Crying on Thoreau's Cabin

A heartfelt essay by a contributor to Fine Books & Collections Magazine about Henry David Thoreau.

From the piece...

If you have not had the occasion to get to know Thoreau yourself, you should race to a book store and buy a copy today. It could change your life the way it did mine. Thoreau can help you figure out what's important, give you the courage to do things you didn't know you could do, and make you see the world as if your eye sight suddenly magnified. He'll also give you a giggle or two. (The scholars often forget the man could crack a joke or two.)

I took Thoreau's words to heart at an early age because he spoke to me both about the meaning of life and what it means to be a writer.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," he wrote, "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 wanted to live deep and suck out the marrow of life, and 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 to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

He also placed inside me a land conservation ethic before I knew what the term meant. (It's certainly no coincidence that I now work as a communications director for The Wilderness Society.) He affirmed my love of solitude. He taught me the virtue of living simply. He showed me that a man can in the course of his time get as much out of life as he puts back into it.