Walden
Henry David Thoreau
Contains spoilers for the entire book.
Discussion topics
Topic 01 of 08
Lives of quiet desperation
Do you agree with Thoreau that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation?
Keep the conversation going
- What does "Economy" suggest about what we really need?
- How did you respond to his account of building his house for twenty-eight dollars?
There is no single right answer. Bring your own reading.
Discussion topics
Do you agree with Thoreau that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation?
Keep the conversation going
- What does "Economy" suggest about what we really need?
- How did you respond to his account of building his house for twenty-eight dollars?
Why does Thoreau go to Walden, and what does he mean by wanting to live deliberately?
Keep the conversation going
- Is his experiment an escape from society or a criticism of it?
- Does it matter that he was only a short walk from town and often visited it?
What does Thoreau find in solitude, and why does he say he was never lonely?
Keep the conversation going
- What did you make of the visitors he describes, such as the woodchopper?
- How much company does a person need?
What does Thoreau's labour in the bean-field mean to him beyond growing beans?
Keep the conversation going
- Why does he care so little about the profit?
- What would your own bean-field be?
Which of the animals in Walden, the loon, the battling ants, the mice, stayed with you, and why?
Keep the conversation going
- How does Thoreau write about the pond across the seasons?
- What does nature teach him, in his account?
How did you respond to "Higher Laws", in which Thoreau wrestles with hunting, eating meat and purity?
Keep the conversation going
- Is he right that something in us wants both the wild and the spiritual?
- Where do his standards seem admirable, and where too strict?
What does the thawing sand bank in "Spring" come to mean for Thoreau?
Keep the conversation going
- Why does he end with renewal after so much about simplicity and thrift?
- What did you make of his advice to step to the music you hear, however measured or far away?
How does Thoreau's night in jail for refusing his poll tax connect Walden to "Civil Disobedience"?
Keep the conversation going
- When, if ever, is it right to break an unjust law?
- Why have readers like Gandhi and Martin Luther King found the essay so important?
There is no single right answer. Bring your own reading.