Reflections on Walden Pond

I recently finished reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau. This was a book I was required to read in high school, hated and never got anything out of it. The one thing I remember about it is that he had entire paragraphs that were comprised of only two sentences, that had so many sentences and commas in them that I could not make heads nor tails of them and never actually understood the points of his sentences.

Hmmm....I'm re-reading that sentence now and have only to say - touche, HDT.

One of my on-going goals is to read and re-read the classics, to see if perhaps they mean more to me as an adult as they did as a teenager. In this case, I have to say YES, I definitely understood and appreciated much more from this reading than I got out of it the first reading.

As I went through I highlighted passages that I found most impactful to me...not because I thought I needed to look for some relevance for a teacher or an impending test, but because I actually found relevance. It was staring me right in the face.

Some of my favorite quotes:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

My life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel.

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,--that is your success.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

If one advanced 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.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and trust were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

The last line is the closing line of the book. Thoreau died at the age of 44 of complications from tuberculosis. He never married and never had children. Yet our lives are the richer for his.