Walden

Through the seasons and the ordinary business of survival, the book counts the cost of a house down to the half-cent, hoes two and a half acres of beans, and sounds the depth of the pond itself. Alongside the practical accounting runs a long, patient meditation on solitude, on reading, on the "quiet desperation" Thoreau sees in the lives around him. He can be wry — his purchase of a shabby shanty becomes a small comedy of poverty and property — and then, a page later, tender, as when a gentle rain dissolves his loneliness and every pine needle turns companionable.

There are people here, glimpsed and remembered. A cheerful, unlettered woodchopper whose contentment Thoreau prizes above any learned visitor. John Field, an Irish laborer trapped in his own hard toil, who can only stare at the arithmetic of freedom offered him across a leaking hut. And then the loon on the pond, laughing and vanishing and surfacing again, leading a man on in his boat.

The prose is lyrical and unhurried, moving without strain from a close look at sand thawing down a railroad bank to a claim about the design of the whole living world. Some of its lines have long outlived their pond: the different drummer, the earth's eye. What holds it together is a simple conviction, borne out season by season: that solid truth exists, and rewards anyone willing to go all the way down to find it.