Thoreau feels that society has strayed too far from the “pursuit of excellence and purity”. He states that man has become too ambitious and too greedy. Man desires to own and gain too many things. People are not living simply anymore. To Thoreau the cost of something is not really its actual cost in dollars and cents. To him the cost of something is the amount of life one person must exchange for it. He claims a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone. Rather than accumulating things (possessions) Thoreau wanted to enjoy the richness of time. His trek to Walden Pond us his attempt to break away from the lives of desperation that he saw most people lead.

Thoreau borrows an axe and builds a cabin for himself on the shore of Walden Pond in the woods near Boston, Massachusetts. He plants a garden of beans, corn, potatoes, turnips, and other dry vegetables and lives off what he can grow and what he can capture.

The only way Thoreau could distance himself from society and free himself from all the luxuries of the world was to move to a place where there wasn’t a lot of people. Walden was his sanctuary. He was able to clear his mind, live simply, and see life in a new light. His attempt to live on his own was obviously successful. He did not need any luxuries or help from anyone else. He was content being by himself. About his experiences at Walden, Thoreau says “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours...If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Thoreau was definitely successful.

He has isolated himself from other people. The closest neighbor lives a mile away from him. In terms of necessities, Thoreau explains that he existed for two years on the most basic of things. He took with him a small wardrobe of clothes. With his borrowed axe and thirty bucks he built himself a small cabin, 10 feet by 15 feet in size. His cabin had two large windows, one door, one closet, a fireplace

Some topics in this essay:
Boston Massachusetts, David Thoreau’s, Walden Pond, Walden Thoreau, walden pond, bonded labor,