Walden

A sage for all seasons
Walden, Henry Thoreaus classic accountancy of breeding in a simple one-room cabin in New England remains, 150 years on, an anti-establishment masterpiece and a will to individualism, writes John Updike

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John Updike
The Guardian, Saturday 26 June 2004
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A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a testis and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and uninformed as the Bible. Of the American classics densely arisen in the middle of the nineteenth century - Hawthornes Scarlet Letter (1850), Melvilles Moby-Dick (1851), Whitmans Leaves of Grass (1855), to which we might supplement Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin (1854) as a nation-stirring bestseller and Emersons essays as an indispensable breeding of the ground - Walden has contributed most to Americas present sense of itself.




In a time of informational overload, of clamorously inane and ubiquitous electronic entertainment, and of a fraught, globally challenged, ever more demanding workplace, the urge to build a cabin in the woods and thus reform, simplify, and cleanse ones flavour - to front, in Thoreaus ringing verb, only the essential facts of life - remains strong. The holiday industriousness, so-called, thrives on it, and camper sales, and the weekend sanctuary to second homes in the northern forests or the western mountains, where the pollutions of industry and commerce are relatively light. Simplify, simplify, Walden advises, and we try, even though a 21st-century attainment of a rustic, elemental simplicity entails considerable complications of budget and transport.
Thoreau would not scorn contemporary efforts to effect his gospel and keep company his example. Walden aims at conversion, and...If you want to get a full essay, pitch it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com



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