Just picked up Thoreau’s Walden again for the first time since high school. It’s been a couple years shy of a decade since HS, and man… this book was amazing then, it’s brilliant now. Trying to figure out why I loved this so much and why I still love it. The mix of philosophical musing combined with survivalism/asceticism is positively intoxicating to me.
Especially his thoughts in the first chapter about how most men live quiet lives of desperation and are generally dissociated from the real gift that is a conscious, reflective, examined life… I work in an extremely demanding and fast-paced profession (biglaw M&A) and the words hit me so much harder than they did in high school.
Any other Walden/Thoreau fans here?
I’m a lover of his writing for both what it says and the way it’s said. To me, Thoreau is the best writer. Or prose stylist, if you must.
Relevant to some of the other replies–yes, the writing in his journals is often wonderful but much of it is solely descriptive observations of local plant life. If you’re interested in them but not up to that try The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals ed. Odell Shepard for a start, as it’s a very good selection of passages from it.
As well, if you’re already familiar with him then you might want to keep an eye out for The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Walter Harding. Not only does it dispel the notion that Thoreau was asocial but it has some unexecellable writing: the magnificent passage beginning ‘Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round . . . .’ is as I discovered many years after first coming across it from one of his letters.