eveloped sociability outside his close family, and the differences in his surroundings left him finding it hard to relate to the outside world as a normal child. Thoreau’s now crippled sociability increased the difficulty for him to make friends, and he may have even been teased or taunted by his peers. Now without boyhood companionship in the school or town, he would have to look for it within the family. Yet he was only to find an older brother whom, as older brothers often do, precluded his smaller, slower little brother, and Thoreau did not find it fit to have a his little sister for his closest friend. His father was more of a disciplinary figure than a companion, as most fathers of the time period were, and the womanly friendship he had with his mother still left him without real camaraderie. Henry turned to the woods and nature, and here he found beauty and solitude. He found a warmth that somehow eased his need for companionship, and an indiscriminant charm that inticed him. It was a place that he felt a part of, even more so than the town, the school, and his family. He would spend much of his childhood here, as described before, fishing, hunting, camping, building fires. The important part is that he was doing this alone, and nature became his one true companion. Thus, creating his fascination and love for it’s splendor. His views of nature would be of the deepest perception and knowing, as he would spend much of his life there. These views not in anyway disturbed or marking him to be a disturbed man as one may comprise from his beginnings, but not being the views a normal man would derive from his naturalistic walks. He soon found that society itself was inferior when compared to nature, and began to view its laws and customs with a rebellious eye. “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,...
