Henry David Thoreau composed this journal entry on July 6, 1845, two days after taking up residence on the shore of Walden Pond. This short passage served as the basis for the second half of "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"--chapter two of Thoreau's master work, Walden (1854).
According to Professor David M. Robinson, Thoreau's "mixed mood of confidence, anxiety, and curiosity" in this entry "suggests that he understood his departure to the woods as a significant turning point, an opportunity for both discovery and self-formation" (Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism, 2004).
Meeting the Vital Facts of Life
Journal Entry by Henry David Thoreau
July 6. I wish to meet the facts of life--the vital facts, which are the phenomena or actuality the gods meant to show us--face to face, and so I came down here. Life! who knows what it is, what it does? If I am not quite right here, I am less wrong than before; and now let us see what they will have. The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest, at the end of the week--for Sunday always seemed to me like a fit conclusion of an ill-spent week and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one--with this one other draggletail and postponed affair of a sermon, from thirdly to fifteenthly, should teach them with a thundering voice pause and simplicity. "Stop! Avast! Why so fast?" In all studies we go not forward but rather backward with redoubled pauses. We always study antiques with silence and reflection. Even time has a depth, and below its surface the waves do not lapse and roar. I wonder men can be so frivolous almost as to attend to the gross form of negro slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters who subject us both. Self-emancipation in the West Indies of a man's thinking and imagining provinces, which should be more than his island territory--one emancipated heart and intellect! It would knock off the fetters from a million slaves.
To see how Thoreau transformed this brief journal entry into one of the best known sections of Walden, read "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For."
