Henry David Thoreau
Walden. Life in the Woods
'He loved Nature so well, was so happy in her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities and the sad work which their refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling. The axe was always destroying his forest.' – Ralph Waldo Emerson about his friend Thoreau
In 1845, a century after Rousseau had called for a 'return to nature', the 28-year-old Henry David Thoreau retreated to Walden Pond, a small lake in Massachusetts. In a hut he built by himself, far away from the cities and the rapidly accelerating America of his times, he searched for a life that was not guided by property, but by what he called deliberation. He spent two years in this voluntary solitude, observed nature, the seasons, his own thought processes. Since then, his account of this self-experiment has become a contemplative and alternative lifestyle classic all over the world.
Walden is a plea for complete liberty, as opposed to civil liberty, which bows the knee to the logic of work, progress and conventions. Thoreau wrote 'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately' – a sentence that has since urged generations to not lose the essential to the world's hustle and bustle. However, Walden is also a poetic manifesto for a life in harmony with nature. It speaks of simplicity, of self-sufficiency and of the kind of wildness that Thoreau considered to be a condition for true humanity. Today, his thoughts, inspired by the quiet of a lake, speak to us louder than ever before: they are a legacy against alienation, an appeal for the dignity of simplicity.
Right to read the translation: © 2020, Manesse Verlag, Zurich / Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe GmbH
