I went to the woods because I wished to live…

This is the heart of the second chapter of Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”. Thoreau has just argued that “To be awake is to be alive”, and that the highest of arts is to affect “the quality of the day”. Here he gives the reason for his experiment, then pushes it further: he wanted “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life”, to “drive life into a corner”, and to find out whether it was mean or sublime.

Thoreau moved into the one-room cabin he had built by Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, on 4 July 1845, and lived there two years and two months. The woods were no wilderness: the pond was within walking distance of town, on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Walden appeared in 1854.

The passage found a new audience with the 1989 film Dead Poets Society, in which students open their secret meetings by reading a condensed version of it.

Walden, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, 1854

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work