I think Nicholas Bone should have read a copy of Walden before embarking on this project, then he'd see just how wrong this whole concept is. Maybe a freegan living in a supermarket car park could come close to living 'deliberately', but the photo accompanying this post seems to jar on the whole Walden vibe.

Unless of course it's a satire on the fact that Walden Pond is now in surrounded by concrete, roads and congestion :o)

"I made a play in a parking garage because I wanted to sell a lot of tickets and make money deliberately, and not, when I came to die, discover that I was still a poor starving artist."

Walden is surrounded by development NOW because it was in the Boston suburbs THEN.

Thoreau was a wimp, who often returned home to his mother's for dinner. He was a grown manchild playing wood'sman. He just also happened to be a decent poet. The one time he tried to really live in the woods (with John Muir) he suffered a mental breakdown.

Uh, Thoreau was dead when John Muir started writing. They never tried to go camping together. Rather, Emerson and Thoreau inspired John Muir, who in turn gave us the National Park System.

Yes, Henry went to his Mom's; everyone knows that. But he also slept alone in the woods every night. He inspired countless environmentalists to this day. He never had a mental breakdown, as you call it. If you are referring to the Maine woods trip, that was not a breakdown. He embellished the experience for literary purposes.

To boot, most literature scholars think his poetry was pretty bad, which it was. It's pretty hard to find volumes of that crap (save the Library of America edition).

Thoreau was famous for his moving prose and his [albeit flawed] experiment. He never camped with Muir, had a breakdown or became a notable poet.