Critiquing an Argument - Essay Example

We have to put emphasis on our tasks to maintain and preserve a safe and hale and hearty environment, from our own human rights to exhausting supplies of natural resources (Lewin 34). Thoreau existed in the era of slavery. He on one occasion spent a night in jail for failing to pay his taxes to the government that sustained it. But his protestation was not only to the slavery of the Negro, but rather the slavery of all people (Murphy 45). As one interpretation has illustrated Walden would be seen as a setting free narrative, the story of a flee from delusion.

For Thoreau, the figurative deep South was just two miles away; Agreement, though it restricted family and friends, was a kind of prison people were not aware they were in, imprisoned by materialism and conventionality (Murphy 47). Thoreau prominently stated to his blank page, the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. With his acquaintance Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau at the present, stands as a pillar of what may be described as the ethic of American distinctiveness (Murphy 54). The insincerity of this is the fact that they both railed in opposition to so much of what the United States and other Western countries have debatably become: prosperous consumer playgrounds shadowed by not having a personal meaning.

Yet Walden and the writings of Emerson that so prejudiced it, is as striking as ever to those in hunt for something more (Lewin 58). Most of the opinions and ideas in it have gone through public awareness, and it has been one of the core inspirations for the modern generation of personal development writers. For example, among the descriptions of nature and people we find these now-famous lines: If one advances confidently in the direction of his own dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours, and I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious