ABSTRACT
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) was not the work of a merely eccentric imagination. It was the work of a deeply spiritual and social imagination. As much as it sought to excuse itself as the conducting of “some private business,” its real object was never anything less than the world. Thoreau’s criticism of what the lives of his neighbors amounted to came out of his determination “to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world” (66). Thoreau, like Nietzsche, sought to be the “bad conscience of his time” but not in order to sink into pessimism. Although Thoreau was convinced that his community was essentially dead in its own life, his efforts were meant not only to draw attention nihilistically to this desperate condition but to move beyond it, to revive the community, to deliver it. His work is an appeal to Life.
