"Screw you all. I'm going to live in the woods for a while."
He took him to the woods, for lack of much else of substance to do. He was classically educated, Ivy League, studying Greek, reading Homer in the Greek, as was the fashion of the day, that so much of the curricula bedrock of the day dovetailed with the Ancient Greek language.
He started a school that failed, and for a time, he was even Ralph Waldo Emerson's housekeeper, just earning a wage and on occasion writing a book.
A unique man, educated, but in plain language, he could justify at length so much of his own existence.
Consider it: a person without a proper career. In today's age of goals and devices, one works a career towards a dream home, and then, Dr Martin Seligman and others have studies that indicate that the peak of happiness in this modern existence is a vacation of at least one week. So the dream is to take a break from the dream, maybe.
Thoreau took most of a year, near Concord Massachusetts, camped-out in a self-built cabin on the edge of Walden Pond. He had some 30 dollars in groceries, mostly staples, as he seemed to live on a kind of hard-tack or "hoe-cake" or something, a simple fritter of sorts of simply flour and water.
His approach seems to be an outsider's look, as in an earlier writing, the "Two Weeks...", in a chapter on "Sundays", he looked at religion from what seemed to be an outsider's perspective, uniquely original, taking on eyes of someone seeing for the first time, and explaining as if speaking to someone with no knowledge of the thing. Clinical, like, and a nice little time capsule for the modern era.
There was, of course, the "Two Weeks On The Potomac and Merrimack Rivers" and his "Cape Cod", in which he gave a nice naturalist view of the flora and fauna of the countryside, though he dips less into that literary vein in Walden.
The ultimate bit of minimalist philosophy, perhaps, in a man, not of property or stature, with perhaps a bit of an odd reputation. And of the modern era, we note that his work survives so-called "counter culture" because he was an abolitionist, in the present lensing of history: one of the "good guys". A day laborer quite often, working a harvest, helping raise a barn, for his income, then finding fame in posterity later as an author, eclipsing to an extent the Transcendentalist Emerson in his lasting influence.
Indeed, a first edition of such a book as Walden would be a great prize for my own person if I were not such a downcast poor day laborer myself, but I have annotated copies in plain print, and a digital Thoreau, "Complete Works", with of course, access to Thoreau with Gutenberg holdings and the Walden Pond Society.
In reading Walden, we have kind of an intoxication of neuroplasticity, pathways in the brain being routed, something in the unique quality of the writing, the originalist kind of perspective, the renaissance man of the youngling America, and we find that thinking can be intoxicating, and thinking about thinking is an even higher intoxication, as Thoreau talks about laying in the mid-morning sun on the bank of the lake, and so forth, having his idle time outside of tending his garden, reading Homer.
Consider this somewhat "contemplative", a time of being lost in one's thoughts. As is said in the King James, "God man made upright, but man has sought many devices". I note the overbearing presence of the cell phone in modernity. Android now gives the casual user a usage report weekly, tallying total hours of usage, and even presenting in terms of metrics, a comparison of week-to-week numbers.
Thoreau was minimalist, before minimalist was cool, and a "contemplative" but not in the religious sense.
Note that Civil Disobedience is not mentioned here. It's a work for its own page, I think, worthy of so much mention for not only its substance, but its influence in the history of American Civil Rights.
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