ABSTRACT
Published in 1854, Walden is Henry David Thoreau’s imaginative re-creation of his experience at Walden Pond, just outside of Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived for roughly two years, from July 4, 1845 to September 1847. Thoreau extends Goethe’s theory to encompass all of reality in a way that his earlier attempts in “A Natural History of Massachusetts” and A Week only tentatively explored. Thoreau’s empirical/transcendental survey of the pond is best read, then, as an effort to break apart the false categorical barriers that divide humanity from itself and prevent its full realization. The lucid quality of Thoreau’s prose carries with it the danger of unraveling his aesthetic vision. The process that Thoreau observes in nature is about excess, overflow, and rupture. Thoreau overthrows both the providential theory of divine creation and the positivist view of the earth as inert, putting in their place an organic conception of the universe in which everything is interrelated and alive.
