| The
Walden Express
If you don't want to read the
whole book...
The Walden Express is quick tour of Henry Thoreau's Walden; it
does not make every stop, but you should be able to reach some understanding
of why it's an important part of American literature. Any
sampling of Walden is in some way inadequate, but it is better to
read some Walden than none, and far better to read a few chapters
deliberately than to rush through them all.
About our author: Henry Thoreau
has been accused of egotism, but never of false humility. Many of us have
known good friends who were not perfect, and whose imperfections have somehow
made them better friends; Henry has been this sort of friend for a great
many people. Those who never get beyond "Who does this guy think he is?"
miss just about everything. You may disagree with him, and you may not
always understand him, but this is probably true on some level for almost
all Walden readers, and you should not let it get in the way of
enjoying the book.
In 1954, E. B. White wrote, "Many
think it a sermon; many set it down as an attempt to rearrange society;
some think it an excuse for nature-loving; some find it a rather irritating
collection of inspirational puffballs by an eccentric show-off. I think
it none of these. It still seems to me the best youth's companion yet written
by an American, for it carries a solemn warning against the loss of one's
valuables, it advances a good argument for traveling light and trying new
adventures, it rings with the power of powerful adoration, it contains
religious feeling without religious images, and it steadfastly refuses
to record bad news."
This is not an easy book, especially
at the beginning. Perhaps the most common mistake is to dwell on individual
sentences, and ponder the meaning of each phrase. Walden is the
classic "more than the sum of its parts," and it's far easier to pick up
the overall meaning if you take care not to get caught in the details --
just keep reading. But not too fast! Try to "listen" to the words, to catch
the tone, the color, the sound. Henry Thoreau loved words and writing and
ideas. He put a lot of his life into developing his ideas and writing them
down, and most of the time he never really expected to get much back except
for the joy of his work. If you listen carefully, the joy is still there.
There are many, many ways of looking at Walden; one is to see
it as having three functional parts. In part one,
mostly in the first chapter, Thoreau defines what he sees as the major
problem of his time, how work and the acquisition of material goods can
consume your life. Henry did not want live out his life, then "when I came
to die, discover that I had not lived." Part two,
especially in the first, second, and seventh chapters, describes his own
experiment in living a simple life. While careful not to recommend his
specific lifestyle to others, Henry does make a genuine effort to test
his ideas and follow his own advice. Part three
is his (and our) reward for having focused on what is really important.
In Henry's case it is mostly Nature; and as Henry was a Transcendentalist,
the capital "N" indicates his belief that the study of Nature is a spiritual
pursuit. Nina Baym writes...
Thoreau was ¡¦ anxious to define man's proper relationship to a Power
assumed to have created the universe and still actively sustaining it.
As transcendental as Emerson, he believed that this Power could be directly
known by man through intuitions arising from his own internal divinity.
These intuitions are supported by the evidences of nature around him, which,
as it was created by the Mind he shares, can be perceived and understood
by him.
The later chapters of Walden describe an ecstatic communion with
the natural world that would eventually make Henry Thoreau one of the founders
of our modern appreciation of nature and ecology. There is also a seasonal
structure to Walden, from Henry's arrival at the pond in March to
the following spring; this seasonal symbolism suggests a spiritual rebirth.
The
three parts described above are not defined sections within the book, and
they frequently overlap, but the overall development of ideas
does follow the same general sequence.
Any "hermit in the wilderness" interpretation of this book is misleading.
Henry has been compared to a kid camping in his mom's back yard -- he could
always go home for a good meal when he felt like it, and he never claimed
otherwise. This is not a book about Henry Thoreau, nor is it about survival
in the wilderness. It is about personal discovery by a man who took the
time to look carefully at the world he lived in, and who was fascinated
by what he found.
