Tuesday, January 31

A little bit of literature

“The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not the effect on Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new garment to take the place of the old. This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice.”

(...)

“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. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. 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.”

Vocabulary build-up

The noun pond means “a still body of water smaller than a lake, sometimes artificially formed, as by damming a stream.” The expression across the pond means “across the Atlantic Ocean, almost always referring to either the British Isles or the United States, depending on which side of the ocean the speaker is from.”

In this context, the noun garment means “outer covering,” but it can also mean “an article of clothing." 

The noun solitude means “the state or quality of being alone or remote from others; a secluded or uninhabited place.” Close synonyms are “isolation”, “seclusion”, and “reclusiveness.” Note that solitude has a positive connotation, whereas loneliness means “the state of being alone in solitary isolation; sadness resulting from being forsaken or abandoned.”

Comments

Henry David Thoreau was an essayist, a poet, and a philosopher. Along with his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau was a leader of the transcendentalist movement in the United State. He is known for his book “Walden”, a series of essays that he wrote while living in the forest near Walden Pond, in eastern Massachusetts. In addition to his writings about nature, which serve as a foundation for modern environmentalism, Thoreau was an abolitionist. “Walden” is viewed not only as a philosophical treatise on labor, leisure, self-reliance, and individualism but also as an influential piece of nature writing. During his time at Walden Pond, Thoreau was almost self-sufficient, growing his own vegetables and doing basic works. It was his intention to live simply and have time to contemplate, walk in the woods, write, and commune with nature. As he explained, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to face only the essential facts of life.” Relatively neglected during Thoreau’s lifetime, “Walden” achieved tremendous popularity in the 20th century. Even today the book might give us lessons about how we should approach life in an era of torrents of information.