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Thoreau and I have an essential difference of philosophy: I am an Epicurean, and he's an asshole.

A puritan may go to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. Not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors.

Walden has some great moments. I appreciate that Thoreau was not just the original hippie, but the original of a particularly cool kind of hippie: the practical kind. I grew up around people like this in Western Mass - people who were really running small farms, building their own shit, forging their own ways - hippies with skills, as opposed to the groovy kind. They're a terrific sort of people. Doing the stuff of life yourself is great.

And I've always loved that most famous quote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." No matter what's going on for me, it makes me feel good. When things aren't going well, it makes me feel less alone. When things are going great it makes me feel smugly superior, and that's nice too.

I heart introverts
I liked parts of the Solitude chapter. Everyone's probably heard this quote:

To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

But here's a passage I like even more:

We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day,and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war.

Ha..."give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are." Awesome.

And he doesn't fuck around
My edition includes On Civil Disobedience, wherein Thoreau - who, as you may know, went to jail for refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the criminal Mexican War - does some pretty fire and brimstone shit:

When a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military laws, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty so much more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army...Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

Kinda makes you feel like a wiener, still complaining about Al Gore, right? Thoreau was a badass.

But he's sortof obnoxious
I think one thing that bugs me is, he's constantly banging on about how easy life would be if everyone just did like he did. And partly, as he says himself, that's because he "simplifies" - he gives up almost every luxury, so it's much easier to meet his needs. I don't think he even has the internet, so that alone saves him like $40 a month. But partly it strikes me as dishonest.

There's a smugness about Walden that puts me off. It's particularly grating in the Baker Farm chapter, where he lectures a poor guy with a wife and three kids about how much easier life would be if they just did it Thoreau's way. And I was like a) what if this dude thinks his kids should eat anything besides beans? and b) if you get cold you just go to your mom's house for the weekend, so your whole shtick is a little bit disingenuous, homie. Thoreau has a big safety net. Even the land he's living on is borrowed from Emerson. The poor Irish guy has no such advantages.

There may be a reason for his weirdness. My book club got in a long and interesting discussion of whether Thoreau may have had Asperger's Syndrome. More on that and and if you Google "Thoreau Asperger's" you'll find plenty more. There's even a whole book called Writers on the Spectrum: How Autism and Asperger Syndrome Have Influenced Literary Writing that throws in Dickinson, Yeats and Melville for good measure. I don't consider myself qualified to have an opinion about this, but it's a fun thing to bring up at your next dinner party.

And he's pretty long-winded
I mean, at one point towards the end he goes on for like five pages about sand. "I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body." Whaaaat the fuck, Thoreau, shut up.

So it's tough to know what to make of this book.
I rarely enjoyed reading it, but I underlined like half of it. (Okay, sometimes it was just so I wouldn't forget what an asshole he is.) He's often right, but always annoying. There's a lot going on here, and much of it is worthwhile, but I can't exactly recommend it to you, because I doubt you'll like it. I didn't. I respected it. But I didn't like it.