Walden 13. House Warming

     I was assigned to read number thirteen of WALDEN.  It's title was "House Warming."  What I can gather is that it is about a man and his home.  In the beginning, it is a depiction of a man and his home.  He is gathering fruit and narrates himself and his home month by month.  "Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond." In the next paragraph, "The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October."  Slowly the narrator works himself into the winter months and here he begins to tell us of the hardship himself and his home encounter.  During the winter, a few times he wishes he had something bigger and better, "I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house."  During the winter, the narrator shares with us how much he appreciates the nature and how fascinated he his.  In the fifteenth paragraph we see what a man he really his, "Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection.  I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work."  Towards the end of the chapter, we start to enter deeper into the narrators mind and see how lonely he is living out of town by himself.  Overall, this chapter is about a man and his house. 

     This chapter is allllll about romanticism and transcendentalism.  Nature is one of the biggest characteristics of Romanticism.  Pretty much all this guy is doing is living by himself about two miles out of town and living off the land.  Whenever he has to build something or fix something he recycles or gets it from the forest.  "It is so much pleasanter and wholesome to be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire."  "I picked out its many fireplace bricks as I could find, to save work and waste."  "I did not plaster till it was freezing weather.  I brought over some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite short of the pond in a boat."  Later he befriends fire as a companion, "It was I and Fire that lives there."  Here he finds the beauty in fire and doesn't just expect it to be destructive. Romanticism also hold poetry as the highest expression of the imagination and there are two poems in this chapter.  n this chapter, the narrator also "transcends reason and spirituality"  Our narrator really likes to put out his possibilities and reasoning and to do his best.  

    The entire work is a book called "Walden."  This book is about "By immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the American Romantic Period. As Thoreau made clear in his book, his cabin was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, about two miles (3 km) from his family home."  Taken from Wikipedia.  The purpose of "Walden" is to immerse himself in nature to get better in touch with himself.  "Housewarming"  is about the narrator and the struggles of maintaining his house with out the help of normal things.  I think this represents the book very well because of how well it exemplifies romanticism through its nature and poetry and its transcendentalism through the spiritual reasoning.  


Works Cited 
Thoreau, Henry D. "Thoreau's Walden - an Annotated Edition." Thoreau's Walden - an Annotated Edition. N.p., 1854. Web. 12 Dec. 2012.