The Lasting Value of Thoreau's Walden

What is the value of Thoreau’s years in the woods at Walden Pond? Did he achieve what he set out to do, and if so, what is the consequence of his experiment? Is the effect a lasting one? Leo Tolstoy writes in a Letter to Dr. Eugen Heinrich Schmitt of the value of the ideas and approach of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and “Civil Disobedience.” He compares his own ideas with Thoreau’s and concludes they are driving at a similar notion. Mohandas K. Gandhi also writes about the similarities of his own doctrine of Satyagraha and Thoreau’s civil disobedience. While he believes they were both aimed at the same ultimate goal, their approaches and reasons for non-conformity diverge. Thoreau may have gone to the woods to “suck out all the marrow of life,” as he says, but in his solitary endeavor, he contributed much more to society than his individual goal implies.