Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Danny Heitman that appeared in The New York Times. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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With household decluttering now a national obsession, maybe Americans should pause this Fourth of July and remember the nation’s original domestic minimalist, Henry David Thoreau.

He moved to a small cabin on Walden Pond near Concord, Mass., 170 years ago today, on July 4, 1845, intent on living as simply as he could. Thoreau fit everything he wanted into a dwelling the size of a tool shed.

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” he exhorted in “Walden,” the classic account of his two years at the pond. “I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.”

At the approach of the country’s great industrial age, which would bring more goods to more Americans more cheaply than ever before, Thoreau sensed a complication — namely, complication itself, the challenge of too much stuff.

Thoreau might not be surprised that more than a century and a half after he published Walden, decluttering is all the rage. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, the Japanese author Marie Kondo’s guide to culling and organizing possessions, has topped the best-seller list for months.

In Stuffocation, another recent book, the British writer James Wallman declares that clutter “is the material equivalent of the obesity epidemic.” Websites and blogs about decluttering abound, and reality-TV shows broadcast the perils of hoarding. These days, Thoreau’s call for simplicity sounds eerily prescient.

He hinted that one good result of American independence from England should be the resolve to live more basically — and authentically — than our ancestors lived in the Old World. “I look upon England to-day as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn,” he wrote in “Walden.”

Thoreau said it was a coincidence of the calendar that brought him to live at Walden on the nation’s birthday. But in beginning his experiment on the Fourth of July, Thoreau demonstrated that his country’s political independence had nurtured a hundred kinds of personal independence, too, including the latitude to be unconventional. His basic scheme — to live in a hut for a couple of years with no regular work and only the barest of essentials — isn’t a plan that many could or would follow, especially those of us with a spouse and children.

But Thoreau mentioned on the first page of “Walden” that he didn’t mean his method as a model for everyone else, urging readers to merely “accept such portions as apply to them.” Like any adventurer, he was testing the limits of possibility to more clearly understand what the limits were.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Advocate in Baton Rouge, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.