Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), 1854
A two-year experiment in living cheaply beside a pond, written as a running argument with your own busyness, your possessions, and the life you assumed you had to lead. A quiet, stubborn walk through woods and arguments, by turns serene and defiant, paced to thought rather than plot.
Feels like serenity, defiance and wonder. About freedom, nature and solitude.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy nature writing, plain-living experiments, and essays that question work and possessions. Be ready for nineteenth-century prose that can be long-breathed and digressive, with passages of accounting and argument that ask for patience.
Why read it
It offers a bracing way to examine what you own and what you hurry toward, and a short, forceful case for conscience over convenience.
Pages from the book
What if you're not late, just keeping time to something else?
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not? The light that overwhelms you may be only the first light.
I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. The art nobody hangs in a gallery: shaping the day itself.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. More passages from Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau.Thoreau built his cabin on land Ralph Waldo Emerson owned, and he was only about a mile and a half from the center of Concord, not deep in the wilderness.
Books that feel like this
All books like Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- Is Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy nature writing, plain-living experiments, and essays that question work and possessions. Be ready for nineteenth-century prose that can be long-breathed and digressive, with passages of accounting and argument that ask for patience.
- What is Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience like?
- A quiet, stubborn walk through woods and arguments, by turns serene and defiant, paced to thought rather than plot. Feels like serenity, defiance and wonder. About freedom, nature and solitude.
- What should I read after Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience?
- If you liked Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, try The Enchiridion (Epictetus), Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson) and The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde).
A taste of the feed
What if the terror was never in the thing itself?
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things. Thus death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death, that it is terrible. When, therefore, we are hindered or disturbed, or grieved, let us never impute it to others, but to ourselves—that is, to our own views. It is the action of an uninstructed person to reproach others for his own misfortunes; of one entering upon instruction, to reproach himself; and one perfectly instructed, to reproach neither others nor himself.
The Enchiridion · Epictetus
Writing a page and later wondering who wrote it.
Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.
Essays · Ralph Waldo Emerson
How the upper classes turn a bereavement into a background check.
To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. Who was your father? He was evidently a man of some wealth. Was he born in what the Radical papers call the purple of commerce, or did he rise from the ranks of the aristocracy?
The Importance of Being Earnest · Oscar Wilde
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed