Thoreau's Transcendental Life Style at Walden Pond

Henry David Thoreau, in Walden, or Life in the Woods, describes, among many other experiences, the transcendental life-style he experienced in his two-year experiment at Walden Pond. Although Thoreau did not consider himself, and would never have considered himself, a member of any group which confined his individualism and independence with any sort of dogma, his outlook on life, nature and man's primary concerns in life and nature coincided with many of the essential Transcendentalist principles. His experiences and writings in Walden reflect his alignment with the Transcendentalists.

Transcendentalism is seen by its critics as an abstract and idealized conception in which the world is a spiritual realm where real life is left behind: "See the holes made in the bank yonder by the swallows. Take away the bank, and leave the apertures, and this is Transcendentalism" (Bickman 8). While any spiritual philosophy in the abstract is vulnerable to such a sarcastic critique, such a snide attack is rendered meaningless by Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond because that experiment was not only rooted firmly in the real world, it was also recorded by a man at the heights of his mental and perceptual powers. His observations of nature, and his comparison of beasts and plants in nature, are used to critique human beings who live imprisoned by their own society, their fears, their habits, and their conformity:

To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. . .

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masterpiece. At the other, it is seen as a significant break, even a refutation, especially of transcendentalism's metaphysical predilection for spirit over matter and its minimizing of the senses (Bickman 11). Thoreau clearly did not write, or intend to write, a Transcendentalist tome. At the same time, "it is important . . . to hear [in Walden] . . . the voices of American culture and its transcendentalist subculture. . . . " (Bickman 12-13). Transcendentalism, in Thoreau's experiences at Walden Pond, certainly includes not simply an abstract belief in the world of the spirit, but a firm commitment to religious or spiritual ideals, although even that religious aspect was grounded in the belief that spirit was advanced though social, economic and political involvement. Thoreau quotes the Bible: "Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the Father, so also the son of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die" (Thoreau 26). However, he uses that quotation to launch into an analysis of land, farms and farmers which reveals that the sins committed in society most importantly are those resulting in institutional, legal, economic, social and political inequities which punish good, hard-working individuals and turn them in

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