Courtly Love of.....farms?

In my history class, courtly love in the middle ages, we read the book The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus. In his book Capellanus basically gave a how to guide on adultery (this book was written in the middle ages if you're thinking this is kind of odd). One of his big points was that the lovers were not to actually "enjoy love's final solace". According to Capellanus, lovers in adulterous affairs were not to engage in sex because doing so would satisfy their desires and therefore make the relationship less thrilling.

Our professor illustrated the point by telling us about her son's obsession with Legos. She said there is always a new Lego set or new pieces that he wants and he drools over the idea of maybe owning them. She lets him look at the pictures of the sets on the Lego website, go through the catalog, look at them on the shelves at the store, but she actually gets them for him only every so often. Every time he gets a new Lego set he's excited and plays with it for a few days but quickly becomes bored. So to avoid the boredom and a household take-over of Lego sets, she only lets him look so he can be entertained the of the IDEA of them, and not by actually having them.

I was reminded of this day in my history class when I read about Thoreau looking at all the farms and taking the deal as far as he could without actually owning the land.

I thought it was curious how he did that, but I couldn't figure out why. Was he trying to keep an interest in the land? Was it a reminder of why he was going to go live at Walden Pond? Did he use the farm deals as kind of a motivator to go through with his idea?

I think I was most excited about this point because I was able to connect it to something else in my other class. I get really excited when I can make connections between seemingly unlike or random subjects/events/ideas.