#MastersofSocialIsolation #3 Henry David Thoreau. In his classic “Walden” he described the 2 years he spent in a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, near Concord MA. There he sought to escape the deadness of a world in which “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
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He was 25 at the time. As he wrote, “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.”
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He provides a meticulous account of the details of his life and his attention both to the world of nature and his own inner world. He was never lonely in the company of Nature. Sitting in the rain, “Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.”
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For Thoreau his time of isolation provided the setting for a journey of inner discovery: “There are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him.” Eventually his retreat ended—he had “other lives to live.”
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The last lines of Walden strike a hopeful note—so necessary today: “The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” Next: Julian of Norwich
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