Student

English 203

Week 4 Response

20 August 2002

Thoreau’s Intentions

In writing his book, Walden, Henry David Thoreau sought to affect change in the lives of his fellow Americans. His narration seeks to enliven our spirits and call us to question ourselves, our habits and our voluntary obligations.

Living his life surrounded by men and women who were forever working and dying in the fetters of luxury and materialism, Thoreau set out to live by another means. He says, “I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster of finished any labor. They have no friend Iolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up” (603), and then asks “why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?”, relaying to us his witnessing of the frivolities and fruitless toils that most men were engaged in, and his doubt that we are required to live that way. In spite of the fact that “the mass of men lead lives of quite desperation” (605), Thoreau shows hope for the fact that things are not destined to be so dismal for us all. In us, he believe, there is the “capacity for change” (606).

What he would have us do, then, is to attempt to do what he has done---“to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment,; to toe that line” (609) and to learn to value every bit of our time that goes into the objects that we struggle to possess. He was seeking to inspire us to realize that the real “cost of a thing is the amount of…life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run” (617). Running day after day to the field or the bank or the herd didn’t encompass living; every man and woman should not feel guilt for valuing their lives and standing up to the long runs and the bold presumptions of power in traditions.