Walden Pond

Walden. Henry David Thoreau. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2009.8. 499 pp.

Henry David Thoreau lived near a lake that was called Walden Pond for 2 years and 2 months and wrote down what he thought of the lives his townsmen led that was later published with the name Walden. The book was intended to be read by people who lived in New England, but it wasn’t too long after its publication before Walden began to have fame over the western world. When I read Walden ,it was like I’m walking on the shore of the sea, or by the side of Daye Pond near the summit of Taibai Mountain, which was just as amazing as a mental massage. I personally believe that Walden is a definitely great place to find a answer if you are confused about the meaning of life.

Back in the early 19th century when Thoreau wrote the book, America was on the early stage of transition from agriculture age to industry age. With the pace of capitalist society’s industrialization, America’s economy was developing at an incredible speed, which thus caused the money worship and hedonism to dominate people’s mind. And that led to people  valuing nothing but money. It seemed that people’s mental world was dead. Thoreau then moved to the shore of Walden Pond to find his peace with himself. I would like to see Walden as a book that helps to find readers’ peace with themselves and criticize the book under the criteria whether it helps to find readers’ peace with themselves or not and if it does, how far it goes to help.

There is a fundamental theme in Walden, returning to nature. He thought that most of his contemporaries were trapped by family, work and multiple material demands, so that they lost mental pursuit and led materialistic lives. Their mental lives are too limited. As Thoreau wrote in Walden, “Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf”. He wondered what is the essential goal of life, what do we really need to live and how we lead lives better. He thought that his contemporaries could not be considered as having truly lived because they ignored some simpler and better way of life.

When I read the book, I did feel the power of Thoreau’s thought and began to wonder the meaning of my own life and those of people around me. Walden, in my opinion, achieved its goal quite successfully. Walden pictured a imaginary life to us in which we have nothing but necessaries, chase nothing but our real needs and follow nothing but our hearts. However, the book isn’t perfect, as it was written in the early 19th century. Some of the discussion in the book cannot resonate with us today. We readers need to give new meanings to the outdated situations talked about in Walden. But when I compare this book to others on the subject, it is still the most striking one, for Thoreau had gone so far to explore this subject that it seems like other books stay in the surface and keep saying what had already said by Thoreau. If you ask me to find some point that’s not convincing, I would say that in the end of the book,  Thoreau criticized others’ lives too much and slightly deviated from the subject. I sometimes do the same thing as criticizing others’ life, but indeed that’s a bad thing to do for the reason that I focus too much on others rather than on myself. Yet I still consider Walden a remarkable book.

2019-12-22

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