Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” As a powerful leader in literature, this statement was targeted towards people who tried to live a different life compared to what society expects you how to live. Emerson was a well known author who was influential to a variety of people such as Henry David Thoreau. Besides the fact that Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were friends, they both influenced each other within their common ideas. Thoreau’s writings, he expressed his feelings based upon nature and society’s problems. In Thoreau’s piece, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” he shares his expectations of life by persuading his audience to live a life surrounded with nature and without society's issues as a conflict.
Within the story, Henry persuades his audience to consume themselves less to what society brings and look for something you will enjoy. His clever rhetorical strategies within the story, grabs his audience attention such as the introduction. As Thoreau states in the beginning, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, … when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live
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He gave them advice to surround themselves with what made their life a better place. The story is given through his own perspective, in which he points out the mistakes he committed which was not enjoying life. The majority of people surround themselves into society that at the end of the day, they are surrounded by negativity. Therefore, Thoreau mentions, “Time is but the stream I go afishing in” (280). This metaphor brings a mixture of emotions to the himself and his audience because it describes how nothing will stop time, it will continue with or without them. This is the main reason to why he has regret within himself to how he has lived his