Walden is the journal Henry David Thoreau wrote during and after the time he spent living in a cabin on Walden Pond. The reason he chose to live here for a time was to live differently than he had ever before lived:
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, 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, discover that I had not lived."
A common misconception about Thoreau's time at the pond is that he lived in isolation; in fact, Thoreau both left the cabin occasionally and had all kinds of visitors. In chapter six, entitled "Visitors," Thoreau records some thoughts about his cabin and the visitors who came to see him.
Though the cabin was small, he could have as many as twenty or thirty visitors without really being crowded (though they had to stand, rather than sit). Thoreau says his biggest concern was having too little space for him and his guests to share big ideas. He says, "You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port."
Because of that need for room in which ideas can be expressed and discussed, Thoreau often saw his guests in what he called his "withdrawing room." He described it this way:
My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order.
Here, in the grandeur and roominess of the natural world, Thoreau and his guests could converse about weighty (or grand) philosophical matters in a setting which would not stifle or confine them. This is exactly why Thoreau chose to live on Walden Pond.
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