Henry-David-Thoreau梭罗.ppt

Conclusion: This final chapter is more passionate and urgent than its predecessors. In it, Thoreau criticizes Americans constant rush to succeed, to acquire superfluous wealth that does nothing to augment their happiness. He urges us to change our lives for the better, not by acquiring more wealth and material possessions, but instead to sell your clothes and keep your thoughts, and to say what you have to say, not what you ought. He criticizes conformity: If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. By doing these things, men may find happiness and self-fulfillment. IV.Themes 　Walden emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, solitude, contemplation, and closeness to nature in transcending the crass existence that is supposedly the lot of most humans. The book is neither a novel nor a true autobiography, but combines these genres with a social critique of contemporary Western cultures consumerist and materialist attitudes and its distance from and destruction of nature. V. Some Comments Some Comments 1. It is a great Transcendentalist work that came out of the period under discussion. 2. It is a faithful record of his reflections. He saw nature as a genuine restorative healthy influence on man’s spiritual well-being, and regarded it as a symbol of the spirit. 3. It can be many things and can be read on more than one level. It is a book on self-culture and human perfectibility. It is full of ideas expressed to jostle his neighbors out to their smug complacency. 4. Regeneration became one of its major thematic concerns and decided its structural framework. The whole book is within the frame of a single year, and progresses through summer and autumn to winter, and finally to a climax in the renascence of spring. 5. It exhibits his calm trust in the future and his ardent belief in a new generation of men. The book concludes on a clear not