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.