Henry David Thoreau Essay, Research Paper

“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.”

Cody Clare

Oct 3 1997

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was a man who’s ideas were light years ahead of the time which he was alive. Thoreau was born in 1817 and was alive from the time of industrial revlution, the westward expansion, and the pinnical of the slave trade. America was exploding with new inventions, and discoveries. Henry David Thoreau was the kind of person who was not at all impressed by all of this business, that is illistrated by his two year solo stay on waldon pond. Thoreau was more intrested in nature, people and thoughts, which at that time was not a common thing to be involved with. Thoreau had been to Harvard University, most of the people who graduated from there went on to become doctors, lawyers, or business tycoons. Thoreau went on to live alone in the woods and write about nature.

During a very materialistic time Henry David Thoreau and his transcendentalists (which were lead by Emerson) were focusing more on the inner self, and thought and philosophies that they had about what their society had become with the come of the industrial revolution. Our country was expanding at an exponential rate. In under fifty years we had come from east of the Appalachians to voyaging past the Mississippi and into the great west. As far as most Americans were concerned America was endless, it had no limits. Our industries were booming with the cotton being grown south and being shipped into new England where we were pumping out 323 million yard of cotton a year. Between the years of 1800 and 1850 there were fifteen new states added to the union. Towns were swelling into great sizes, devloping into cities, railroads and canals were breaking up the country into something ?liveable?. For many life was great, the opportunity in a unclaimed world was still there. However for Emerson and Henry David Thoreau they saw this as a negative. Could you possibly imagine someone thinking what America was a negative thing. Thoreau was an extremely educated man and I think that he viewed all of these people who were all caught up in the system to be just ignorant followers. The way that he combated the ideals that our country had developed was through writing. Thoreau kept a every day journal of his life, in which he made observations about nature, animals, life and other things. These journals were the roots of all of his books, speeches, and essays. These writings were his way of speaking out against society?s ideals not against society, if Thoreau?s intent was to speak out against society I?ll bet he would be remembered as an extremist not a peaceful philosopher.

Henry David Thoreau showed a very import and different from the normal view of life. While the thoughts of manifest destiney were rushing through most people?s heads, Thoreau was writing about how it is possible to be totally self reliant, how man and animal can live as one, and to live ?delibratly?. Many other people of his time were down south: owning 100?s of slaves to work cotton fields, west: killing and moving the indians to aid in our westward expansion. Others were raping the land by logging, mining, hunting, trapping, and settling. Henry David Thoreau is famous because of his eutopic life. He is faous for his insiteful writings in a time of abuse.

?The wilderness of the west had been invincible, endless, overwhelming. It would of been proposterous to protect them. Settlers flooded across the plains and over the mountains, miners worked their claims, loggers cut down their forests, and still there was no end to the trees and the ore and the animals and the grasses.?

Where the waters divide. Karen Berger &Daniel Smith. Pg 53

This quote I think really sums up what the main attitude of the land was back in the 1800?s. This is a voice of humans taking advantage of the earth, having no concern or care for it. Now I think that most people realize that the world is not like that anymore. During the time of Henry David Thoreau the view that settling the land was the main point of view. People believed that humans were meant to move west and settle land, everything was up for our grabs. At that time conservation was not a concept that had been thought of yet, there really was not a need.

Studying Henry David Thoreau helps put all of the confusion and mass explosion of technology into perspective.