Walden, and Civil Disobedience

Like Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, Walden is one of those seriously important books I feel I must have read and, if I haven’t, I should, because seriously important people – Tolstoy, Marx, Gandhi – said that it changed their lives. Thoreau, philosopher, abolitionist, environmentalist, is America’s most famous dropout. In 1845, aged 28, he built himself a shack in the woods at Walden Pond, Massachusetts, and spent the following two years putting his philosophy about living a simple life into practice. He has views on everything from civil disobedience to soft furnishings. ‘A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on a sod before my door. It’s best to avoid the beginnings of evil.’ You get the drift – there’s not much light relief, but Rupert Degas’s cool, elegant reading, with just a hint of the geeky weirdo lurking as he lists the ingredients in Latin of Cato’s recipe for bread, achieves the impossible. You can’t turn it off.

Sue Arnold, The Guardian

‘There is no companion as companionable as solitude.’ So wrote Thoreau, who in 1845 withdrew from the increasingly distasteful commercialism of American society and lived for two years in a log cabin he built himself by the shores of Walden Pond. Eschewing the ‘mean life’ of his fellow men and living on eight dollars a year, Thoreau reflected on the spiritual, on nature and on the shortcomings of mankind. Rupert Degas is an excellent narrator for Thoreau’s mesmerising meditations which are totally captivating – and pertinent.

Rachel Redford, The Observer

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau left the town and headed to the countryside. There, beside the lake of Walden, he built himself a simple log cabin and returned to nature. In this perceptive and sometimes moving narration, we hear Thoreau’s deeply personal reaction against the commercialism and materialism of mid-nineteenth century America. A warning from the past which is more than valid today. ‘If a man does not keep pace with his Companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.’ Let’s hope so, and that there are more Thoreau’s out there today. If not, then this audiobook may go some way to inspiring them.

Bukowski on Bukowski zine