Good evening and welcome back to bedtime with Bavis. Tonight it is my pleasure to share with you some excerpts from Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

I portrayed Henry David Thoreau in the Night Thoreau spent in jail back in high school and on

the last night of the show I had a fever of 101 and during my character's actual fever dream in the play I burst out into tears.

People thought that I did a great job but really I was just losing my mind.

Let's start with an excerpt from the first chapter, Economy, wherein Thoreau builds his cabin on Walden Pond. Near the end of March 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond nearest to where I intended to build my house and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines still in their youth for timber.

It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit

your fellow men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye, but I returned it sharper than I received it.

It was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through

which I looked out in the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were

springing up. The ice in the pond was not yet

dissolved, though there were some open spaces and it was all dark colored and

saturated with water. There were some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked out there,

but for the most part when I came out under the railroad on my way home,

its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere and the rails shone in the spring sun

And I heard the lark and the peewy and other birds already come to commence another year with us.

There were pleasant spring days in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing

as well as the earth.

And the life that had lain, torpid, began to stretch its stealth.

One day when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hegery for a wedge, driving it with

a stone, and had placed the hole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood.

I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom apparently without inconvenience as long as I stayed

there or more than a quarter of an hour perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the

...