Satisfaction.

“I think that no experience which I have to-day comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood,” Thoreau wrote in 1851. “My life was ecstasy. In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me ... I can remember how I was astonished.”

The premise of Walden—a man adventuring in a hut he builds for himself near a lake—seems like the ultimate boy’s fantasy, and the convenient proximity of Thoreau’s cabin to friends and neighbors can remind one, a bit wryly, of a child pitching a tent in his parents’ backyard.

The theme seems perfected in the passage of Walden where Thoreau tallies up the homely materials he’s used to build his retreat, including a few boards, throwaway shingles, “two second-hand windows with glass, one thousand old brick,” along with assorted hinges, nails, and other oddments. One sees similar lists in Huckleberry Finn and Robinson Crusoe, two other works with special appeal to males of a tender age. They read like an inventory of the boyhood mind, a pleasant brainstorm of found objects that suggest endless possibility.

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