Henry David Thoreau’s Diary: Walden and the Early Journal
Period: 1845–1846
An experiment in place and routine sharpens the conversation between material experience and large claims about how to live.
Literary reading guide
The writing associated with this period moves among observation, independence and the problem of choosing how to live. Its value as a journal is partly that questions can be tried out in prose before they settle into an argument elsewhere. Avoid reading every fragment as an advance announcement of a later famous book; the notebook has its own provisional life.
For a modern writer, this offers permission to keep contradictory drafts of an opinion. Date a thought, test it against what happened that day and allow later pages to correct it. The point of a personal journal is not to demonstrate permanent consistency. It is to preserve a trace of how attention and decisions changed.
Excerpts from this period
Short excerpts from the public-domain edition named on the guide page. An excerpt that ends mid-sentence is an excerpt, not a whole entry.
5 July 1845
Yesterday I came here to live. My house makes me think of some mountain houses I have seen, which seemed to have a fresher auroral atmosphere about them, as I fancy of the halls of Olympus.
The move to Walden is entered the day after it happened, and at once compared with somewhere else. Source edition
An essay by the TAEONIA editors. Quotations are limited to texts in the public domain.