In Walden Pond, Patty Nash probes and plays with the first-person pronoun, investigating the construction of national identities and the way nations construct the identities of individuals in turn. From the medieval merchant town of Lü beck to the high desert of central Oregon, the Adriatic Sea to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nash explores and interrogates the historical forces that shape her — and our — " I" . Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden (1854), declared, " I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well." Nash responds: " Content am I."