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First, let me say that these readings were boring. David Thoreau says he goes to live in the woods so that he can, learn what nature has to teach; he can basically “live” his life, instead of dying and finding that he hadn’t been living at all. In this time period, that’s what it was all about, was becoming a man and seeing the “frontier” like the Old Western folk heroes did—but without the gun fighting and swearing. This time period was gushy and mushy, and personally, I would have hated to be alive. I would have been in favor of tearing all the trees down from their roots and not letting them alive again. It is writers like Thoreau that turn me off to the Transcendentalists.