Precis:
David Thoreau, a philosopher
that spent roughly two years living “simply”, wrote “Why I Went to the Woods”
(___); it claims that living simply is the only way to fully experience life.
Thoreau illuminates the unnecessary qualities of all of your stuff that you hold dear through rhetorical
questions (Why should we live with such
hurry and waste of life?” parallelisms (“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”), and varying sentence lengths
to emphasize certain ideas (“One is enough.”). He emphasizes the need for
simplicity in life to encourage his readers to break out from their normal
detailed life to experience everything around them; only in this way will they
truly be living. David’s audience is broad; he is reaching out to the entire
world’s population because these are the people that are bogged down with
clutter and unnecessary materialistic mentality
Graphic Organizer
Why I Went to the Woods
Paragraph 1:
I
went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the
essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and
not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live
what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation,
unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the
marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that
was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a
corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why
then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to
the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give
a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it
appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the
devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it
is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."
Paraphrase: I lived in the
woods because I wanted to live simply; In this way I could fully enjoy life. In
my experience, men look upon the world to quickly and they need to access the
world, and what it means to them.
Rhetorical Strategy or style
elements:
Loose
sentence
Long
Sentence
Declarative
sentence
Allusion
to Spartans
Effect or Function:
The
paragraph is an introduction; it declares the purpose of the character’s
actions (thesis). It also sets up the character/author’s opinion of man’s view
of the world, which is that they think that they need way more objects and stuff then they actually do. He uses an
allusion to the Spartans to represent how he has conquered his life and done
only the absolutely necessary actions, like a Spartan would, to produce a
fulfilling lifestyle.
Paragraph 2: Still we live
meanly, like ants; though the fable
tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error,
and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a
superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our
life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count
more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes,
and lump the rest. Simplicity,
simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not
a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your
accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized
life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items
to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to
the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a
great calculator indeed who succeeds.
Simplify, simplify. Instead
of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things
in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary
forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at
any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called
internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is
just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and
tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation
and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for
it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and
elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that
the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a
telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do
or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little
uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and
devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to
improve them, who will build
railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and
mind our business, who will want
railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are
that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee
man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars
run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few
years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure
of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when
they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in
the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a
hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it
takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in
their beds as it is, for this is a
sign that they may sometime get up again.
Paraphrase: Even though we
were told that we have evolved past basic animal beings, like ants, we still
act like them. Until we are able to simplify our lives, we will never live as
an “honest man”. We must live like the
Spartans, a simple life with a purpose. The clutter and things that we hold
dear to ourselves, and believe that we need, are really an ailment, that can
only be healed by simplicity. Even though we are tripped up by all of our
materials; there is still hope for us.
Rhetorical Strategy or Style
Elements:
Parallelism
Short
Sentence to reinforce main idea
Rhetorical
Questions
Metaphor
Effect or Function: This
paragraph is used to point out the flaw in human nature; that we are attached
to our objects and other things.
Thoreau uses parallelism “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”
to emphasize the encumbrance of objects on humanity. At the end of the
paragraph it gives the reader hope in the form of a metaphor that humans may be
able to be saved from their stuff.
Paragraph 3: Why should we live with such hurry and waste
of life? We are determined to be starved before we
are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time
saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine
tomorrow. As for work, we haven't any of
any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and
cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a few pulls at the
parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is
hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that
press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a
boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that
sound, not mainly to save property from the flames,
but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it
must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire — or to see it put
out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were
the parish church itself. Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after dinner,
but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "What's the news?"
as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some
give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose;
and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night's
sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. "Pray tell me
anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe" — and he
reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this
morning on the Wachito River;never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark
unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye
himself.
Paraphrase: Hurrying through
life is not living. We all have a maniac disease that causes us to hop around
without appreciating our surroundings. News is worthless. We try to look at
events that are happening all over the world, which causes us to miss what
happens right around us. By examining what is happening in our current
situation we can reach the higher truth than by examining events that aren’t
happening in your “world”.
Rhetorical Strategy or Style
Elements:
Rhetorical
question
Common
phrase/ cliché
Effect or Function:
Paragraph 3 urges the reader to focus more locally on their life. By
exaggerating a common cliché (“A stitch in time saves nine”) in a comical form
Thoreau remarks on the hurried way humans go through life and how it is not
really living.
Paragraph 4: For my part, I
could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few
important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received
more than one or two letters in my life — I wrote
this some years ago — that were worth the postage. The penny-post is,
commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for
his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If
we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house
burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over
on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in
the winter — we never need read of another. One is
enough. If you are acquainted with the
principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To
a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who
edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after
this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the
offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large
squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the
pressure — news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month,
or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As
for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the
Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions — they may have changed the names a little
since I saw the papers — and serve up a bull-fight when other
entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea
of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid
reports under this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last
significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if
you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need
attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary
character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new
does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.
Paraphrase: The post-office
is one of the many silly inventions of the human race. Also, the Newspaper,
does not produce memorable news. It loops on the same type of stories, robbery,
murder, a cow run over by the railroad. “One is enough”. To a
philosopher, all news is not necessarily the true facts. You can approximate
the ”new” news, as long as you have some understanding of a little previous
history.
Rhetorical Strategy or Style
Elements:
Interrupted
sentence
Oxymoron
Short
Sentence
Rhetorical
Question
Under-exaggerating
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