This book is the oldest I’ve read for fun thus far. At first I didn’t think this would be much an issue, but it does show its age eventually. It’s just... it gets boring.
This book was written in isolation, in a cabin that HDT made for himself. He was in his 30’s.
To be a philosopher is to live according to the wisdom of philosophical dictates. Once you have what you need, play.
Clothing is dumb. Any fashion is guaranteed to go out of fashion. Anything that requires new clothes is something he steers clear of.
He farmed his own foods. His crops were 7 miles long if laid end to end. But they were actually relatively small in terms of area. He ate the same things over and over. He found his dull and repetitive meals “quite agreeable”.
Henry David Thoreau really likes being by himself. He loved living out in nature, away from man. He said, though, that his physical distance didn’t make him truly any “further” from anyone else.
He spoke a lot about the actual pond. There’s a whole chapter just describing the pond. It’s color. The vegetation. All the things. Man he loves this pond.
There’s a weird section in here about humans being a being of two basic minds. We have a core, gross, gluttonous, unchaste mind, and a higher mind that’s essentially where “good” comes from.