| The Walden Express is an abbreviated tour of 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's better to
read some Walden than none, and far better to read a few chapters
deliberately than to rush through them all.
Thoreau Reader: Home
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About our author: Many
of us have known 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 virtually all Walden readers, and you should not let it keep
you from 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. Usually, it's best not to spend too much time
on individual sentences, pondering the meaning of each phrase. Walden
is the classic "more than the sum of its parts," and it's 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 much of the time he never expected to get a lot back, except
for the joy of his work. If you listen carefully, the joy is still there.
There are 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 to 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 own specific lifestyle, 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 the capital
"N" reflects his belief that the study of the natural world 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.
... 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 a spiritual communion with
the natural world that would eventually make 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 symbolism suggests a spiritual rebirth. And
as Ken Kifer pointed out,
"quite often any words would be inadequate at expressing many of
Thoreau's non-verbal insights into truth. Thoreau must use non-literal
language to express these notions, and the reader must reach out
to understand." 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 self-sufficiency.
Walden
describes an experiment in living well;
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 and excited by what he
found.
There are tools that can help
when Henry gets obscure. Small numbers in parenthesis within the text are
links to annotations for many of Thoreau's references, some of which have
become more obscure since Henry's time. If you bookmark the inquiry page
for the G & C. Merriam Co. 1913 edition of Webster's
Dictionary, it can be easier to look up the more obscure words.
What follows is an abbreviated
Table of Contents for Walden; six of the eighteen
chapters are represented. The Walden Express bypasses two portions of the
first chapter, but the remaining chapters listed below are complete; no
text has been edited. If you ask any ten Thoreauvians for the six best
Walden
chapters, you will almost certainly get ten different lists, and this one
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. If you are really pressed for time, try to read
at least part of each chapter...
-
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 - "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 a 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
Ask Jimmy - from a Walden chat board:
collected
student questions & answers
More suggestions from Jimmy - The
main message of this book
A little cleverness... advice on
writing
a paper on Thoreau
More help...
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Comments and questions to: Richard Lenat - rlenat@yahoo.com
Copyright © 2004-2008, Richard Lenat, All Rights Reserved
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