Maybe running away from our problems doesn’t solve them, but at least nature can help to clear our minds.

Pages Two Hundred through Two Hundred and Twenty

Thoreau grows lonely in the winter. With few friends to entertain him, he thinks of the people who used to wander about Walden Pond years earlier. The people who were forgotten as time went on. Were they as lonely as he? It makes one think about the footprints in the snow. They are not only a look into the past, but a foreshadow of the future. They remind us that someone was here before us, walking this same path, breathing this same air, watching this same moon. But soon enough the footprints will melt away, taking the memory with them.

In my head

is my home. Where

silence

overpowers any wounded

thought or

fragile blessing. Here I

am free to feel how I

want to feel,

and not how I should

feel. Here, hidden among

my secrets and

regrets,

I find a 

shelter.

That is why

when I am

with my mind

I never feel

alone.

Thoreau describes the serene beauty of the forest where he lives in pages sixty through eighty.

Past you I can clearly see

the trees as

they tower over us,

protecting us from

the unseen terrors and

guiding us to beauty.

In pages sixty through eighty, Thoreau focuses on beauty, specifically the beauty of nature. Beauty is something that exists so that we can search for it, and when we find it we are attracted it to it like magnets and never want to let go. To let go would be to surrender to the darkness of the earth.