Walden x 40: Essays on Thoreau

By: Robert B. Ray

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Synopsis: Provocative and illuminating essays on Thoreau&’s masterwork, shedding new light on its enduring inspiration and philosophical depth. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved from his parents&’ house in Concord, Massachusetts, to a one-room cabin he built himself on the land of his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He described his time there, just over two years, as an experiment in &“living deliberately.&” His daily journal entries became the source material for Walden, a masterful meditation on the virtues of simplicity, self-sufficiency, and man&’s relationship to nature. In Walden x 40, Robert B. Ray adopts Thoreau&’s compositional method to explore some of the questions posed in Walden. Drawing connections to the works of poets and philosophers from Wordsworth to Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Breton, Ray derives the inspiration for his 40 brief essays by exploring the pages of Walden in the same way Thoreau explored his own life—deliberately.