@lostwisdom.tv: He ended up with a library of nearly nine hundred books, and more than seven hundred of them he had written himself. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an essayist, naturalist and surveyor from Concord, Massachusetts. After Harvard he briefly taught school, then quit when he was told to flog his pupils. He worked in the family pencil business, took odd jobs as a surveyor and carpenter, and spent his remaining hours walking and writing. In 1845 he moved into a small cabin he had built at Walden Pond, on land belonging to his friend Emerson. He stayed two years. The book he wrote there, an account of a river trip with his brother, sold so poorly that most of the print run came back to him unsold. He recorded that fact in his journal with dry humour. In 1846, while still living at the pond, he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax he would not support. He died of tuberculosis at 44. Walden, published in 1854, found its real readers long after his death. This line comes from his Journal, written when he was in his thirties. It reads differently once you know the man. Thoreau did not write about nature from a desk. He walked the same fields in every season and kept watch on them for years, and the pages came after. The line is not an argument against writing. It is a test of whether what you describe is something you did, or only something you admired from a chair. The same test applies to anything we talk about more than we do. ✦ LOST WISDOM ✦ #thoreau #walden #transcendentalism #philosophy #wisdom

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Tuesday 03 November 2026 09:30:00 GMT