Perhaps the most attractive aspect about the life of Henry David
             Thoreau to a modern reader is the fact that the man actually lived the type
             of life and philosophy that he preached. Thoreau disdained the
             industrialized, modern urban life of the modern intellectual. His entire
             life illustrates how he lived, not simply as a great thinker, but as one
             who embodied the living principles of the Transcendentalist movement.
             Thoreau did not simply tell others to live. Rather he sought to discover,
             and then to embody his own principles in the text of lived experience, as
             First of all, rather than attempting to secure a job as a minister or
             academic after graduating from college, Thoreau embarked upon a period of
             study in the real world, to determine what was the best path for himself.
             On this quest, he worked as, among many other menial' occupations and
             pursuits, as a handyman for the esteemed essayist and Unitarian minister,
             Ralph Waldo Emerson. By working with his hands, Thoreau was able to gain a
             better sense of the importance of lived experience, rather than living in
             books. However, the literary climate at this most famous
             Transcendentalist's house enabled the emerging writer in Thoreau to remain
             immersed in this movement's literary scene and its ideas.
             The importance of working with one's hands, as a path to true self-
             reliance, in Thoreau's philosophy was next put into practice in his most
             famous experiment, that of his time of living in the woods in Walden,
             Massachusetts. Thoreau recoded in his journals and in the book that bears
             the location's name, his practical daily difficulties of dealing with
             ordinary individuals in the community, as well as his many successes and
             failures in dealing with harsh environmental conditions.
             Unlike Emerson, Thoreau does not sentimentalize the natural world.
             Having come to grips with its harshness in a very real and vi
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