In the "Conclusion," Thoreau urges us to seek "our own interior . . . on the chart," regardless of whether it proves to be good or bad, to investigate the "continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet." Actual voyages of exploration and discovery pale by comparison to the journey inward and upward. He encourages the reader to begin right now. We tend to "esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star." But, as the author writes in "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For":
. . . all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us.
Our existence occupies one moment in the continuity of time ("Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in," Thoreau writes at the end of "Where I Lived . . ."). From any particular point of existence, the universal is accessible. By living deliberately, self-reliantly, and independently in the present, we may transcend the limits of time, "walk with the Builder of the universe . . . not . . . live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by" (as Thoreau writes in his "Conclusion").
Life at Walden Pond provides Thoreau with the opportunity to journey into himself, into nature, and into the divine, but other men may have approaches of their own, reflecting their particular conditions and circumstances. Even for Thoreau, his Walden experiment is only one expression of the spiritual impulse. As he explains in the "Conclusion," he leaves Walden because he has "several more lives to live," and can spare no more time for the one he has so fully described in his book. He does not prescribe living at Walden as a remedy for the spiritual ills of others; he offers it only as an example.
