Transcendentalism is a philosophy. It is a way of life. It is a way of life which an individual conscientiously leaves, symbolically as well as physically, the world of material possessions and rationality alone in lieu of intuition, individual sovereignty, and the culmination of both to realize the truths of truths: that life, all life, down to the miniscule atoms that make up everything, and our awareness of it, is born and lives forever connected to the divine force which governs the Universe. Thoreau’s search for a life his own; a life connected to the divine force led him to a shanty in Walden woods in Concord, Ma. In the woods he lived for two years performing his life’s experiment. His experiment started with a question, how minimalistically could he live, and would this simple life prove to add to his overall happiness? There he shed the life of most New Englanders, a life encapsulated by duty and material possessions. A life where material possessions owned more people than people owned them. It was in this simple life at Walden where he built his home with next to nothing. It was in this simple life at Walden where he realized a life caught up in the throes of industrial life was really no life at all. He marveled at the desperate lives men led all around him. They lived life in a rush, they lived life in constant want of larger houses, finer clothes, and more crops and all the while sustaining an oblivious state of what he called “quiet desperation”. Their lives consisted of a void that could never be filled. Thoreau wrote, “why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry” (Thoreau, 1029). Men are hungry for spiritual food, they thirst for a connection to the God energy (the divine force), but they haven’t the sight to see that divinity is all around them. It is found in Nature, in the wonders of the natural world; the woods, the ponds. Thoreau went to the woods to search for his food. He went to the woods to nurture his Soul, what Emerson called the Over-Soul, the divine energy that connects all and in which all have access.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 13:36:06 +0000
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