Walden
Henry David Thoreau · 1854
5.0 · 9 ratings
About the book
Thoreau borrows an axe, builds a cabin by a pond, and spends two years finding out how little a deliberate life actually requires. The founding book of every simplify-your-life movement since, written by a man who counted his nails and his mornings with equal care.
Try the short course
Part 1 · What a life really costs. The first six slides, free.
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Thoreau begins not in the woods but in Concord, in its shops, offices and fields. Everywhere he walked, his neighbours seemed to him to be doing penance, and he means the word exactly.
He sets them beside the ascetics he had read about in India: men who hang head-down over flames, or stand for years on one leg on top of a pillar. Those feats, he says, are hardly stranger than the scenes he witnesses every day in his own town.
There is one difference. The ascetic knows he is suffering and chose it; the farmer and the shopkeeper do not see their labour as penance at all. And unlike the twelve labours of Hercules, which at least had an end, theirs are never finished. Crush one head of the hydra and two spring up.
Inside the course
20 parts- Economy: what a life costs, itemisedFree above
- Economy, continued: the house, the furniture, and the bills
- Where I lived, and what I lived for
- Reading, and the shelf a cabin needs
Questions
Is Walden free to read in Astra Trainer?
Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.
What is the short course?
20 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.
Where do I get the app?
Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. Walden is waiting in the app’s library.
