The passage I’ll be talking about is paragraph 16 of the Where I Lived, What I Lived For passage of Walden. This section marks the shift from Henry David Thoreau’s personal experience of living in the woods for a period of time to his theory on how a similar experience could enlighten someone else like it did for him. He went through living in the woods so he might “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,” and makes it necessary to shift into theory when discussing how he felt society could benefit from this. Thoreau viewed his experience as showing him important aspects of life, and theorizes that, interestingly enough, most other people are either as confused with how to live life as he apparently was or have decided on a simple solution based off of societal expectations. I find this interesting mostly because of what I think it says about Thoreau: that he often believes what has improved his life and his understanding of it will do the same for many in the same situations, but is also aware of the fact that there are exceptions. The reason I feel the shift from experience to theory was necessary was due to the fact that Thoreau can’t speak absolutely like he does with his own experience with a large group of people. He acknowledges that there are outliers to his claims by referring to “most men” rather than “all men,” and has to frame his extreme claims as theory because of these outliers. This connects back to a prevalent quality of Thoreau’s writing in general, which are claims that events seemingly should influence people the same way as Thoreau. While I believed this to be the case for a while, the shifts from his experiences to theory often have the small details like the necessary “most men” to show Thoreau’s understanding that there can be exceptions to people experiencing the same things as him in various scenarios.
English Majors Practising Criticism