Walden Pond

I’ve just about had it with
all this nonsense about
Living deliberately!
Well, not all of us have Walden Pond
in our back pocket.
But we carry copies of Walden
in our back pocket,
right next to our last fiver.

After a lecture on Transcendentalism:

Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau is considered to be one of the first published environmentalist texts, detailing the two years Thoreau spent detached from society, living in a hut by Walden pond near the town of Concord, the birthplace of literary |Transcendentalism.

Or so the story goes. According to my lecturer, the hut was only a short walk out of town, where he would shop, and his mother would often visit to do his laundry, so it really isn’t that impressive.

The famous line ‘I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately’ strikes deep to our hearts, but less so when we realize we don’t all have the money and time to build a hut by any pond we want, so it all seems a bit elitist nowadays.