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    Walden (Condensed Classics): The Landmark Classic of Simple Living--Now in a Special Abridgment
    Walden (Condensed Classics): The Landmark Classic of Simple Living--Now in a Special Abridgment
    Walden (Condensed Classics): The Landmark Classic of Simple Living--Now in a Special Abridgment
    Ebook61 pages2 hours

    Walden (Condensed Classics): The Landmark Classic of Simple Living--Now in a Special Abridgment

    By Henry David Thoreau and Mitch Horowitz

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    “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”







    Here is Henry David Thoreau’s classic work of personal experimentation and nonconformist living, Walden, presented in a special condensation with a new introduction by PEN Award-winning historian Mitch Horowitz







    This concise journey to Thoreau’s cabin in the woods provides you with the most stirring ideas of his original, with its celebration of simple living, self-sufficiency, and following your own inner compass.







    “Read Walden not because it is old and venerated,” Mitch writes in his new introduction. “ Read it because it summons you to all that is new within yourself.” When you finish this work you will have a better sense of your own direction in life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherG&D Media
    Release dateFeb 25, 2019
    ISBN9781722521400
    Author

    Henry David Thoreau

    Henry Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817, and attended Concord Academy and Harvard. After a short time spent as a teacher, he worked as a surveyor and a handyman, sometimes employed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Between 1845 and 1847 Thoreau lived in a house he had made himself on Emerson's property near to Walden Pond. During this period he completed A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and wrote the first draft of Walden, the book that is generally judged to be his masterpiece. He died of tuberculosis in 1862, and much of his writing was published posthumously.

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      Walden (Condensed Classics) - Henry David Thoreau

      INTRODUCTION

      Why Read Walden?

      By Mitch Horowitz

      As I lay down these words to a new introduction to Walden, I am sitting under the gaze of the Great Sphinx at Giza—and I am deeply struck by something. As incredible a monument as the Sphinx is, and as deeply affected as I am by its antiquity and mystery, I had a more emotional response about twenty years ago when I visited the all-but-barren spot where Thoreau built his tiny cabin on the shores of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.

      I will never forget my first visit. It was a snowy day near Christmas and I arrived at the spot to find that the only original remains were of Thoreau’s hearthstone. I knelt down in the snow and cleared away the mounting flurries from the stone. I kissed it—and began to cry. I was so deeply struck that this was the place to which one man came to experience life in its fullness. I later wrote that what was there was a kind of Sphinx of air. When writing that I forgot that Thoreau himself had written: If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost.

      A woman who had been walking in the woods nearby later approached me and said that she saw me kneeling in the snow and wondered what, if anything, was wrong? No, I smiled, I had just dropped my car keys. How can you explain an emotional reaction at such a moment? It’s not part of casual talk.

      In the years since, a few literary critics have questioned Thoreau’s sincerity and have accused him of pursuing hype by living two years on the shores of the Concord town pond in what they considered make-believe hermitage. I believe that that kind of hero-toppling is overblown and, at times, shallow. You can still find in Thoreau’s book observations that could not arise from any but the person who yearns to peer into life at its core.

      Here is one of them: The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself.

      For all of Thoreau’s personal enterprise, why should anyone still read his 1854 memoir, a classic that can seem overly familiar or event a remnant of grade-school assignments?

      Because Walden created a culture of rebellion and independent thought that reflects the best of American life, especially at the current moment when coarseness, unlearned opinion, and groupthink threaten to overrun us.

      The philosophy called Transcendentalism, as shaped by Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and their collaborators, reflected America’s sharpest break with the religious dogma and intellectual conformities of the Old World. Transcendentalism embraced inner experiment, personal experience, and the individual search for meaning.

      The New England Transcendentalists rejected the idea of rewards in the afterlife as the aim of religious practice. Instead, they believed in living out your highest potential in the present, deriving power and purpose from a palpably felt relationship to the Higher. The Transcendentalists also embraced mystical ideas from the East to which they gave a practical and can-do tone, familiarizing Americans with concepts of meditation, karma, and nonattachment. Thoreau and Emerson further drew upon esoteric ideas from Hermeticism—the Greek-Egyptian philosophy that flourished in the decades following Christ—to suggest the creative and causative powers of the human mind, and how to apply them in the here and now.

      Thanks in part to Thoreau, the idea of the individual spiritual search now seems like a national birthright. In polls, most Americans agree that spiritual truth can be found outside of allegiance to any one faith or tradition. Unaffiliated is the fastest-growing category of religious identity. In recovery groups, twelve-step programs, and other nontraditional forms of spiritual search, we are encouraged to seek our own conception of a Higher Power. Even those Americans who affiliate with the traditional faiths are taught to believe that their own paths to the Divine are many—that the gates of prayer and forgiveness are always open; that the house of God, the seat of the ineffable, exists all around us. A spark of divinity, many believe, exists within. Such concepts were foreign, if not heretical, in the hierarchical religiosity of the Old World.

      Consider, for example, the physical structure of the fourteenth-century Pope’s Palace in Avignon, France. In the enormous church that dominates the palace’s ground floor, the front pews were, naturally, reserved for aristocracy. A few rows back,

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