In transcendentalist thought, the city stomped out individuality, transforming human beings into an automated assembly line of soulless factory workers. Since Shakespeare, artists have romanticized the rural as a paradise of purity and goodness and condemned the urban as an inescapable cesspit. This strict dichotomy between city and country has almost always existed. To him, the modern metropolis was a Dante’s inferno of debauchery and decadence, a netherworld where- as James Shergold Boone so poetically said- “the appetites, the passions, the carnal corruptions of man are forced, as in a hotbed, into a rank and foul luxuriance.”

For Thoreau, it was only amid the autumn quietude of the New England woods, the soothing sounds of a tranquil brook, the idyllic charm of a French countryside that man could finally be free of the corrupting influence of civilization. What is the great attraction in cities?” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal in 1845, “It is universally admitted that human beings invariably degenerate there and do not propagate their kind.” As the Industrial Revolution alienated laborers from their labor and gobbled up countrysides, transcendentalists lamented we lost a deep connection both with ourselves and with nature.

Rebecca solnit thoreau