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Henry David Thoreau Research Paper

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The Big Picture: Thoreau's Step Back From Society Viewed Alongside Society Today

The proximity in which someone is from civilization can have a great influence on their thoughts and ideas about civilization and the nature that they live in. Henry David Thoreau spent a lot of his life moving around from the likes of New York City to Walden Pond; while squatting, as he referred to his stays in these places, he wrote some of his most interesting and notable works such as Civil Disobedience (1849) and Walden (1854). Noted as a transcendentalist, Thoreau was quite thoughtful of his surroundings as they gave great meaning to his life; the most meaningful of which was Walden Pond, an escape that overlooks Concord, Massachusetts, where he spent …show more content…

Thoreau found the railroad system to be an invasion of nature and what made nature pure. In the article, “Life and love: Thoreau's life philosophy on man and nature in the age of industrialization,” they explain the unpopular opinion that Thoreau thought the rail system was useless in contradiction to the public's opinion that it was the most important 19th century invention. “What he saw were plenty of trees being cut down for building the railway and for fuel, the original pastoral peace being broken by the noisy sound, the wasting energy, and the pollution of nature by the steam-powered engine;” Thoreau didn't understand, rather support, the hype behind this new mode of transportation and ground breaking spectacle that forever changed business in America (Ma 383). In Walden, he chronicled, “The iron horse makes the hills echo with his snorts like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (Thoreau 82).” In his perch at Walden Pond, Thoreau could see all these things happening in Concord this perspective made his views more abstract because he wasn't based in the center of the matter and he could see the bigger picture. Part of the bigger picture is the idea of “train style” that this new system implemented on the people in

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