Henry was a bright student and attended Harvard, where he studied Greek, Latin, and German. After graduating, he wasn’t sure what to do next. After a period of drifting, he founded a school with his brother, but the venture failed a few years later. He subsequently met a mentor who introduced him to Transcendentalism, an idealistic philosophical and social movement. Henry began to think deeply and write about what it means to live a good life. Still a young man, Henry decided to retreat from the city—its noise and distractions—to live and work on land owned by his mentor outside of Concord, Massachusetts. Henry, as you may have guessed, is Henry David Thoreau. His mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his masterwork, “Walden,” Thoreau describes what led him to pursue a simpler existence: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of …