whitefun220

"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... Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail..." --Thoreau

Every so often I feel the urge to thumb through Thoreau's Walden. I do it to make sure that I am keeping my mental feet on the ground in the general confusion that grips the world today.

Of course, there are other reasons for reading Walden, but an occasional does of Henry David Thoreau's ax-like logic as applied to the problem of living is a tonic that helps me no little in these bewildering days. The lines above have always struck me with extra force. They are some of the first I underscored in my now well-worn copy of Thoreau's masterpiece.