I was first exposed to Walden and Henry David Thoreau, like many, during high school. And like many, tripled the amount of ink on its pages, underlining, circling and annotating its margins. I make it a point to reread it every handful of years.
Simple as it were, Thoreau’s goal was to see if he might not live by himself in the woods. Well, that’s probably the short version he maybe told curious inquirers anyway. The lessons shared with Walden, and immortalized in American literature canon, are deep, yet tantalizingly simple still: “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.” In what pursuit could be more urgent, more noble?
