Walden proposes that men, to use a commonplace phrase, can and should "make the best of two worlds"—the supernatural world of the spirit and the natural world of everyday existence. Writers of an earlier century might have used the expression, "bringing God into the marketplace," to approximate what Thoreau was suggesting. In the terminology of his own intellectual milieu, Thoreau advises his readers to recognize the Ideal, and then design their lives accordingly so that the Ideal becomes the Real, so "the best of two worlds" may become "one world," wherein spiritual existence is the same as everyday existence.
Walden is the artistic depiction of the quest to realize such a state of life. Unlike Emerson, who usually wrote in theory about an experience of the ideal, Thoreau provided his contemporaries—and us—with a concrete way to attain successfully such a quest for a higher mode of life. In Walden, we vividly see Thoreau erect the "foundations" under his "castles in the air"; we see him create a way of life that enables him to make his dream of self-fulfillment come true.
Thus, as he attempts to "awaken" the spirit of dull John Field in Walden, Thoreau offers to us, his readers, an example of how we might "wake up" and transcend our own unsatisfactory lives. Fittingly for a transcendentalist, Thoreau offers us in Walden nothing less than the possibility of realizing our own perfection, our own divinity.
