Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was another great great contributor to transcendentalism. Where Emerson would become the teacher Thoreau would be the practitioner. Emerson wrote of going back to nature and escaping society but Thoreau was the one to actually try it. Thoreau believed so strongly in the ideas of transcendentalism that he went out into the wilderness to experience them and a life away from society. He lived in a small shack/house near Walden Pond. While there he wrote of his experiences and great realizations. Thoreau took Emerson's essays and teachings to heart and was now trying to rise above his original awareness in order to transcend and develop a higher understanding of the world around him. Emerson said “But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.”  Thoreau will have taken this idea to heart. Since he journeyed into the woods he must have thought he could cleave himself of the worldly things in his life that had been polluting him and not allowing him to reach his full potential. Thoreau said in Walden "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" This basically sums up the whole reason why he ventured of into the woods. He wanted to live with a purpose that is greater than he had before. He wanted to learn from life and see what it could teach him. He wanted to truly live, to be alive and infinite in a single moment and not be able to have that moment corrupted or destroyed by society. He wants to think for himself and challenge the things that he knows.

Thoreau practiced Emerson's teachings to the fullest and documented his full experience in detail before he died in the Alaskan wilderness. He is the great practitioner and it it he who truly transcended as he secluded himself from society.