American Adam

1 Pages 348 Words

Thoreau’s position on the West was a dichotomous one in comparison to Emerson’s. While he was in agreement with Emerson about the power and the pull of nature and the innate human need to be a part of it, he condemned the idea of conquering and taming the wilderness. In his most popular work, Walden, Thoreau was building upon the transcendentalist view that the mind is the true frontier. Starting in 1845, he moved onto Emerson’s land at Walden Pond and for “two years, two months, and two days” he lived a simple and self-sustained life (Woodlief) While there he kept detailed journals which were published as, Walden, in 1854. In Walden, he gives the reason for his stay in the woods, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Thoreau 1692). Such reasoning is evidence that he too was calling into question the societal values of his day while searching for true meaning in a sort of pioneer experience. While at Walden Pond he realized, or rather criticized his society, “The nation itself with all its so called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up with its own traps ruined by luxury and heedless expense . . . and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose” (Thoreau 1692-93). In effect it seems as if the idea of pioneering and simplicity in the natural world had become his “safety valve” in the face of “progress” and growth of the government and nation. Of course, it must be said again that the major idea of the frontier was in the cultivation of simplicity of the transcendental mind,...