Solitude in Walden

Quite a few people consider solitude as a negative state, for example, lack of contact with people or love. However, different from loneliness, which is marked by a sense of isolation, solitude is the state of being alone without being lonely. And that means you may choose to be solitudinous, like H.D. Thoreau, for better self-awareness or other purpose.

The author loved solitude and he was never lonely as long as he is close to nature. He used solitude to refresh and replenish himself. Quiet environment brought peacefulness to his souls or spirits.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

He thought solitude makes people concentrate more upon what they are doing. So those who are in solitude do not feel lonely at all. When people concentrate on the field of work, they always feel companions with them. Attractive contents of books, impressive sceneries of nature, and anything else are companions of people in solitude. And this is because these people are "employed",

The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed;
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and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the blues"; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.

Although a number of people pay too much attention to learn how to deal with people and how to enlarge the social networks. He believed there was no great value to work on social networks. Instead, working on themselves was a much more effective and substantial method,

Society is commonly too cheap...We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war...Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications...It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.

Solitude also has limitation, which means it may turn to loneliness if he spent time with no single company. Even Robinson Crusoe had to consider Friday as a friend, although, obviously, he did not intend to be in solitude. Since Thoreau had "heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions," he prevented loneliness when he was in the long-time solitude ("a two-year and two-month stay at a crude cabin in the woods near Walden Pond").

I have a great deal of company in my house;...I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.

Solitude is a period of time of reflection and self-consciousness. He needed this unusual experience and long-time solitude to get rid of the cheap society and reflect his destinations of gaining a more objective understanding of it. However, he did not feel lonely, for he had creatures from nature, and simplicity and self-reliance as his goals.