Life, an Experiment

from Thoreau: A Sublime Life (A. Dan)

In 1845, a few miles from Concord Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau built a small cabin in the woods where he would live (self-sustainably) for two years, recording his experiences in his journal and in what would later become one of the great works of American literature, Walden; or, Life in the Woods. This wasn’t a failed flight from society, as some of his critics claim, but an experiment to see what life was like in its barest form, stripped of the comforts that most people now consider essential:

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 practise 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

Living this simple but no doubt difficult life, he realised that there is a…