“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 i...
“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...”
When the nineteenth century author and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson offered Henry David Thoreau a plot of land called Walden Pond, little did he know he was helping to make literary history. Thoreau moved to this idyllic spot in Concord, Massachusetts, USA, where he spent two years living in a rustic cabin and writing amidst nature and solitude.
The result was Walden, a meditative work published in 1854 that would become a classic. In it, Thoreau reflected upon life in the woods, the passage of time, and the place of books as “the treasured wealth of the world, the inheritance of generations.”
Half a world away and multiple generations later, Thoreau’s seminal work would become a deep influence on a young electrical engineering student in Chennai, India. A self-described recluse, V Ram Prasad recalls haunting the city’s local libraries in the 1970s and early 1980s, sometimes reading a book a day. By the time he was twenty, he said, he’d read “most...
