Thoreau’s Walden is a classic, no doubt about it, and worth reading twice. The best chapters are the first and last, “Economy” and the “Conclusion”, in which he exhorts us to spend as much time as we can doing what we want, and not what others expect of us. If life is too costly, just stop spending money and go live in the woods, he says. And that’s what he did.
However, he did cheat a little in doing this himself. He went to live on a friend’s land. Back in the 1800’s, how many poor people had friends who would let them squat on their property? How many people today could do this? I think it’s easier said than done.
Further, he completely ignores the fact that many people have health issues which are quite costly to treat. He himself suffered from tuberculosis, and died at the early age of 44. Would he have lived longer if he had had more money to spend on treatment? Perhaps money was not an issue for him, since a successful treatment for tuberculosis had not been developed in his lifetime. But it was for many others with treatable diseases, and continues to be today.
These are the main flaws that I see in Thoreau’s arguments to live simply – they are unrealistic in some respects. I give the book four stars because of these problems, and also because it’s overly lengthy and could have used a strong editorial hand in trimming some of the last chapters, which got rather boring. Despite all that, I still find his views very appealing. And now that I live close to Walden Pond, the book is made richer than it was for me originally, because I can “put a face to the name” of local features like Lincoln Woods and Flint’s Pond, and towns like Fitchburg.
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