"Thoreau…“With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits,” he proclaimed, “all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.”

Blow clicked off the stereo and turned to me. “I honestly didn’t plan that,” he said.

In so many words, Loud Thoreau had just described Blow’s central idea for The Witness. Whereas so many contemporary games are built on a foundation of shooting or jumping or, let’s say, the creative use of mining equipment to disembowel space zombies, Blow wants the point of The Witness to be the act of noticing, of paying attention to one’s surroundings. Speaking about it, he begins to sound almost like a Zen master. “Things are pared down to the basic acts of movement and observation until those senses become refined,” he told me. “The further you go into the game, the more it’s not even about the thinking mind anymore—it becomes about the intuitive mind."

"Librivox recording of Walden by Henry David Thoreau Read by Gord Mackenzie."

"If he went to jail to demonstrate his commitment to freedom of others, he went to the berries to exercise his own recovered freedom, the liberty to do whatever he wished, & the evidence in all his writing is that he very often wished to pick berries. There’s a widespread belief, among both activists & those who cluck disapprovingly over insufficiently austere activists, that idealists should not enjoy any pleasure denied to others, that beauty, sensuality, delight all ought to be stalled behind some dam that only the imagined revolution will break. This schism creates, as the alternative to a life of selfless devotion, a life of flight from engagement, which seems to be one way those years at Walden Pond are sometimes portrayed. But change is not always by revolution, the deprived don’t generally wish that the rest of us would join them in deprivation, & a passion for justice & pleasure in small things are not incompatible. That’s part of what the short jaunt from jail to hill says."

"I fear technology not because I think it's evil, but because it's too easy to start clicking and never stop…

Thoreau had to abandon work and friends to live simply, but he was not against it. He just had no choice at the time, given the technology at hand. I think we–and information workers like programmers, designers and writers especially–are capable right now of living a fantastic life that marries the wild vitality that Thoreau experienced at Walden with the better parts of civilized living. This is a life that Ted, if he were still in his cabin, could be envious of–if we could only muster the discipline to get away from the noise.

See, for the first time ever, the trade off between living a powerfully exciting life close to nature and adventure and having the basics of civilized, boring life are largely gone. We don't have to abandon civilization and our friends and our work and technology and run off into the woods to live a simple, powerful life."

"Throughout history, from Plato on, creative people have spoken out against the stultifying effects of compulsory education. Here are quotations from fifty such people, which I have culled partly from my own reading but mostly from various other websites."

"The Walden Project is an alternative program focused on environmental studies and on the teachings of Henry David Thoreau, who did some of his best thinking outdoors at Walden Pond.<br />
<br />
Life Consists with Wildness<br />
<br />
Matt Schlein, a New York native, is 50 percent of the staff at Walden. After years teaching in a traditional high school, Schlein started a foundation that raised the money to buy the 260 acres that the Walden Project uses as its classroom.<br />
<br />
Two or three days a week, Schlein drives through the farmlands around Vergennes, Vt., parks his well-used Toyota next to a 200-year-old barn, grabs some vegetables from a garden he maintains and walks nearly a mile through the woods.<br />
<br />
On one school day in early January, Schlein gets to a spot where 19 students sit on a motley collection of old chairs and benches. Schlein starts to read from Thoreau's essay "Walking."…"

"student…is asked to distill this info & create a cohesive picture of the world. While it is undoubtedly true that many students have achieved success w/ this model, it is also clear that this model does not work for everyone. Creating a sense of one’s place in world, through education, is a highly individualized affair. To that end, it is important that we offer students a variety of ways to wrestle w/ the important questions of learning, where there is a natural thematic connection linking the fields of study. There is a historical precedence for this type of interdisciplinary education.<br />
<br />
On the following pages, you will read about TWP…a model based upon this idea…each academic discipline is discussed & its relationship to the VT Framework of Standards is detailed…program itself is designed so these distinctions are blurred. While students will undoubtedly gain the skills in each academic discipline, these skills will be developed as part of a broader mode of inquiry."

"not school in the traditional sense. It is a community of 19 students & 2 teachers who use this former farmland for what the founder calls a "great, living template for education." They spend three days a week outdoors, through fall, bitter winter, and spring. On Tuesdays, for Field Sociology class and writing, the students visit government offices, nonprofit organizations, & other institutions in Burlington, a college town of 40,000 located 20mi away.<br />
<br />
On Fridays, they work at internships in their areas of interest, such as Web design or photography.<br />
<br />
Matt Schlein, who had taught English, drama, & psychology at VUHS for 6 years, founded the project in 2000 with a vision of authentic, student-directed learning based in nature. He created a small foundation, Willowell, and collected grants and donations to buy the 230 acres Walden Project participants call simply "the land" -- a swath of sloping fields spotted with woods & ringed by the Green Mountains."

