[billwilliams]

Build yourself a hut. Pretend to live off nature while women from the town one mile away bring you pies. Thus is self reliance.

[dang]

Let's try to do better than reflexively repeating the #1 dismissive meme about someone's work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9722096

All the more so when the work is beautiful and the meme is about the wrong guy.

[TeMPOraL]

Your linked response is so perfect I'm saving it in my quotes file. Thank you for putting into words the vague feeling some of us have but can't name.

[justinator]

You are thinking of Thoreau, not Emerson.

I would highly suggest the essay from Emerson, it's one of my favorite pieces of writing.

[morgante]

You've got the wrong transcendentalist.

[zecho]

Not only did you get the wrong Concord resident, you trotted out the biggest misconception of the book with the subtitle "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For." Whenever this complaint comes up, it is very clear the writer didn't bother to read the book, or even its most famous passage, where Thoreau explains exactly what he was doing at Walden:

> I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

[alayne]

Sounds very similar in plot to Walden.