| 1. What audience does Thoreau imagine for his work?
2. What complaints does Thoreau have about American life?
3. Why did Thoreau go to live in the woods?
4. In the chapter called "The Ponds" Thoreau records numerous specific observations and anecdotes about Walden Pond. Why do these details interest him? What symbolic or universal value do they have for him?
5. What information does Thoreau offer about Walden's’s past? What significance does this history have?
6. How does Walden differ from other ponds in the area? Why is Thoreau interested in these differences?
7. What relationships do you find between Emerson's’s and Thoreau's’s essays? Do they share a similar vision of nature? Of America? Would Thoreau qualify as Emerson's’s American scholar?
8. What similarities do you find between Thoreau's ideas and Emerson's? What differences?
9. Why does "Where I Lived and What I Lived For" emphasize sleeping, slumber, and wakefulness? What do these have to do with Thoreau's overall themes? Compare their use in the "Conclusion, final paragraph.
10.What Puritan ideas do you find expressed, perhaps in new ways, often not, in Walden?
11. In what ways does Walden seem to be based on ideas about the relationships between language and natural facts similar to those of Emerson (as expressed in the "Language" chapter of Nature)? How do these ideas seem to affect the writing style of Walden?
12. What does Thoreau mean by living "deliberately?"
13. According to Thoreau, what do we have; what do we want; what do we need? Why aren't these three lists the same in his thinking? Are they the same in your thinking (that is, are what you have, what you want, and what you need approximately the same?)? If so, what would Thoreau say to you? If not, do any of Thoreau's ideas help you to align them?
14. Do any of Thoreau's ideas seem to be relevant in American society today, given what you know of it? To Taiwanese society? Give examples for both.
15. What similarities do you find between Thoreau's ideas and those of Chinese philosophy and religion? (Consider, for example, this passage from Tao Te Ching: Lau Tzu writes, "Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness, have few desires" (ch. 19).)
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