Walden

Re-read in March 2011. I first speed-read it last November over our American Thanksgiving vacation since I had a reading test due on the Thursday. Being Canadian with an American husband can sometimes lead to such unfortunate experiences as having to rush through Walden and being supremely annoyed with it for taking me away from lazing away in the hot summer weather and drinking bourbon ale. So of course I didn't enjoy it much then – I mean, how absurd to idealize solitude and quiet in the woods and economical living while on a road trip from Ontario to Florida to visit family and eat delicious food – but after hearing the professor's lecture and re-reading it in preparation for writing a paper, I have changed my opinion and am kind of thrilled with Walden. So okay, Thoreau seems a bit of a douchebag in some ways, but seriously, he's not telling you that you have to go out and live in the woods by yourself in order to have a fulfilled life. He's opening up some possibilities on how to have a fulfilled life. So maybe I have romantic notions about solitude and nature and things of that sort, but there is a lot in this book that makes sense and can work even if one has a mortgage and would rather stay in a hotel than a cottage in the woods.

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‰ЫПThen to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go in search of water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and snowy night it needed a divining-rod to find it. Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet is well as over our heads.‰Ыќ