Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores.

In the first portion of Henry David Thoreau's, Walden, Thoreau explains his living experiment of moving into nature to strip his life down to the basics. He speaks of moving to he banks of the Walden pond in Ralph Waldo Emerson's cabin. Throughout the entire first chapter, Economy, he explains the basics f his idea. He explains how many question his decisions, but also how he doesn't want to live a life of a farmer, who he believes are, "digging their own graves before they are born" (Thoreau, 4). His main idea is that life needs to be stripped to the basics, and that we should live simplistically in nature and throw away all of our materialistic ideas. Thoreau's ideas are completely justified though, he was writing as a member of the transcendentalist movement and their ideas of going back into nature, away from the industrialization so that we could find ourselves is extremely insightful. Many speak of how Thoreau was a fraud in that he was living on the border of a town and living in a cabin that was pre-made and furnished; however, he admits this in his novel, he acknowledges in the first paragraph that it his experiment is temporary and not a life-long ordeal. Also, Thoreau's work cannot be read through cynical eyes as an instruction manual, more as a book of conceptualized ideas and thoughts. If you read the book with preconceived notions that Thoreau's in a fraud and contradictory, then you aren't going to enjoy Walden for what it is. Thoreau's transcendentalist ideas are simple, to live in nature, stripped to the basics, and to live a full life of appreciation of the world around you; if modern day society took more cues from Thoreau then maybe we wouldn't have so many problems with greed and corruption.