Life in the Woods

Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

Life in the Woods

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

Henry David Thoreau

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15 responses to “Life in the Woods”

  1. Jennifer Butler Basile Avatar
    Jennifer Butler Basile

    When I was fifteen years old, I fell in love with Thoreau and swore I’d go live in a shack off the grid, off the land. Then I realized I’d had to pay taxes on the land, etc., etc. and my dream was crushed. Pastoral utopia aside, we can still live deliberately.

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    1. That’s amazing, thank you for sharing. It’s pretty hard for us to do so, I wouldn’t mind seceding from society and living on land away from it all, but we can live deliberately as you say. Feel free to share more about this love of Thoreau!

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  2. Beautiful post! We did a Thoreau section in our honors English class in high school once. Really enjoyed it, too–Walden was a nice break from the depressing literature we read half the time, and Thoreau’s writing was more approachable than Emerson’s, which we studied just before.

    Do you know what type of trees those are? For a moment I thought they were birches but they are very lacking in branches!

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