It is not its explicit use of language or vivid description of natural beauty that makes it true, but its significant research into the relation between nature and human society. I was evoked into deep thought by Thoreau's philosophy on individulism and simplicity of life. Living in a sea of manufactured objects, our life has become more and more complex and polluted. We are so aim-oriented as to forget the purpose of life; we have so advanced the technology as to ignore the regeneration of our mentality. We labor, we sweat, we worry till we are toiled to death, but we rarely ask ourselves for what purpose.
I, with a majority of others, have paid much more attention to the physical existence than to our moral cultivation. We seem wealthy but are void in mind. On the part of Thoreau, his way of living is to achieve mental complexity through physical simplicity. He believes that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."" In his two-yeaer-experience in Walden Pond, he shuns and even scorns material things. By doing so, he saves a lot of time to think and observe. In his writing, we can easily sense his intention to enlighten the readers but find it difficult to interpret many seemingly uncompleted sentences, such as " There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."" That is because all the themes in the book, so to speak, are revealed by symbolism or depicted as images. .
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A major theme is regeneration. The whole book is consciously structured by the seasonal cycle, both beginning and ending in the spring, the time when the world renews itself. The narrative of Walden may seem haphazard, but the reasonal cycle is not a coincidence. The author condenses two years of living into one entire year in the book to show the unimportance of calendar time and call for attention of the significance of the symbolic time. The story begins in the spring, the new arrival of a year, as Thoreau begins construction on his cabin.