There are tools that can help when
Henry gets obscure. First is the G & C. Merriam Co. 1913 edition of
Webster's
Revised Unabridged Dictionary. If you bookmark (or "add to favorites")
the dictionary page now, it can be easier to look up words later. Second,
there are annotations for many of Thoreau's references that may not be
easily understood; the small numbers in parenthesis are links to the notes
at the bottom of the page. The "more information"
link above the notes connects to biographical links for many of the people
quoted or referenced in Walden.
What follows is an abbreviated Table of Contents
for Walden; six of its eighteen chapters are represented. No text
has been edited -- this is straight Henry. The Walden Express bypasses
two portions of the first chapter, but the remaining chapters listed below
are complete. If you ask any ten Thoreau fans for the six best Walden chapters,
you will almost certainly get ten different lists, and this list should
not be considered definitive. To follow the order below, use the "back"
button to return to this page before connecting to the next chapter in
the "express" sequence...
-
Chapter 1. Economy - Part A - "No way
of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What
everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to
be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for
a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields."
-
Chapter 1. Economy - Part C - "Near the
end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden
Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down
some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber."
-
Chapter 1. Economy - Part D - "Nations
are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves
by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken
to smooth and polish their manners?"
-
Chapter 2. Where I Lived, & What I Lived
for - "Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a
day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical
nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force
and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial
music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air--to a
higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit,
and prove itself to be good, no less than the light."
-
Chapter 5. Solitude - "This is a delicious
evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through
every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself.
As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though
it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract
me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump
to usher in the night, and the note of the whip-poor-will is borne on the
rippling wind from over the water."
-
Chapter 7. The Bean-Field - "Removing
the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this
weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought
in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet
grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass--this was my daily work."
-
Chapter 13. House-Warming - "At length
the winter set in good earnest, just as I had finished plastering, and
the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission
to do so till then. Night after night the geese came lumbering in the dark
with a clangor and a whistling of wings, even after the ground was covered
with snow, some to alight in Walden, and some flying low over the woods
toward Fair Haven, bound for Mexico."
-
Chapter 17. Spring - "One attraction
in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity
to see the Spring come in. ... Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually
melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see how I
shall get through the winter without adding to my wood-pile, for large
fires are no longer necessary."
In her 1985 introduction to Walden, Joyce
Carol Oates wrote, "... so superb a stylist is Thoreau we always
have the sense as we read of a mind flying brilliantly before us, throwing
off sparks, dazzling and iridescent and seemingly effortless as a butterfly
in flight."
"Thoreau understood himself as physical part of that field of dirt that
gave birth to beans, cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, pigweed, sorrel,
piper-grass and many other forms of life. The pure and crystalline Walden
Pond was a part of his soul." - George Gow
"Thoreau’s quiet, one-man revolution ... has become a symbol of the
willed integrity of human beings, their inner freedom, and their ability
to build their own lives." - The
Columbia Encyclopedia
An essay by Scott Ardley looks at
Walden
as an experiment with life:
"Thoreau believed that every single person was perfect, remarkable, brilliant,
wonderful, superb, and a poet. He wondered why they spent their lives doing
such boring, ordinary things."
More suggestions : The main
message of this book
More help...
A little cleverness... advice on
writing
a paper on Thoreau
All of Walden, drawings,
photos, more Walden sites:
Walden Table
of Contents
[ 홈 ] [ 위로 ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-A ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-B ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-C ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-D ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-E ] [ Walden - Chapter 2 ] [ Walden - Chapter 3 ] [ Walden - Chapter 4 ] [ Walden - Chapter 5 ] [ Walden - Chapter 6 ] [ Walden - Chapter 7 ] [ Walden - Chapter 8 ] [ Walden - Chapter 9-A ] [ Walden - Chapter 9-B ] [ Walden - Chapter 10 ] [ Walden - Chapter 11 ] [ Walden - Chapter 12 ] [ Walden - Chapter 13 ] [ Walden - Chapter 14 ] [ Walden - Chapter 15 ] [ Walden - Chapter 16 ] [ Walden - Chapter 17 ] [ Walden - Chapter 18 ] [ The Walden Express ]
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