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In the 1840s Henry David Thoreau swapped his busy schedule in Concord, Massachusetts, for a wooden hut he built himself near Walden Pond. We had the privilege of visiting Walden in July 2012; it exceeded expectations in its tranquillity and beauty - and the swim in the pond itself was unforgettable.

Writing in the winter of 1843, shortly after Margaret Fuller’s mentorship made him a writer, the twenty-five-year-old Thoreau awakened to a snow-covered wonderland and marvelled at the splendour of a world reborn.

Thoreau went to the woods, he said, to “live deliberately” and according to his own scheme of economy – represented by his beanfield. Visitors were not encouraged (he had cutlery enough for only one person and a half), and he devoted himself to the Higher Philosophy between berrying excursions. Yet it turns out, according to a piece in the New Yorker entitled “Pond Scum”, that Thoreau regularly swerved from his self-proclaimed virtue to dine with friends in Concord!

For Thoreau, trees were creative and spiritual companions, sane-making and essential. His love of them is documented in Thoreau and the Language of Trees -  a selection of his meditations on trees, drawn from his two-million-word journal by writer and photographer Richard Higgins.

The word ‘economy’ evolved from the Greek root οἶκος. ‘Oikos’ had three interrelated senses in ancient Greece: the family, the family’s land, and the family’s home. Thoreau, knowing his Greek, loving puns and etymologies, was likely quite deliberate in the choice of ‘Economy’ as his title for the longest and first chapter in Walden (1854), believes Psyche. By living in his spartan little pond house, his oikos, and getting this house in order, as it were, Thoreau meant to help others get their houses in order - and, house by house, family by family, give new life to society.

The Past Present Future podcast explored Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), a ringing call to resistance against democratic idiocy. Thoreau wanted to resist slavery and unjust wars. How can one citizen turn the tide against majority opinion? Was Thoreau a visionary or a hypocrite? And what do his arguments say about environmental civil disobedience today?

Thoreau’s Walden has been translated upwards of 300 times in China, and about a third of all visitors to a Massachusetts pond that inspired the book are Chinese, Julia Du wrote for Literary Hub. The author has been dubbed the “Patriarch of Lying Flat,” referring to a Chinese workplace trend of eschewing overwork or overachievement. “Thoreau warned us that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. In China today, that desperation has been given a name: Neijuan — involution,” she argued. “If Thoreau were alive today, he might say that China has industrialized quiet desperation.”

See also:

• About The Walden Woods Project
• Calculating the Incalculable: Thoreau on the True Value of a Tree
• Don Henley's Two Waldens
• How Henry David Thoreau still surprises, 200 years after his birth
• How to live in a hut
• Lessons from the first ‘tiny house’ evangelist, Henry David Thoreau
• On Walden Pond
• The Book of Life: Henry David Thoreau
• The Great Philosophers: Henry David Thoreau
• The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837–1861
• Thoreau on How to Use Civil Disobedience to Advance Justice
• Thoreau on Knowing vs. Seeing and What It Takes to Apprehend Reality Unblinded by Our Preconceptions
• Thoreau's Beloved Walden Pond is Being Destroyed by Urinating Swimmers
• Thoreau on Living Through Loss
• Thoreau on What It Really Means to Be Awake
• Thoreau on why not to quote Thoreau