Henry David Thoreau's Walking: Analysis Essay - 1220 Words.
Henry David Thoreau was an advocate of all things nature, and this essay of his is no exception. Here, he champions a simple act that seems to have become a lost art in modern society.
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Walking Thoreau Analysis. Rhetorical Analysis: About Walking About Walking Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, He was a philosopher, naturalist and an American author (Witherell, 1995). According to the book, Listening to Earth, Thoreau graduated from Harvard College, but never got a long term job because he devoted his life to bring awareness to public of the nature.
Walden is the product of the two years and two months Thoreau lived in semi-isolation by Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts.He built a small cabin on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and was almost totally self-sufficient, growing his own vegetables and doing odd jobs. It was his intention at Walden Pond to live simply and have time to contemplate, walk in the woods, write.
Henry D. Thoreau turned the content of his lectures into his essays, such as “Walking,” “Civil Disobedience” and “Slavery in Massachusetts.” Some of his essays he eventually incorporated into books, such as the essay about the trip he took during his Walden Pond years to Mount Katadhin that eventually became a part of Maine Woods.
In this essay, Thoreau stands unimpressed by the society he inhabits. It’s the wild and unruly not the cultivated and crafted he’s after. (He also comes off as rather impressed with himself, which is a bit off-putting.) So much of his walking-sensibility is steeped in the experience of distancing oneself from society, which according to Thoreau dulls the sensibilities and renders one.
Thoreau begins his essay by saying man is an inhabitant or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society. He stresses how vital it is to walk, and talks precisely about how important walking is to him. Thoreau talks about how friends and neighbors are cooped up in offices and shops for months sometimes even years and all the time they are doing that he is out walking. Thoreau is.