Walden Main Text Hi, this is AJ again. Welcome to the next lesson. This week's lesson is called "Walden." And we're going to talk about a book with the same name, Walden, by a writer named Henry David Thoreau. Now Thoreau is probably my favorite American writer, I guess maybe my favorite writer in general. He wrote back during the American Civil War, prior to the American Civil War, and his book Walden is his most famous book. Now it's quite difficult. There's a lot of big vocabulary in this book. And also the writing style is kind of old, very, very, very formal English and a little bit of an old style of English. So l'm going to read one paragraph from the book and then l'll talk about it more. And that paragraph may be quite difficult for you, but don't worry. I'll explain it after. Now, Walden, the book, is about an experiment, an experience that Henry David Thoreau had. He decided to go and live in the woods. Go away from the town where he was into the woods, into the forest, and then build a very small little simple house and live in it by himself. And just think and relax and live a very simple life. And then he wrote a book about this experience. Now, of course, this is something that people have done for centuries and centuries, holy people, religious people, spiritual people, philosophers. In many different periods of history, in many different locations in the world, they've gone off by themselves to some small remote place away from other people to think, to live simply. And of course we have a lot of great intellectual breakthroughs from these people. So it's a long tradition to do this and Henry David Thoreau was following the same tradition. And it's not a usual thing for Americans, I would say. He was maybe one of the first Americans to do this and write about it. I'm sure many did it but he wrote about his experience. And this book is a book about his experience, his experiment, but more so it's a book about his philosophy, a philosophy of life that he developed while living in the woods alone. And the main part of this philosophy is to live simply. That in fact we don't need so much in terms of things, buying things, getting lots of things. So even at that time in the United States people were always trying to get more, more, more...bigger, bigger, bigger house...more, more, more money...more, more, more nice furniture. Just always buying things and of course today we have more, more, more computers and iPods and phones and bigger cars and nicer stuff. All the time people want more, more, more. And he was saying this is a source of unhappiness if you're always trying to get more and more and more you will never be happy. And so his idea was actually to be happy with what you need and then focus on doing other things. Instead of always trying to get more, more, more, live more simply and you will have a lot of time for yourself. You'll work much less. You'll enjoy your life. So that is the basic philosophy of