What does Thoreau say about a man keeping pace with his companions?This is an extremely important question about Thoreau's Walden Please...

Henry David Thoreau was himself a man who "marched to the beat of a different drummer."  For him, and for the other Transcendentalists, individualism was of paramount important.  Another Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson reiterates this precept of individualism in his line,

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Like Emerson, Thoreau emphasized the importance of nonconformity if one would be an individualist.  When he goes into the woods to live, as he describes in Walden, Thoreau observes that people who have fewer possessions have more freedom because they are not bound to care for what they own.  Instead, they can travel more easily, and need not worry about anything.

The individual may more easily communicate with Nature, as well, intuitively experiencing it at his own pace.  In Chapter 8, "The Village," Thoreau writes that he enjoyed a small amount of gossip, but too much "numbed the soul."  On one visit to town, he was incarcerated for refusing to pay taxes, protesting because of his position on slavery.