In Walden, Henry David Thoreau recounts his experiences living at Walden Pond. The work is also theoretical and philosophical, and there are points throughout in which he uses said experiences to create an abstraction that allows him to generalize his thoughts to the greater whole in a way that can potentially reach his readers. His effort is to share his ideas, and he does this through his abstractions. An example of this can be found in “Solitude” paragraph 12.
In this paragraph Thoreau reflects on his positive experiences of being alone, expressing the fact that he likes it better than socializing in general. He moves from this into his theory of solitude not being measured by physical space but by one’s perception, using the example of the farmer and the student to frame his point. As most people may identify with the farmer who “cannot sit down in a room alone,” it becomes necessary to generalize it and explain in this way in order to help people understand the potential beauty in solitude that most people shy away from. The point made in this paragraph can generalize, too, to the recurring theme in Walden of helping others understand why Thoreau went into the woods in the first place.
I find the relation to working in the field to be an interesting analogy for the difference found between solitude and loneliness.
“…he does not realize that the student… is still at work in his field… and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does…”
That is, it is the recreation and society which keeps them from feeling alone; so long as they are occupied with these, their solitude won’t become negative. His use of “recreation and society” is intriguing, in this context. It’s commonly perceived that Thoreau is not in any way fond of society, and in fact it seems quite the contrary in this sentence. Just after this paragraph, he calls society typically cheap, and yet he refers to it as something that can thwart loneliness. People may take this as a contradiction.
Yet Thoreau also says,
“the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man.”
Thoreau implies here that society doesn’t have to be the one which he so disagrees with throughout his work; rather, society can be found anywhere if one can only find it. This really frames Thoreau’s later reference to a man maddened by disease and starvation taking comfort in his hallucinations. Thoreau writes that we may be similarly cheered “by a like and more normal natural society, and come to know we are never alone.”
This, here, defines the difference between loneliness and solitude. Thoreau has not retreated from society at all; he is mere finding his own.