When a person is put into this world, there are things they can do to make life how they want it to be. Throughout living and learning, people have created things to live a better easier life. The simplest item can hold a great about of mystery and identity. Just by looking around, there may be an item that can open views to new things. To some, nature is that opening. The early romantic writers were inspired by beauty and spirit. The writers also emphasized emotion and having a vivid imagination. The romantic writers work can leave a person with a well-being they never had. According to romantic writer, to live a good life a person must find the truths in nature and hidden things in life to have happiness and success. After they have found …show more content…
In one of the poems, “The Chambered Nautilus”, the author Oliver Wendell Holmes, explains the process of growing older. Holmes begins describing the stages of life and how one grows into something majestic. Holmes creates nature to be a glimpse of the future and the potential there could be. The poem then starts to drift towards the death of the shell and all of the things within the shell. At the end of the story, Holmes writes his new beginning. Holmes says “Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea” to resemble the struggle Holmes has had (Holmes 35). The shell is the outer layer that protects who a person is, it acts as a barrier to the outside world. When Holmes refers to the “unresting sea" what is meant is the comparison to challenges and struggles in everyday life. The sea may be hectic and have storms just like life, but that is no reason to let the weight pull oneself down. The cracking of the shell resembles breaking free of those challenges to look at the bigger picture. The shell remains where it is, to resemble where that brave moment took place. The spot where the future began. Another piece from Holmes that encourages looking at the beauty of a resting place is “Old Ironsides”. In the beginning of this …show more content…
These two authors made the biggest things become nothing and the small problems become nonexistent. In the story “Nature”, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, there is the plot line where the human spirit is powered by nature. Emerson says, “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit” to give the lesson that how a person acts and thinks, is how their life will be (Emerson 374). To live a bright life with potential, a person’s spirit and attitude towards things needs to be happy as well. The “colors” are the character traits a person can have. Emerson encourages that you kind find yourself in the art of nature and the colors that are within it. When the weather is gloomy and hazy, it can affect one's day to be sad, just as a sunny day can leave a person feeling happy and hopeful. The way a person interprets their surrounding, is the way that one person will live. Another story that encourages simplicity is Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”. In “Walden” Thoreau teaches the lesson of not taking anything for granted or advantage of while he lives in a small shack by Walden Pond. There, Thoreau learned to become one with himself and have a more of a self-reliant perspective. One of the most influential things Thoreau said about nature is to “Live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” (Thoreau 382). What the author meant by this is to get everything out of life
In Walden (Where I Lived & What I Lived For), Thoreau travels to a place not far from the rest of the world, but to him he “did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my imagination” (Walden 66). By escaping the real world he is able to come to terms that everyday was a new adventure. “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself” (Walden 67). Thoreau connects to nature by spending his time in the woods to live deliberately and to learn what nature had to teach us or offer us. “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep” (Walden 68). Thoreau says that it's doesn't take extreme measures or far distances to connect yourself to nature and escape the real world. Letting nature teach you what they have to offer can allow life to slow down and really enjoy what life has to
Thoreau believed it was best to live a simple life claiming,’’I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life’’ (par. 1). He wanted to get the most out of life and make sure he was truly living. Although he lived in the woods he went to Harvard University’s library to check out books. Many people wonder how could you
David Thoreau uses Tone,Metaphor, and Theme to emphasize that people would benefit their lives in strengthening their connection to nature. To live life in simplicity and harmony. David Thoreau’s life was influenced by nature, he wanted people to learn the lesson life has to teach us.
