Henry David Thoreau example essay topic

Through the miracle of technology today, young Henry David Thoreau (seventeen years old) has been brought forward in time to present day. Henry David Thoreau has come to present day with three possessions that reflect his personality, character and concerns. For his personality he carries a piece of steel. He carries this piece of steel because for a period of time he lived in the woods. He moved into the woods, "to live deliberately, to front only the essential factors of life".

So that when it did come to the point in his life when he would depart from this world he wouldn't lay there feeling he hadn't lived. To do this it takes great will and courage to drop technology that today we hold so dear and depend upon. I feel the piece of steel reflects this in his personality. For his character he carries a law book but this law book is different. You open this law book and on every page all the words are scratched out and there are even pages torn out!

There are words scribbled in between the scratched out ones. This law book represents Thoreau's charter because it is said that Henry David Thoreau's character was, "tedious, tiresome and intolerable". When our four fathers started to write the constitution it was tedious and tiresome. Thoreau thought, as do others, that laws are sometimes very intolerable because they are a permanent idea that everyone follows without question except for some. What I mean by that is the ones that received their civil rights, the ones that received the right to be a free citizen no matter what color, the ones that received the right to vote no matter what sex they are, the ones such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jane Addams. The third and last possession that Henry David Thoreau carries is a ball of yarn.

This ball of yarn refers to his concerns. This ball of yarn represents tradition in the worst way. Tradition starts out like the very beginning piece of yarn but as it grows it curls up onto itself and forms a ball of never ending reform. You " ve never seen yarn thrown into a pile because if tried to straighten out, there would be kinks and knots.

The knots and kinks are the new ideas that question the authority of tradition. One of Thoreau's biggest concerns was that by the time his life came to the end and his yarn was all rolled up or thrown into a pile he would feel he hadn't lived. He felt that if he just listened and accepted tradition as it was and not throw new ideas into tradition's face that he would end up like the many Americans that live today. Not as an individual. Steel, a vandalized law book and a ball of yarn are what I believe to represent Henry David Thoreau's personality, character and concerns. Each object I feel represents him and how we know this man from his intelligent writings.