As he points out in "Solitude," a man thinking and a man working are always alone. The week included a great deal of nature, time and space, and mostly a complete lack of wifi and cellphone access. . In writing Walden, Thoreau tells of the course of his own spiritualization — a process of intense change and development — and counsels the reader on how to elevate. Are you an author? I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.". Reading Response: Where I Lived, and What I lived For “Time is but the stream I go afishing in” (Thoreau, 38). In Walden, as throughout Thoreau's writings, anything that encourages individual conformity to the status quo — society, institutions, the historical past — is criticized. Removing #book# But the woodcutter resists rising beyond his animal nature, and consequently offers no insight into the integration of man's animal and spiritual sides. Find all the books, read about the author, and more. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. In "Economy," Thoreau compares primitive and civilized life: "[T]his points to an important distinction between the civilized man and the savage . Where I Lived and What I Lived For Analysis Henry David Thoreau, the author of this piece, lived in the mid-1800s. In "Higher Laws," Thoreau discusses preoccupation with hunting and fishing as one stage in the evolution toward spiritual consciousness. In the chapter "The Ponds," Thoreau suggests integration of nature as reality and nature as symbol. . There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure—news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve–month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. He is so specific and precise that many readers have approached Walden as a manifesto of particular social, economic, and political points of view, in the process sometimes overlooking Thoreau's larger purpose in describing his life at the pond. Thoreau's spiritual journey provides one example of striving toward the absolute. As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions—they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers—and serve up a bull–fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. As Thoreau writes in "The Village," we need to be lost to "appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature," to "begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations." We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. Men should stay away from the busy places where crowds congregate, and seek instead "the perennial source of life." We tend to "esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star." If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? The book affirms change over stasis, present over past, vitality over stagnation, life over death. What is a house but a sedes, a seat?—better if a country seat. Thoreau emphasizes the crushing, numbing effect of materialism and commercialism on the individual's life. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever.". This passage reflects upon his selection of a place to live and why he wanted to live simply. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining–rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. . But it turned out as I have said. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk. Throughout Walden, Thoreau devotes considerable attention to the subject of the simple life. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. Described in "House-Warming" as "an independent structure, standing on the ground and rising through the house to the heavens," Thoreau's chimney symbolizes individual aspiration toward the spiritual and infinite. But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. Hunting and fishing, expressions of man's animal aspect, comprise one form of intense involvement with nature. Through the pond, through nature, man sits at the gateway between earth and heaven. Thoreau recounts his personal quest to demonstrate to his readers the possibility of surmounting the obstacles that materialistic society places in the path of the individual. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good." . . As it dives into Walden's depths, the loon that shows up repeatedly in the book stands for man in search of higher understanding. They simultaneously have the life-altering power to change a man. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. The village is full of shops that beckon to the passerby, but their materialistic appeal distracts a man from the pursuit of nature and spirit. Where I Live and What I Lived For is a collection of essays by the 19th century philosopher Henry David Thoreau extracted from the book of essays Walden and Civil Disobedience. I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. The two years of his actual stay at Walden are compressed into a single year to provide narrative coherence and movement and to build toward the presentation of rebirth in "Spring." I did not need to go outdoors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. It is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. He writes in "The Village" of being lost in a snowstorm, which bestows a heightened appreciation of nature and an ability to see familiar things anew. Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. He is both stout and a "great consumer of meat." Optimism about change is evident in his own story and implicit in his advice to the reader. He points out the forces that dull and subjugate the inner man, materialism and constant labor in particular. . Society, institutions, and the traditions of the past — expressions of the status quo — constitute the major hindrances to change throughout Walden. His mood is integrally connected to season. In "The Village," he exposes the at once comic and grotesque seductiveness of the shops on Concord's Mill Dam, and describes his own hasty escape from town. Thoreau writes, "In him the animal man chiefly was developed. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. After he has taken care of the essentials, however, "there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced," and ultimately to turn his thoughts "into the heavens above.". All rights reserved. the life of a civilized people [is made] an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed." If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. This is depicted in the way he describes his love and adoration for nature. