Henry David Thoreau was man of simplicity, and if he were to experience life in Cary, he would not only be surprised, but disappointed in humanity itself. Thoreau believed in the necessities of life, nothing more, and the people of Cary live lives exactly the opposite. Cary residents live lives of material possessions, business, and over-complexity. These traits of society are precisely opposite of Thoreau’s ideals and beliefs. Not only would Thoreau be disappointed, but his eyes would be filled with disgust, every which way he looked in the Town of Cary and it’s people. Certainly material possessions are a necessity to a point, but people in Cary drag it out to the extreme, and worship their possessions to a point where they become idols.
Surely if Thoreau spent as little as fifteen minutes in Cary, the ideals he so richly abode by would be crushed in an instant. He believes in living the basics of life, for as Thoreau put it, “let us spend one day as deliberately as nature. () ” We the people of Cary don’t just live as shut off from nature as we possibly can, we “pave nature”, and transform it into things that we don’t even need, or use. We work the best days of our lives, and all we have to show for it is our nature-born possessions, which mean absolutely nothing to Thoreau. Indeed, we toil the best of our days, and “fritter away our lives by detail.
() “, in order to earn the perishable items we acquire by destroying the ever resilient gift we have been given. We all live “meanly, likes ants… () “, and we forget to stop and look at our lives from a different perspective. In fact, our minds are constipated with thoughts we entertain to feel important, and do the job, to once again achieve greatness through our “things.” Our lives are so complex for such unjust reasons, and we all ponder the question that a wise man once asked, “why, should we live with such hurry and waste of life? () ” Furthermore, our lives are lived so shallowly and are filled with the frail, irrelevant things, and not the pulp of life.
The Essay on Thoreau Views On Nature, Society, And Man
Henry David Thoreau’s life began on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. At a young age he began to show an interest in writing. In 1833, at the age of sixteen, Thoreau was accepted to Harvard University. Although his parents could not afford the cost of tuition, his family offered to help with the funds, and in August he entered Harvard. In 1837 he graduated and applied for a teaching ...
We think of time as the last peanut butter remaining in the jar we go scraping for, whereas Thoreau views time as “the stream I go a-fishing in. () ” Thoreau stresses simplicity, yet we only feel important by living complexity. The people of Cary live lives almost equivalent to that of bees. We work hard, but relax almost never. We have five televisions, but not five minutes to spare. In the eyes of the people of Cary, complexity is modern.
Again, Thoreau would look upon Cary as a symbol of the society of disgrace, for we are constantly conquered by our schedules, obsessed with our toys, and living the over complex lives we live. Somewhere along the way, humanity lost focus, and started to build things while disregarding nature. Humanity got busy, and we marveled at our ability to create. Thus creating life complexity, for as Thoreau put it, “An honest man has hardly a need to count more than his ten fingers… () ” In Thoreau’s eyes, Cary would be the gleaming example of a world gone bad. We dwell in detail, sweat the best years of life away, only to acquire ornate possessions which we obtain in order to appear better in the eyes of society, while blindly living shallow lives..
