Thoreau's Walden: Points of Particular Interest

Chapter XV - Winter Animals

• Winter animals is indeed about winter animals, as Thoreau recounts the sounds (and rarer sight) of so many creatures who would have, by this time, accepted his shack and his presence as part of the scenery.

Chapter XVI - The Pond in Winter

• More careful natural observation, as Thoreau describes in detail the frozen pond, fish beneath the ice or frozen in the ice, and such surroundings.
• We are in the days before refrigerators, when summer's ice was made by Mother Nature's winter [please excuse deliberate anthropomorphism], and harvested from the pond much as one would harvest trees from the forest. The ice would be hauled into town and stored in icehouses -- generally cut deep into hillsides and always insulated with great layers of sawdust to retard the melting of the ice. Thoreau describes an ice-crew at work.

Chapter XVII -- Spring

• Serves to close the loop of the narrative, to complete the year (Thoreau stayed at Walden a little over two years, but compressed his account into a single year, thus providing his readers with one Cycle of Nature).
• The chapter details the breaking up of the ice on Walden Pond as well as the pattern of budding of spring -- Thoreau's reflection that he had come to the pond looking forward to observing the arriving spring can well be understood.

Chapter XVIII -- Conclusion

• Chapter opens with an exhortation to "explore oneself," to find discover the "white" (unknown) areas on one's inner map.
• The Mirabeau segment on 1553 offers, compactly, the political philosophy found in Civil Disobedience: do not obey laws or societal dictates which stand in direct opposition to conscience and good judgment; do obey all those which are reflective of or consistent with just behavior.
• The paragraph (1553) beginning "I learned this ..." reflects Thoreau on experimentation and what we would term daydreaming: "If you have built your castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
• 1534 - note Thoreau's rejection of the notion of the "wisdom of the Ancients."
• On 1536 Thoreau advises, "However mean your life is, meet it and live it." I find those words particularly wise and apt.
• He devotes most of the remainder of the conclusion to the notion that truth and life lie ahead -- for all of us; that each of us may live more deeply, understand more, and see more than has ever been revealed in the past.
• "There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." Think on those words. If "the sun is but a morning star," what does Thoreau suggest lies ahead.