the most valuable points he makes against the critics of John Brown is that a person should not be dismissed as “insane” by virtue of dissenting from the majority: his anger is grounded upon an awareness of the fact that slavery is a violation of human rights, and the law-abiding citizens of Massachusetts are not excused for turning away from this reality (“A Plea for Captain John Brown”). Passively allowing an unjust practice to go on is tantamount to collaborating with evil. Unfortunately, Thoreau seems to assume that all of Brown's actions were justified because he was an inspired reformer with a sacred vocation. But he does succeed at pointing out the stupidity of certain knee-jerk responses to Brown's raid, and in this respect his essay has a more general pertinence to debates about the individual's relation to community norms. It also raises the issue of whether political violence can be justified as the lesser of evils, or in cases where it may be the only way of instigating reform.

Thoreau has somewhat misleadingly been classified as a New England transcendentalist, and—even though he never rejected this label—it does not really fit. Some of his major differences from Emerson have already been discussed, and further differences appear when Thoreau is compared to such figures as Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. A history of transcendentalism in New England which appeared in the late nineteenth century mentions Thoreau only once, in passing (Frothingham 1886, 133). And a more recent history of the movement concludes that Thoreau had little in common with this group of thinkers, who were for the most part committed to some version of Christianity, to a dualistic understanding of mind and matter, and to the related idea that sense experience is unreliable (Boller 1974, 29–35 & 176). It was suggested above that a better way of situating Thoreau within the Western philosophical tradition is to consider him a kind of transcendental idealist, in the true Kantian spirit. For reasons that ought to be obvious by now, he should be of interest to students of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling—all of whom he studied at first or second hand—and possibly Schopenhauer. Thoreau was a literate and enthusiastic classicist, whose study of ancient Greek and Roman authors convinced him that philosophy ought to be a lived practice: so he can profitably be grouped with other nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who pointed out the limitations of the abstract philosophy of the early modern period. Yet he also has the distinction of being among the first Western philosophers to be significantly influenced by ancient Chinese and Indian thought. He anticipates Bergson and Merleau-Ponty in his attention to the dynamics of the embodied mind, and shares with Peirce and James a concern for problems of knowledge as they arise within the horizon of practical experience.

Ever so gradually, contemporary philosophers are discovering how much Thoreau has to teach—especially, in the areas of knowledge and perception, and in ethical debates about the value of land and life. His affinities with the pragmatic and phenomenological traditions, and the enormous resources he offers for environmental philosophy, have also started to receive more attention. Still, it remains true that the political aspect of Thoreau's philosophy has come closer to receiving its due than any of these others: whether or not this is because such prominent figures as Gandhi and Martin Luther King cited Thoreau as an inspiration, it has resulted in a disproportionate focus on what is only one part of an integral philosophy, a part that can hardly be understood in isolation from the others. Even if it is a sign of Thoreau's peculiar greatness that subsequent American philosophy has not known what to make of him, it is a shame if his exclusion from the mainstream philosophical canon has kept his voice from being heard by some of those who might be in a position to appreciate it. Then again, it is never too late to give up our prejudices. Recent and forthcoming work seems to indicate that Thoreau's influence is starting to show up more noticeably on the American philosophical landscape.

Works By Thoreau

• Walden; or, Life in the Woods , ed. Jeffrey Cramer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Originally published in 1854. Parenthetical citations indicate with roman numerals which of Walden 's 18 chapters is the source of each quotation.
• The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau , 14 volumes, ed. B. Torrey and F. Allen, New York: Dover, 1962. Originally published in 1906. Parenthetical citations give the date of each entry.
• The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau , ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode, New York: New York University Press, 1958. Citations give the date of the letter quoted.
• Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau's Hitherto “Lost Journal” (1840–1841) , ed. Perry Miller, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. Citations give the date of each entry.
• The Indians of Thoreau: Selections from the Indian Notebooks , ed. Richard Fleck, Albuquerque: Hummingbird Press, 1974.
• Early Essays and Miscellanies , ed. Joseph Moldenhauer et al ., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
• A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , ed. C. Hovde et al ., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Originally published in 1849.
• The Maine Woods , New York: Penguin Books, 1988. Originally published in 1864.
• Cape Cod , ed. J. Moldenhauer, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Originally published in 1865.
• Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings , ed. Bradley Dean, Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993.
• Wild Fruits , ed. Bradley Dean, New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
• Collected Essays and Poems , ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell, New York: Penguin / Library of America, 2001. Contains “Natural History of Massachusetts” (originally published in 1842), “A Winter Walk” (1843), “Civil Disobedience” (1849), “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1860), “Walking” (1862), “Autumnal Tints” (1862), “Life Without Principle” (1863), and “Chastity and Sensuality” (1865).

