What is your analysis on Thoreau's essay "Where I lived and What I lived for"?

Question

Particularly on this passage:

"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."

It is very deep. But what do you think is he trying to say? What really is this kind of life that he is talking about?

Answer 1

That living in a circumstance where one's actions are directed toward survival and one is dependent upon oneself and nature for all one can have, is (for him) instills a deeper sense of "living" than can be had in the artificial constructs of a city and social constructs.

Answer 2

Thoreau Analysis

Answer 3

Well, I think he was greatly influenced by the Brits. What he is after is meaning. Not in the conventional mode, where we are brainwashed into believing that school, religion and being a good person will provide us with a higher level of living; rather, he wanted to transcend the ordinariness of life and find the truth. This is a common theme in literature; the quest for the truth, but paradoxically, the truth is often a dangerous path, consider Hamlet and his plight to put order back in his universe, by finding the truth. Thoreau, however seems very positive that his truth will lead to a higher vision.

Answer 4

I think Thoreau saw that most people don't really experience "Life". To live, one must merely exist. In efforts to make living more convenient, people and things assist us to the point of distraction and dependence. Thoreau was born into an affluent society. He did not suffer poverty, but I think he saw an inner strength which the poor possessed that the rich did not. I believe that he knew the only way to truly "Live deliberately" was to get away and experience life for ones self, alone with it. To be taught life through "Nature", and to force oneself to strive, commune and discourse with the basic essentials which ARE life.