Thoreau built a cabin at Walden Pond in 1845, lived there for two years, and spent seven years writing this book about it. What emerged is not really a nature book or a memoir but a scripture for a new kind of attention: to seasons, to commerce, to the vast life going on below the surface of the ordinary. The prose is dense with puns, classical allusions, and deliberate paradox. Thoreau wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. This book is what he brought back from that experiment.