Walden
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
“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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
What would happen if you left your (sub)urban life as you knew it to live in the woods? Walden Pond is one man’s answer. In the mid 1800’s American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau undertook an experiment to live for two years, two months, and two days as simply and self-sufficiently as possible in a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond outside of Concord, Massachusetts. He looks both outward and inward as he details and opines on his natural surroundings, farm and maintenance work, society, spirituality, literature, and human nature.