Thoreau’s] intention was not to inhabit a wilderness,” he writes, “but to find wildness in a suburban setting.” We can substitute solitude for wildness in this sentence without changing its meaning. Thoreau had no interest in complete disconnection, as the intellectual milieu of mid-nineteenth-century Concord was surprisingly well developed and Thoreau didn’t want to completely disengage from this energy. What Thoreau sought in his experiment at Walden was the ability to move back and forth between a state of solitude and a state of connection.
