It's been a little while now since I've read Henry David Thoreau's Walden but I'll do my best to write from recollection. Basically, Thoreau goes to live on Walden pond in a little town in Massachusetts for two years. He built the place himself and he starts to grow his own beans, I think. This is for him an experiment in living.
What he hopes to achieve is a life lived simply and deliberately. What this means is a little difficult to ascertain but it seems to me this. He wants to be more mindful and appreciative of what the natural world has to offer him and not be so dependent on the technology and busy city life. By stripping away all of these amenities, he thinks he can arrive at some deeper understanding about his place in the world and what really matters to him.
The life he describes is somewhat paradoxical. As much as he protests to not being lonely, there is an air of loneliness to his writing. And he's never one to turn down the company of strangers who come to visit him. He also seems to be curious about the people who spend their days retrieving blocks of ice from the pond to go back and sell at the market (Thoreau is only a couple miles out of town). But Thoreau does, in spite of all that, begin to feel genuinely as though he has learned something about the human spirit, namely that it's all right to march to the beat of your own dream, to obey your higher spiritual laws, and find beauty in nature, even in its occasional wildness and savagery.
Walden isn't a perfect book but no book ever is. I'd heard some advice to read the first chapter last and that's what I did. I think it changes the experience of reading the book for the better if you read the first chapter as a kind of afterword. Just my two cents.
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This little book has a big heart and is well worth reading on your Kindle. I have some printed versions, but recently had the opportunity to visit Walden pond (a state reservation) near Concord, MA, and loaded the Kindle version on my Kindle Fire as I could then read it without having my book suffer travel wear and tear. So I took the train from Boston, somewhere close to Harvard University, towards Concord, and spent the day walking the pathways surrounding the pond. I could read the book and search for matching descriptions of the pond area as described by Henry Thoreau. That was a lot of fun. The train line still runs on its original track, and you can imagine Henry listening to the whistle and seeing the smoke of the train. The park and pond is beautiful, and combined with the book and Henry Thoreau's stories, transfers one back in time to another world, a world that was both different and similar to the world that we know. There is a life-size model of Henry Thoreau's cabin (he lived in this cabin for 2 years and 2 months, and started construction late March 1845) in the parking lot across the road, and construction has started on a new visitors centre. Load this book on your Kindle and visit the pond...
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Though written 170 years ago, this book is a very good look at someone else's opinion of what matters most in life to them.
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