"The Walden Project is an alternative learning program through Vergennes Union High School. It focuses mainly on science and literature while exploring the relationship between humans, society, and the natural world. Walden encourages students to take their education into their own hands and make it their own."

"Walking, as Thoreau said and Solnit elegantly demonstrates, inevitably leads to other subjects. This pleasing and enlightening history of pedestrianism unfolds like a walking conversation with a particularly well-informed companion with wide-ranging interests. Walking, says Solnit, is the state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned; thus she begins with the long historical association between walking and philosophizing. She briefly looks at the fossil evidence of human evolution, pointing to the ability to move upright on two legs as the very characteristic that separated humans from the other beasts and has allowed us to dominate them. She looks at pilgrims, poets, streetwalkers and demonstrators, and ends up, surprisingly, in Las Vegas--or maybe not so surprisingly in that city of tourists, since "Tourism itself is one of the last major outposts of walking." …"

"And that’s part of the reason I share some of the things I do via twitter: The music I listen to. The food I’m cooking or eating. The films I’m watching; the books I’m reading; the places I go to. Sometimes what I share is in the immediate past, sometimes it’s in the present, sometimes all I’m doing is declaring my intent. Because, paraphrasing John Lennon, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.<br />
<br />
When we share our experiences of sights and sounds and smells, we recreate the familiar imaginary places we share with others. We use these digital objects as the seed, as one dimension of the experience to flesh out the rest of that experience. So we take the sound or image or location or even in some cases the smell, and we extrapolate it into a rich memory of that particular experience. Which is often a worthwhile thing to do, for all the people who shared that “imaginary place” with you."

"We travel…to lose ourselves…to find ourselves…to open our hearts & eyes & learn more…to bring what little we can, in our ignorance & knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed…to become young fools again—to slow time down & get taken in, & fall in love once more…

…travel…is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile & awake. As Santayana…wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, & it fosters humor.” Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end."

"You have no idea how meta we can get. This whole Tumblr ecosystem really just exists in the daydream of a distinguished gentlemen musing on machinery in a cabin somewhere."

"In a country where so many gamely adopt the latest new gadget, we need our Thoreaus, not to stop the profusion of technology, but simply to remind us to use them well. There are spaces shot through our massively complex society to find "Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!" by simply deciding to look for it.<br />
<br />
Take another grave and important personality of the time, Abraham Lincoln. His views on technology, delivered in a series of speeches on "Discoveries and Inventions" in the years directly after Thoreau's Walden, were more positive. For Lincoln, technology did not debase humanity, as Thoreau would have contended, but it also wasn't a magical staircase leading to a better world under the label of Progress."

"Anarcho-primitivism is an anarchist critique of the origins and progress of civilization. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence gave rise to social stratification, coercion, and alienation. Anarcho-primitivists advocate a return to non-"civilized" ways of life through deindustrialisation, abolition of the division of labour or specialization, and abandonment of large-scale organization technologies. There are other non-anarchist forms of primitivism, and not all primitivists point to the same phenomenon as the source of modern, civilized problems."

"At our desk, on the road, or on a remote beach, the world is a tap away. It's so cool. And yet it's not. What we lose with our constant connectedness." ... "DESCARTES, NEWTON, LOCKE, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard -- they share the distinction of having been some of the greatest thinkers the world has known. They also share this: None of them ever married or had their own families, and most of them spent the bulk of their lives living alone. In his provocative 1989 book Solitude: A Return to the Self, British writer and psychiatrist Anthony Storr made a persuasive case for the value of deep, uninterrupted alone time. He found it in ample supply in the lives of not just philosophers and physicists, but also some of the greatest poets, novelists, painters, and composers."

"As everyone seeks more and broader connectivity, the still, small voice speaks only in silence"

"Rolling Huts are several steps above camping, while remaining low-tech and low-impact in their design. The huts sit lightly on the site, a flood plain meadow in an alpine river valley...The wheels lift the structures above the meadow, providing an unobstructed view into nature and the prospect of the surrounding mountains...an offset, steel clad box on a steel and wood platform...Living occurs not only in the 200 sq ft inside the box, but on the 240 sq ft of covered deck space...Interior...simple and inexpensive. Exteriors are no-maintenance materials...The raw nature of the materials responds to the natural setting. The huts are grouped as a herd: while each is sited towards a view of the mountains (and away from the other structures), their proximity unites them...The huts evoke Thoreau’s simple cabin in the woods; the structures take second place to nature."

Walden / Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau in full online

"This year, a more cryptic stencil has appeared on the Humber Bay Arch Bridge, boldly proclaiming "ISBN 486-28495-6" for all to see and ponder. This International Standard Book Number turns out to be a paperback edition of Henry David Thoreau's Walden; Or

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practive resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdy and Spartan-like as to put a rout to all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."