It's summertime and I'm sitting by "Riverbend" 's own 'Walden Pond' which is teeming with aquatic life!
"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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." (Henry David Thoreau)
Of course, Thoreu's 'Walden' is the work of an utter hypocrite, a man who rhapsodizes about his life of simplicity, a man who convicts his readers for joining the rat race, for owning more than they need, and so forth. And yet Thoreau seems blissfully unaware that his own lifestyle is made possible by that rat race; he’d have nowhere to live if Emerson didn’t let him squat on the land he bought with all that filthy, corrupting money. (Thoreau also had his laundry sent to his mother and ate a chicken dinner with Emerson each week, although these ugly facts are at least not evident in the text.) Complete text of 'Walden'