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. If the bell rings, why should we run? Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. As were the mounts whereon his flocks We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. How could I have looked him in the face? For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. Engage students in your virtual … Rhetorical Analysis of “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” Through paragraphs 7 and 8, Henry David Thoreau utilizes certain rhetorical strategies to convey his attitude toward life, generally being that he dislikes the impostor way of life in which everyone lives now. . To be awake is to be alive. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. There was pasture enough for my imagination. For my part, I could easily do without the post–office. Thoreau writes that Walden was dead, and is now alive again. The story of the artist of Kouroo, who aspired to perfection and, in the process of single-mindedly achieving it, transcended time and mortality, provides another. Independence of thought requires self-reliance and some degree of separation from others. In Walden, Thoreau exalts the change required for individual spiritualization. He approaches things with practical intelligence, displays an almost philosophical outlook, has a certain "positive originality," and is capable of "thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion." If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life—I wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage. Field cannot decide whether he wants to go fishing. I cannot count one. My head is hands and feet. . I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. White's Once More to the Lake At first glance, Henry Thoreau’s, Where I Lived and What I Lived For, and E.B. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. He writes at the beginning of "Sounds" of the "language which all things and events speak without metaphor." If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. To enjoy these advantages I was ready to carry it on; like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders—I never heard what compensation he received for that—and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted, if I could only afford to let it alone. The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose to describe more at length, for convenience putting the experience of two years into one. Nature itself changes cyclically, but the cycle of the seasons — the cycle of life — is repeated over and over. Thoreau underscores this coexistence of animal and higher qualities in "Solitude," in which he describes man as simultaneously a physical entity and as an intellectual spectator within his own body. In solitude, there is a sufficiency of companionship in self and nature, and the possibility of spiritual understanding. The pond is the work of the divine creator, a point of access to the universal for the alert seeker. Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. Need writing where i lived and what i lived for essay? In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand–and–one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. "Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe"—and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself. One of his father's ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. If he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. At the beginning of "The Pond in Winter," he awakens in a state of anxiety, with "the impression that some question has been put to me, which I have been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep." He writes of his own urge to gobble down a raw woodchuck as an expression of animal impulse that is as much a part of him as of any man. We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? As the ants and the pygmies described by the first sentence in paragraph 2, the motives they seek have a purpose, but out of the group what they do are things which do not benefit themselves in the long run. He requires not only of himself but of every writer "a simple and sincere account of his own life." . Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow. In the essay “Where I lived and what I lived for,” Henry David Thoreau’s [1817-1862] expression appeals me of the importance and value of living the simple life nature affords, that I believe, it is as necessary now as it was back in his time. Openness to taking new perspectives is essential to individual change. But never in Walden does Thoreau suggest that every man should move to Walden Pond, bake his own bread, and grow beans. In "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," Thoreau urges, "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! Look at a meeting–house, or a court–house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling–house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. He writes of fishing on the pond at night: It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. The individual's awareness of self, of nature, and of higher purpose provides the key to surpassing animal nature. Henry David Thoreau, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Lit2Go Edition, (1854), accessed February 14, 2021, https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/90/walden-or-life-in-the-woods/1538/where-i-lived-and-what-i-lived-for/. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. . If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would the "Mill–dam" go to? The man who has "seeds of a better life in him" may progress to a broader, more poetic understanding of the natural world, and ultimately achieve true spirituality. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Quotes Showing 1-6 of 6 “While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them” ― Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale—I have always cultivated a garden—was, that I had had my seeds ready. But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. He was one of the major figures of Transcendentalism, alongside writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Time is but the stream I go a–fishing in. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind." If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done. Throughout his life, Thoreau was an author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. One is enough. . It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. . Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry—determined to make a day of it. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real–estate broker by my friends. Simplify, simplify. Where I lived and What I Lived For “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself” (Thoreau 3). In "Spring," the process of rebirth, the leap from death to life, represents radical change. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, wood–lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow, perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. Walden chronicles spiritual growth, but the progress of this growth is not linear. The nearest that I came to actual possession was when I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife—every man has such a wife—changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Thoreau distinguishes between solitude and loneliness. . The chapter concludes with the seasons "rolling on into summer" in a predictable cycle of endless change. The portion of this paragraph from this point to the end forms the text for composer Gregory Spears’ song “Where I Lived, And What I Lived For,” Track #8 of The Opera America Songbook – Volume 1. The man who minds his own business — tends to his own spiritual health — is the true reformer of society. Avast! Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. Thoreau uses an astonishing range of metaphors to characterize the spiritual quest. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Retrieved February 14, 2021, from https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/90/walden-or-life-in-the-woods/1538/where-i-lived-and-what-i-lived-for/. He does not prescribe living at Walden as a remedy for the spiritual ills of others; he offers it only as an example. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was but dry land. Transformation and inertia are presented as conflicting forces, balanced against one another in a kind of universal tension. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp–post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. Openness to change and to new perspectives is necessary to elevate the rudimentary link with nature to a higher plane of awareness and understanding. . . Cite them and discuss their effect. One value even of the smallest well is, that when you look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular. A summary of Part X (Section2) in Henry David Thoreau's Walden. From any particular point of existence, the universal is accessible. . "I am monarch of all I survey, It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. Where I Lived and What I Lived For By Henry David Thoreau 1854 Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American author, essayist, abolitionist, and philosopher. He writes in "Economy": . We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. His chimney, symbol of the narrator himself in "House-Warming," is described as an independent structure. We think that that is which appears to be. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. At the beginning of "Winter Animals," he describes looking at the landscape from the frozen surface of Flint's Pond and marveling at the sensation of never having seen it before. I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last. Our life is frittered away by detail. . And in discussing just why particular species, and only those species, exist in nature, Thoreau comments that "they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.". As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Lit2Go Edition). For more information, including classroom activities, readability data, and original sources, please visit https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/90/walden-or-life-in-the-woods/1538/where-i-lived-and-what-i-lived-for/. . Walden is Thoreau's entreaty to his reader to begin a new life. I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. But the symbolic pond seems bottomless to some men, and will continue to be so perceived as long as men need to believe in the infinite. I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail." . Until these needs are met, a person cannot rise above them. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Summary and Analysis. The light of each new day brings fresh opportunity for understanding. It transcends time and change. In "Baker Farm," he sketches the character of John Field, a poor man who regards as necessities tea, coffee, meat, and other dispensables that are obtained only at the cost of precluding higher life. He clearly shares Emerson's Transcendental understanding of nature (expressed in Nature in 1836) as symbolic of spirit. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. Physical and intellectual independence from narrowing influences protect the individual's ability to make the spiritual journey. Thoreau stresses how costly this assimilation is. . But, as the author writes in "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For": . He discusses the virtues of the farm, but in the end is content not to have compromised his poverty by acquiring it, and he says he took with him the beauty of the landscape, which is the best part of the farm. When Thoreau describes his July 1846 arrest in the village for refusing to pay his poll tax, his freedom to protest slavery and the Mexican War is compromised by government as personified in the jailer (Sam Staples, unnamed in Walden). What a worthy messenger!" I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. February 14, 2021. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau was one of the most important thinkers of his time in America and is still widely read today. 7 benefits of working from home; Jan. 26, 2021. A few actually embark upon the spiritual quest. This is always exhilarating and sublime. Man (as Thoreau writes in "Spring") wants to understand things, and yet, at the same time, craves the inexplicable. Excerpted from "Walden," the essay by Henry David Thoreau explains why he went to live in the woods. and any corresponding bookmarks? . Higher laws and divinity are absolute, but they are transformative for the man sensitive to the meanings of nature. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. Even for Thoreau, his Walden experiment is only one expression of the spiritual impulse.
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