When Henry David Thoreau escaped to Walden Pond in the summer of 1845, it was as a refuge from this precise experience, the invasive omnipresence of modernity and the way it can cloud a person’s faculties. Of our so-called modern improvements, he writes, “There is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance…Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.”[23]
