A sage for all seasons Walden, Henry Thoreaus classic accounting of breeding in a simple one-room cabin in New England remains, 150 years on, an anti-establishment masterpiece and a pull up stakes to individualism, writes John Updike o Tweet this o [pic] o [pic] o [pic] John Updike The Guardian, Saturday 26 June 2004 Article history [pic] A degree Celsius and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a testis and hermit saint, that the book risks being as grand and uninformed as the Bible. Of the American classics densely arisen in the lay of the nineteenth century - Hawthornes Scarlet Letter (1850), Melvilles Moby-Dick (1851), Whitmans Leaves of Grass (1855), to which we big businessman supplement Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms C abin (1854) as a nation-stirring bestseller and Emersons essays as an inhering breeding of the ground - Walden has contributed most to Americas present sense of itself.

In a time of informational overload, of clamorously inane and ubiquitous electronic entertainment, and of a fraught, globally challenged, ever more demanding workplace, the urge to cook a cabin in the woods and thus reform, simplify, and mitigate ones flavour - to front, in Thoreaus ringing verb, only the innate facts of life - remains strong. The holiday industriousness, so-called, thrives on it, and camper sales, and the spend sanctuary to second homes in the northern forests or the ! westerly mountains, where the pollutions of industry and commerce are relatively light. Simplify, simplify, Walden advises, and we try, even though a 21st-century attainment of a rustic, elemental simplicity entails broad complications of budget and transport. Thoreau would not scorn contemporary efforts to effect his gospel and keep company his example. Walden aims at conversion, and...If you want to get a full essay, pitch it on our website:
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