Selected Works by Other Authors

• Bennett, Jane, 2002, Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Blakemore, Peter, 2000, “Reading Home: Thoreau, Nature, and the Phenomenon of Inhabitation,” in Thoreau's Sense of Place , ed. Richard Schneider, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 115–132.
• Boller, Paul F., 1974, American Transcendentalism, 1830–1860: An Intellectual Inquiry , New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
• Borjesson, Gary, 1994, “A Sounding of Walden 's Philosophical Depth,” Philosophy and Literature , 18: 287–308.
• Buell, Lawrence, 1995, The Environmental Imagination , Cambridge, MA: Belknap / Harvard University Press.
• Cafaro, Philip, 2004, Thoreau's Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue , Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
• Callicott, J. Baird, 1999, Beyond the Land Ethic , Albany: SUNY Press.
• Cavell, Stanley, 1988, In Quest of the Ordinary , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 1992, The Senses of Walden , expanded edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published in 1972.
• –––, 2000, “Night and Day: Heidegger and Thoreau,” in Appropriating Heidegger , ed. J. Faulconer and M. Wrathall, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 30–49.
• Chapman, Robert L., 2002, “The Goat-stag and the Sphinx: The Place of the Virtues in Environmental Ethics,” Environmental Values , 11: 129–144.
• Eldridge, Richard, 2003, “Cavell on American Philosophy and the Idea of America,” in Stanley Cavell , ed. Richard Eldridge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 172–189.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1993, “Nature,” in Essays: First and Second Series , ed. John Gabriel Hunt, New York: Gramercy / Library of Freedom, 282–297. Originally published in 1836.
• Foucault, Michel, 1997, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth , ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: The New Press.
• Frothingham, Octavius B., 1886, Transcendentalism in New England: A History , New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
• Furtak, Rick Anthony, 2003, “Thoreau's Emotional Stoicism,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy , 17: 122–132.
• –––, 2007, “Skepticism and Perceptual Faith: Henry David Thoreau and Stanley Cavell on Seeing and Believing,” Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society , 43: 542–561.
• Garber, Frederick, 1977, Thoreau's Redemptive Imagination , New York: New York University Press.
• Hahn, Stephen, 2000, On Thoreau , Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
• Harding, Walter, 1962, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography , New York: Dover.
• Hodder, Alan D., 2001, Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Jolley, Kelly Dean, 1996, “ Walden: Philosophy and Knowledge of Humankind,” Reason Papers , 21: 36–52.
• Kuklick, Bruce, 2001, A History of Philosophy in America: 1720–2000 , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Löwith, Karl, 1997, Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same , trans. J. Harvey Lomax, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Originally published in 1978.
• McGregor, Robert Kuhn, 1997, A Wider View of the Universe: Henry Thoreau's Study of Nature , Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Milder, Robert, 1995, Reimagining Thoreau , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mooney, Edward, 2009, Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy from Thoreau to Cavell , London: Continuum.
• Moran, Michael, 1967, “Henry David Thoreau,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. Paul Edwards, New York: Free Press, 8: 121–123.
• Nagley, Winfield, 1954, “Thoreau on Attachment, Detachment, and Non-Attachment,” Philosophy East and West , 3: 307–320.
• Norton, Bryan G., 1999, “Pragmatism, Adaptive Management, and Sustainability,” Environmental Values , 8: 451–466.
• Oelschlaeger, Max, 1991, The Idea of Wilderness , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Peck, H. Daniel, 1990, Thoreau's Morning Work , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Richardson, Robert, 1986, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Sattelmeyer, Robert, 1988, Thoreau's Reading , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Sayre, Robert, 1977, Thoreau and the American Indians , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Slovic, Scott, 1992, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing , Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
• Tauber, Alfred, 2001, Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Taylor, Bob Pepperman, 1994, “Henry Thoreau, Nature, and American Democracy,” Journal of Social Philosophy , 25: 46–64.
• Vilhauer, Benjamin, 2008, “The Theme of Time in Thoreau's Cape Cod ,” The Concord Saunterer , 16: 33–44.
• Walls, Laura Dassow, 1995, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science , Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Ward, Andrew, 2007, “Ethics and Observation: Dewey, Thoreau, and Harman,” Metaphilosophy , 38: 591–611.
• Wilshire, Bruce, 2000, The Primal Roots of American Philosophy , University Park, PA: Penn State Press.
• Wilson, Jeffrey, 2004, “Autobiography as Critique in Thoreau,” Journal of Philosophical Research , 29: 29–46.
• The Thoreau Reader , offers text from the eserver project at Iowa State University.
• The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau , definitive scholarly edition from Princeton University Press.
• The Thoreau Society , website maintained by Michael Frederick.
• Henry David Thoreau , on American Transcendentalism Web.

| Augustine, Saint | Cambridge Platonists | character, moral | civil rights | Confucius | Darwinism | Emerson, Ralph Waldo | epistemology: virtue | ethics: environmental | existentialism | friendship | hedonism | integrity | James, William | Kierkegaard, Søren | liberalism | life | Merleau-Ponty, Maurice | mysticism | naturalism | Nietzsche, Friedrich | pantheism | Peirce, Charles Sanders | Plotinus | process philosophy | Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von | Schopenhauer, Arthur | Stoicism | Taoism | transcendentalism | wisdom

Civil Disobedience

In lines 18-22, what does Thoreau say is the purpose of his essay?

I'm sorry, you will need to provide the lines in question.

Log In To Your GradeSaver Account

• Remember me
• Forgot your password?

Create Your GradeSaver Account