“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, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”  So wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1845, when he began the then-radical experiment in simple living that resulted in his best known work, “Walden.” As many of us now find ourselves suddenly uprooted from our familiar environments, isolated from our neighbors and friends, at home with unexpected time on our hands, and perhaps deeply worried about what comes next, is there solace to be found in a long-dead romantic writer from a hundred and seventy five years ago?  Robert “Thor” Thorson certainly thinks so. When he’s not teaching geology at the University of Connecticut, Thorson reads and writes on Thoreau. Recently, he meditated on the idea of what Thoreau might teach us about “social distancing.” “Thor” Thorson joined Monday Buzz host Brian Standing on March 30, 2020.

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