NOTES FOR A (RE)IMAGINED #WALDEN

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau leaves the family home in Concord and settles in the cabin he has built next to the Walden Lagoon to "live life intensely from beginning to end". Walden, Thoreau said, "is a book written for that majority of men and women who are unhappy with their lives and the times they have had to live through, but who could improve them. And also for those who seem to be rich, but in reality have accumulated useless things and do not know very well what to do with them”; is a defence of free and wild life, as well as a fierce criticism of society and its impositions, -which have hardly changed since that date-; is a radical and direct questioning of the institution of work as indoctrination and of the market as the only god, as well as a lucid defence of the simplification of life and of the path that leads us to pursue its essence and its daily pleasures; is a reflection on the need to preserve both nature and the planet as well as the core of our own individual and irreducible existence; is a stimulating exploration of intimacy in its most concrete form: living conditions (in this time of confinement, needless to say that not everyone is housed in the same way). Is it enough to be alive to live?