Walden

[henrikhank]

Laudetur Jesus Christus!
Have you read Walden by (Transcendentalist?)Henry David Thoreau? librivox.org/walden-by-henry-david-thoreau/
What do you think of this book?

 

[seeker57]

It is Thoreau’s best known work and many of his comments and criticisms expressed in the book correlated with the transcendentalist thinking of others at the time, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing and Walt Whitman.

Thoreau’s criticism of society at the time, at least in part, and of religion and, particularly, how Christianity was being taught, helped light the spark that later helped create today’s Unitarian Universalism.

There is a town near me that is named after him, just as an aside.

I liked the book and find many of his critiques and observations still intellectually stimulating.

Peace,

Seeker

 

[Khalid]

I find the book to be tripe, both in diction and in thought, on the level of a Sword of Truth novel philosophically, and as rude and subtile as a hammer to the face, much like one of Sartre’s plays, but who am I? Many greater thinkers have expressed admiration for the work. I think Emerson is is twice better in style and in thought.

Now, if you want to read a good novel with philosophical trappings, read the Brothers Karamazov in the original Russian or the English Pevear-Volokhosky translation. It’s much more subtile, and much more profound.

Or, even, for a modern taste, Anathem by Neal Stephenson, Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter, or the Book of the New Sun by Wolfe. The former is essentially an extended dramatized account of the fight between Platonic realism and everything else, with a heavy dose of modern physics, and is still an enjoyable read. Godel, Escher, Bach is a meditation on the nature of being and self, and the Book of the New Sun is many things, amongst which is likely the status of the best book of the twentieth century.