love not money

The Free University Brighton Launch

Caroline Lucas
Bob Brecher
Martin Levy
Red Diamond Dragon Club
Funge

LIFE IN THE WOODS

thoughts on walden

For one who has long very much enjoyed living according to the Wilde philosophy – i.e. ‘anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination’ – Henry David Thoreau’s Walden presents rather a problem. For those unfamiliar with the book, it is more or less a collection of thoughts and observations from the two years in which Thoreau built himself a house and lived in the woods beside Walden Pond. The spirit of the book is a call toward a simpler life, and a eulogy to nature that evokes its subject with dazzling and earnest description. And between these two, a challenge to the notion that modernity, all our material advance, has advanced the heart of man:

‘While civilisation has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.’
p. 21