He personifies nature as a human being by giving him the ability to hug and give warmth to others. He also says that people should have no worries in him because the beauty of nature is not the temporary happiness of sadness that life brings you, but the ability to breathe in air. The ability to stand up and walk. Nature has the ability to bring the best out of the worst. The narrator also says that people can truly see nature when they are isolated from society due to the fact that they can think take their time to analyze
A Comparison of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Beliefs concerning Simplicity, the Value and Potential of Our Soul, and Our Imagination.Henry David Thoreau tests Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas about nature by living at Walden Pond, where he discovers that simplicity in physical aspects brings deepness to our mind, our soul to its fullest potential, and our imagination to be uplifted to change our lives. These two men believe that nature is what forces us not to depend on others’ ideas but to develop our own. Nature is ever changing so we must keep searching for explanations about human life. They feel that nature is the key to knowing all.Thoreau lives at Walden Pond to find the true meaning of life. He wants to experience
Henry David Thoreau had become fascinated with his friend’s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalism ideas. Ideas such as humans being born naturally good and society and government corrupting that purity and making us more dependent on one another and things. Thoreau had built a one-room cabin at Walden Pond where he had lived alone for about two years. In Thoreau’s “From Walden”, he has discovered that simplicity is the key to living in life. He expresses to “let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of one million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail”(218). Don’t overbear yourself with so much work and forget to live. If you live simply, you’ll enjoy what’s around you. Sometimes people are all caught in society’s bubble that they don’t realize what they have. Materialistic things aren’t always important and having everything isn’t what it seems to be. “The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise”(Thoreau 221). No matter how many things one has, they’ll always
The essay by Henry David Thoreau, “Where I lived and What I Lived For” tells Thoreau beliefs of how society should live. He asks deep questions such as, “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” to encourage the reader to contemplate their lives and values. He said, “Our life is frittered away by detail.” and goes on to emphasize the value of, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Thoreau states simplicity and self sufficiency are virtues society should live by; however, they potentially jeopardize the community and are consequently not viable today.
Simplicity allows us to have a richer life. Thoreau existed simply
Emerson encourages one to think of nature as a whole, and not merely as a collection of individual entities.
Henry David Thoreau wanted to get most of out of life and did so in the woods. He built a cabin in the woods and a lived a simplistic life. In “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Thoreau asserts that “I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life… to put to rout all that was not life: and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Thoreau, 8). Conformity creates an uninspiring life full of thoughts of the mass.
Emerson and Hawthorne both focused on nature and how humans affected it, but Emerson wrote more about being optimistic than Hawthorne, whom was more of a dark romanticism writer. In the essay "Nature", Ralph Waldo says, " But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give a man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime"(Emerson 11). This quote demonstrates how Emerson focuses on the feel of nature to oneself being one with nature. Previously he talks about how nature offers solitude and how we should take advantage of it instead of ignoring what the world has to offer.
I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen,and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. ”(17). While Thoreau lived in nature he learned the true meaning of life, he wanted to live his life with a purpose and wanted to experience learning new things about life. You don’t really get to experience the little details in life, He lived his life with no modern civilizations around him he wanted to gain knowledge of what life was truly like and experiencing everything while living in nature, Life seemed it had slowed life down for
Thoreau wished to open the minds of many revealing the importance of nature “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails” (Thoreau II). In the quote, Thoreau discusses how he learned to live deliberately in nature encouraging other members of society to do the same. He has learned that it can lead to harmonization with oneself, to
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau explains how a relationship with nature reveals aspects of the true self that remain hidden by the distractions of society and technology. To Thoreau, the burdens of nineteenth century existence, the cycles of exhausting work to obtain property, force society to exist as if it were "slumbering." Therefore, Thoreau urges his readers to seek a spiritual awakening. Through his rhetoric,Thoreau alludes to a "rebirth" of the self and a reconnection to the natural world. The text becomes a landscape and the images become objects, appealing to our pathos, or emotions, our ethos, or character, and our logos, or logical reasoning, because we experience his awakening. Thoreau grounds his spirituality in the physical
In this work, man is an object in the middle of living nature. Nature itself draws us from dependence upon the past and invites us to a richer state of being. Do not remember the past for "[t]he sun shines today…[t]here is more wool and flax in the fields…[t]here are new lands, new men, new thoughts"(215). Which suggests that because there is always a tomorrow. Man should not focus on the present and be more concentrated on what will be happening in the future. Emerson believed that nature was beautiful and nowhere else on earth could he find the majestic settings of the macrocosm. As Emerson declares "[in] wilderness, [he finds] something more dear and connate than in streets or villages"(216). He cannot find anything more loved and kindred than in towns and cities than what he finds in nature. Unlike Thanatopsis, Emerson focuses on the living and not the defunct. He tells us that "[in] the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature"(216). Man's nature is more beautiful than the outside of his exterior. Therefore, according to this attitude, man's life is just a mere dot in this world of blackness.