When my brother left for college that last time, we had a celebration to say goodbye. Of course we didn’t know that we were saying goodbye for real, it was only temporary. We may cry now, we told ourselves, but spring will come and we will be united yet again. Oh how naive we were. How naive each of us are: every person on this deeply swollen Earth. All of us will try to convince ourselves that this moment is not our last. My brother famously said that “in the end, everything will be alright. If it’s not then it’s not the end yet”. I have this quote carved into a necklace of mine, constantly hanging from my neck and reminding me that as long as these tears are flowing, I will still find myself breathing. Before my brother died, I was completely oblivious to the depth of the world around me. I put all of my focus into fitting into society, on being accepted by people that I didn’t know anything about. And that is the problem with our culture. With society. We trap ourselves in these bubbles, obliviously following the people around us, telling ourselves that the only thing that matters is that we don’t lose sight of them. But as we hurriedly focus on following these people’s every step, we forget to stop and take a look around. Rather than focus on who the people are that we are following, we focus on the fact that we must follow them in order to be accepted. But what happens if a person’s bubble pops? We are left stranded. Hopeless. Forever regretting the fact that we never took the time to stop and really look at them. This is the message that Thoreau was trying to convey to his readers in Walden. Don’t put all of your energy into conforming to society. Take a breath, look around, and get to know the Earth around you before you give yourself away to the curse of society. Otherwise, you won’t know the value of this Earth until you are no longer on it.

That winter night

so long ago, when

the endless skies let down

their snow,  and the

moon’s pure light

shed far below, I

pictured spring and summer’s

glow.

(and that’s what made me warm)

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.

Pages one hundred and twenty through forty

In these pages Thoreau describes, among other things, the feeling of being lost in the dark woods at night. He introduces his readers to a couple of friends who got lost in the forest after spending evenings with Thoreau in his cabin. I fear being lost more than anything else, and when I read about the darkness of that forest a story came into my mind…

Among these stars

I see your silhouette staring

down at me, reaching for

me. I hold out my

hand to you,

a desperate attempt to

get back to where we were.

But I cannot reach you.

The trees surrounding

my vulnerable soul

keep me at a

distance.

I am lost.

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.

What defines evil?

According to Thoreau, evil is in part defined by the man-made necessities of civilization. Things such as dishwashers, laundry machines, vacuums, cars—these are the evils that man has created. They are the things that hold a person back from learning responsibility; they hold a person back from experiencing first hand what it means to do, what it means to be. If a person spends a life time letting everything be done for him, he will die never having experienced anything worthwhile. Not only that, but the man or woman who takes the time to wash the dishes by hand is ultimately wiser than the person who lets a machine take care of the cleaning for him.

So is it evil for a person to use a dishwasher? It is certainly not evil like rape or murder is evil. But it is evil in the sense that it holds a person back from learning, and ultimately, from creating.