瓦尔登湖

When Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) set out for the Walden woods in Massachusetts on Independence Day, 1845, the United States was still a young nation. The book that he published in 1854, Walden, is based upon his experiences as a youth. The young don’t yet know how to live. They must experience the world and reflect upon their experiences in order to gain knowledge. The same is true of a nation. The book’s status as a classic shows that what Thoreau had to say echoed in the souls of other Americans. And it’s not just his fellow countrymen who relate to the story – Walden is read all over the world. If it can be enjoyed by non-Americans, this is because Thoreau set out to find what the basic principles of life are, no matter where we’re from. We may not agree with his answers, but we identify with his quest for meaning. This is probably why Walden is still loved by so many people, even 200 years after Thoreau’s birth, the anniversary of which will fall on July 12 this year. Thoreau looked around him and saw the beginnings of industrialism and found it ugly. He disliked the factories and he disliked what they produced. He objected to consumerism, suspectingthat it took people away from their real concerns. Men and women lived lives of “quiet desperation” because modern life was leading them astray. In Walden, he would find what he hoped was really “essential”. As he writes near the beginning of the book, “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.” This is the major theme of the book. He hoped nature could be his guide and his teacher. We should not think that Thoreau was simply withdrawing from the world. He didn’t go to Walden only to stare into the surface of lakes and observe wildlife. He went there because he was disgusted by modern civilization. Ironically, some of the people that Thoreau met around Walden wanted the opposite to him. If he wanted to escape from civilization, they wanted to get out of nature and leave it for a more exciting existence in the town. Thoreau was greatly influenced by ancient Greece and Rome. And in a sense, the philosophy of the book he wrote is very classical. Socrates once said that the “unexamined life is not worth living”, but what was Thoreau doing in his cabin in the woods if not examining life? Not only was he examining his own, but the life of America and its people in general.