solitude and thoreau, trancentdentalism

             ¡°I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.¡±
             Transcendentalism, according to www. Dictionary.com, means a literary and philosophical movement, associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition. Transcendentalists believed that there is knowledge beyond what humans can see, hear, feel, smell, touch, and taste. Their theories were based on the philosophy of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. One of the theories they believed was the idea of solitude. It was an important theme to Emerson and Thoreau and both practiced and wrote about the importance of solitude in every persons life.
             Thoreau stayed in Staten Island for one year to tutor Ralph Waldo Emerson¡¯s children and when he returned from this experience, he built a small cottage on Emerson¡¯s estate next to Walden Pond. He lived in this cottage for two years in complete solitude. Thoreau thought of solitude as necessary to every person. He demonstrates how necessary he thinks of solitude in this quotation.
             It is easy to live in the world after the world¡¯s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.¡±
             Thoreau is saying that every man can live by the world, or by himself, but his idea of a great man is he who can balance out the two. During Thoreau¡¯s two year stay at Walden, he wrote a book that today is considered a classic. To him, it was a journal. To the world, it is a collection of ideas that many haven¡¯t even fathomed. I think Thoreau thought of so
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