Read this when
Walden
'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.' Thoreau said it in 1854 and your group chat said it this morning. 🌲
Who it's for
Thoreau builds a small cabin by Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, lives there from July 1845 to September 1847, and reports the experiment: what the cabin cost, what he ate, what he read, the sounds, animals and seasons of the pond.
Feelings it meets
What it is
Walden is Henry David Thoreau's 1854 account of living in a cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts from July 1845 to September 1847, on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Organized in chapters such as 'Economy', 'Solitude', 'Sounds', 'The Ponds' and 'Spring', it combines a reckoning of what simple living requires with reflections on self-reliance, reading, solitude and nature.
Where to find it
Public domain in the US: free on Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks; free audiobooks on LibriVox; also in print and from libraries.
Before you start
Age: Ages 14+
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.Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”
