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Henry David Thoreau - At Walden Pond

Between 1845 and 1847, Henry David Thoreau decided to spend two years in a small cabin - located in the woods in Concord, Massachusetts, near Walden Pond - to see what it would be like to withdraw from the constant demands and "busyness" of daily life. 

As he writes in Walden:

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.  (Thoreau, Walden, Volume 1, page 143.)

In this clip, Professor Richard H. Baker - a Transcendentalist scholar - gives an overview of Thoreau and the lessons he tried to learn when living in his Walden-Pond cabin (which no longer exists, in its original form). 

Credits

Clip from "Teaching Henry David Thoreau" from the American Literary Classics - The Transcendentalists series (from TMW Media).  Online, courtesy TMWMedia's Channel at YouTube.