Nor is he exactly easy to read: his sentences are not always as clear as "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," and he can irritate a reader when he turns on him: "It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live." Finding this on page three of Walden, I put the book down. I know that when I first tried to read Walden, at age 15, Thoreau did not speak to my condition or to my life goals, which were, at the time, to get a car and meet girls. The book is conceded to be a masterpiece and figures on every list of essentially American books, but in this day and age, we may legitimately wonder whether Thoreau's experiment in plain living has any meaning at all for a generation weaned on cellphones, the Internet and Nintendo. "It would be some advantage," he wrote, "to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization." Walden, published 150 years ago this month, is Thoreau's report on this modest-almost backyard-experiment in getting back to basics. His idea was to conduct an experiment in simple living, to lead a life according to nature and to determine the real necessities of life. Thoreau lived at the pond for two years, two months and two days.
Thoreau had built himself a 10- by 15-foot cabin with secondhand lumber on shoreline property at Walden owned by Emerson. He had almost no money, but he had friends, by far the most valuable of whom was his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson. He had a degree from HarvardCollege, he had tried teaching and failed, and he possessed some skill in surveying. On the fourth of July, 1845, a month and a half after Sir John Franklin set out from London with the ships Erebus and Terror to find the Northwest Passage, Henry David Thoreau set out from the family home in Concord, Massachusetts, to take up residence at nearby Walden Pond to find himself.
You can walk from the Emerson House to Walden Pond along the Emerson-Thoreau Amble, a forest-and-field footpath."I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." (The Concord Museum used to have another replica, but it was removed in 2019.) The replica of Thoreau's little house, with chimney and woodshed, is near the Walden Pond parking lots. Stones frame the area the little house covered.
He discovered the footings for the chimney This began the custom, and later visitors-ecological May Alcott) had walked out from Concord in 1872 with a visitor and placed The present parking lot and public beach,
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