Walden 1824
"WHEN I WROTE the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months" (1-a. Economy)
Walden Pond from Pine Hill, by Herbert W. Gleason, circa 1900.
"There are many ways of looking at Walden; one is to see it as having three functional parts. In part one, mostly in the first chapter, Thoreau defines what he sees as the major problem of his time: how work and the acquisition of material goods can consume your life. Henry did not want to live out his life, then "when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Part two, especially in the first, second, and seventh chapters, describes his own experiment in living a simple life. While careful not to recommend his own specific lifestyle, Henry does make a genuine effort to test his ideas and follow his own advice. Part three is his (and our) reward for having focused on what is really important. In Henry's case it is mostly Nature, and the capital "N" reflects his belief that the study of the natural world is a spiritual pursuit". (http://thoreau.eserver.org/waldenxp.html)
Good Quotes From Walden:
"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow" (2. Where I lived and What I lived for)
"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea" (2. Where I lived and What I lived for)
"If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality" (2. Where I lived and What I lived for)
"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born" (2. Where I lived and What I lived for)
On Romanticism:
*If Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality and instead being against physical materialism in general and emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental, then Thoreau definitely fits into Romanticism! He left society to build a house in the forest and lived there for two years! *Although at the same time Thoreau accepts calm, harmony balance and in some sense rationality. It seems to me that he is Blakeian in the sense that one needs harmony in life, one needs to balance work with admiring the beauty of life and what it gives you. "Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that.....He has no time to be anything but a machine"
Walden Pond from Pine Hill, by Herbert W. Gleason, circa 1900.
"There are many ways of looking at Walden; one is to see it as having three functional parts. In part one, mostly in the first chapter, Thoreau defines what he sees as the major problem of his time: how work and the acquisition of material goods can consume your life. Henry did not want to live out his life, then "when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Part two, especially in the first, second, and seventh chapters, describes his own experiment in living a simple life. While careful not to recommend his own specific lifestyle, Henry does make a genuine effort to test his ideas and follow his own advice. Part three is his (and our) reward for having focused on what is really important. In Henry's case it is mostly Nature, and the capital "N" reflects his belief that the study of the natural world is a spiritual pursuit". (http://thoreau.eserver.org/waldenxp.html)
Good Quotes From Walden:
"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow" (2. Where I lived and What I lived for)
"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea" (2. Where I lived and What I lived for)
"If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality" (2. Where I lived and What I lived for)
"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born" (2. Where I lived and What I lived for)
On Romanticism:
*If Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality and instead being against physical materialism in general and emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental, then Thoreau definitely fits into Romanticism! He left society to build a house in the forest and lived there for two years! *Although at the same time Thoreau accepts calm, harmony balance and in some sense rationality. It seems to me that he is Blakeian in the sense that one needs harmony in life, one needs to balance work with admiring the beauty of life and what it gives you. "Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that.....He has no time to be anything but a machine"
posted by Ann Wilson at 7:04 p.m.
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