This post was first published almost two years ago when visitors to my new blog were so scarce, I often dropped by myself to check if it was still on-line. So for those that never saw it, here is that post about Thoreau with a few changes.
There once lived a man who was, is and always shall be The King of Frugal Mountain. Born in New England, and a close friend of Emerson the poet, Henry David Thoreau lived in Concord, Massachusetts, where living close to the bone was considered a worthy path. But Thoreau, a Harvard grad and aspiring writer, took that path and stretched it as far as it could go by leaving his cushy home in town and walking into the woods to build himself a small shack a mile from the nearest neighbor. There on the shore of Walden Pond, he lived alone for two years and two months. In his words: ” 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.”
Leaving behind his comfy possessions, he wrote in a later book: “Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
