As a Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau held that
every indidual can reach ultimate truths through spiritual intuition, which transcends
reason and sensory experience. This spiritual intuition came best when man was in
communion with Nature, which is symbolic of the
spirit.
Believing that God was present in every aspect of
Nature, Thoreau went deliberately into the woods of
Walden
to
front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die,, discoer tha I had not
lived.
The woods and cabin of
Walden provided Thoreau with the existential experience for which he sought. Away from
society and its corruptive devices, as Thoreau felt, he encountered the essential
lessons of life such as realizing how one-dimenstional members of society had become:
"The mass of men....lead lives of quiet desperation." Thoreau believed that if men
constructed their dwellings with their own hands as he had done his cabin, they would
develop the "poetic faculty" that nourishes the soul.
In
the woods of Walden, away from society, Thoreau perceived the existential core of life
itself. When Thoreau was dying of tuberculosis, his aunt reportedly asked him, "Henry
have you made your peace with God?" "Why, Aunt," he replied, "I didn't know we had ever
quarreled."
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