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American Lit I
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Introduction
In his journal, Emerson famously wrote "Thoreau gives me, in flesh and blood and pertinacious Saxon belief, my own ethics. He is far more real, and daily practically obeying them, than I, and fortifies my memory at all times with an affirmative experience which refuses to be set aside." For many, Thoreau and Emerson are the yin and yang of American Transcendentalism: Thoreau, as Emerson suggests here, the practical, lived in Transcendentalism; Emerson, the theoretical, idealized Transcendentalism.

Count me out of the many: such a dividing line gives Thoreau short shrift because, as his writings reveal, he was a deep thinker in his own right.

And for someone who absorbed his lesson, check this New York Times essay.

How a car commercial helps explain Thoreau.

Modern advice on how to follow Thoreau's philosophy: "The Problem of "Living in the Present'."  New York Times, 11 September 2017.   Kieran Setiya

A finally, a contemporary psychologist, Martin E.P. Seligman, sets out the tenets of well-being.  Thoreau beat him by over a hundred years.

Day 1: After some quick biographical notes, we’ll look at the opening and the style, then move into group work and examine the book as 1) a critique of society 2) a spiritual guide (conduct books) – pond and importance of morning “religious exercise” Chap 2 1028 – discus entire page

Day 2: Iconoclasm; focus on asceticism and eastern philosophy; spring as metaphor for ____; artist of Kouroo as metaphor for ______ , what Thoreau wanted readers to learn from the book

Terms and People to Know
Pantheism: worship of nature (with an emphasis on the religious connotation in "worship")

Romanticism: an aesthetic/philosophic approach to art characterized by a freedom from the strictures of realism, an emphasis on the individual and feelings over rationality, and a tendency to look to nature rather than humans or religion for "truth." It seeks to transcend the physical and base itself on an idealized vision of the world.

Transcendentalism: Great -- now I have to try and define the ineffable . . . . Here goes. A literary/social/aesthetic/quasi-religious movement which stemmed from a belief that God manifested himself in nature. It isn't pantheism because it does not suggest that god is nature, just that god is best exemplified in nature rather than any belief system as exhibited in organized religion. A reactionary movement, it fit in well with the reform minded impulse of the nineteenth-century. While obviously a reaction to the prevailing Calvinist creeds, it shares with it a belief in a dichotomous view of the world: the body/world v. spirit/soul; the imaginary/real. And to reach this "real" world means you have to "transcend" the physical world . . . . which means we have to -- as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, et al. suggest -- change our ways.

Abolitionism: The movement to repeal slavery in the U.S. (i.e. to "abolish" slavery).

Fugitive Slave Act: Part of the Compromise of 1850, this federal law made it a crime to assist a runaway slave. This transformed those Northerners who helped run the Underground Railroad into criminals. Both Thoreau and Emerson -- who were abolitionists -- felt that both the Missouri Compromise and the Fugitive Slave law were immoral and wrote against it.

Mexican-American War: ( 1846 -- 1848 ), the first photographed war , the first U.S. war covered by newspaper correspondents, and the first fought mostly on foreign soil. One of America's most successful conflicts militarily, the Mexican War added vast territories to the national domain. It also, however, provoked anti-Americanism in Mexico and contributed to the sectional tension that culminated in the Civil War. . . . Read rest of essay

May, Robert E.  "Mexican War."  The Oxford Companion to United States History. Ed. Paul S. Boyer. Oxford University Press 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Web.  22 November 2009.

John Brown: Abolitionist leader, in 1855 moved with his five sons from Ohio to Osawatomie, Kan., following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. Believing himself to be the special instrument of God intended to destroy proslavery settlers, he deliberately murdered five of his Southern-minded neighbors, and this, and similar acts, together with his previous reputation as an operator of the Underground Railroad, made him nationally celebrated as "Brown of Osawatomie." In 1859 he and his followers moved to Harpers Ferry, Va., where, on the night of October 16 , he and 21 others captured the U.S. armory, with the intention of establishing a base from which they might free slaves by armed intervention. A force of U.S. marines under R.E. Lee attacked the armory, killed ten of Brown's men, and wounded and captured Brown. With the insurrection quelled, Brown was hanged (Dec. 2 , 1859). His sincerity and dignity when on trial led many liberals to treat him as a martyr, e.g. Thoreau's The Last Days of John Brown. He is also lauded in Benét's John Brown's Body, the title too of a Civil War song, in Whittier's John Brown of Osawatomie, Stedman's How Old Brown Took Harpers Ferry, and Leonard Ehrlich's novel God's Angry Man (1932).

"Brown, John." The Oxford Companion to American Literature. James D. Hart, ed., rev. Phillip W. Leininger. Oxford University Press 1995. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 22 November 2009.

Life
Went to Harvard, earned living after graduation in family pencil business and as a land surveyor.

Moves to Walden on July 4 th (page 1852)

Dies at 44 (1862)

Thoreau noted in a manuscript "What in other men is religion is in me love of nature" (qtd. in Harding 197)

To demonstrate the lengths to which the above was challenged in his time, consider the following:

In 1857, James Russell Lowell, the editor of the reigning intellectual magazine, Atlantic Monthly , asked T. for a piece on Maine . It was accepted and published in July 1858, but a sentence had been omitted. T. wrote to Lowell "When I received the proof of that portion of my story printed in the July number of your magazine, I was surprised to find that the sentence --"It [a pine tree] is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still."--. . . [had] been crossed out, and it occurred to me that, after all, it was of some consequence that I should see the proofs; supposing, of course, that my "Stet' in the margin would be respected" (qtd. in Harding 393)

"When an old friend of the family asked "how he stood affected toward Christ,' he replied that "a snow-storm was more to him than Christ'" (qtd. in Harding 464)

In a letter a few years after Walden, he wrote "our souls (I use this word for want of a better)" (qtd. in Drake 72)

Drake, William. "Walden." Thoreau . Cliffwood , NJ : Prentice Hall. 71-91. Print.

As a child, his mother asked him "Why, Henry dear, don't you go to sleep?" He replied "I have been looking through the stars to see if I could see God behind them" (qtd. in Harding 12)

Childlike/innocent view

On T's curiosity: After Channing remarked that he was always curious, T. replied "What else is there in life?" (qtd. in Harding 355)

In his journal at 34 -- "I think that no experience which I have to-day comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my youth. . . . I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction" (qtd. in Harding 295)

T. on corporal punishment: "it may teach a truth in physics, but never a truth in morals" (qtd. in Harding 55).

Times
Essay on abolitionist movement in America

Essay on Transcendentalism

Overview: Walden. Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them. Joyce Moss and George Wilson. Vol. 2: Civil Wars to Frontier Societies (1800-1880s) .  Detroit: Gale, 1997.  From Literature Resource Center

Modern day Thoreaus

Link to photo essay on 21st century hermits. While doing the project, the photographer, Carlo Bevilacqua, didn't go to Walden, but he did discover "You don’t need so much to live . . . .Our life is not our stuff."

And check "Living with Less.  A Lot Less" by Graham Hill for a more modern Thoreau in NYC -- Soho to be exact. 

Modern times? Read Generation Sell; [Op-Ed] William Deresiewicz. New York Times (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Nov 13, 2011.

"What Work is Really For." New York Times. September 8, 2012. Interesting essay by Gary Gutting on the real purpose of work and materialism. Thoreau would nod with agreement.

Are Hunter-Gatherers The Happiest Humans To Inhabit Earth? NPR essay on the topic in the title.  Connect to Thoreau's theory of time.

A modern day Thoreau?
“Yet, they also say that their mobile devices eat away at their time to think. One says, “I don’t have enough time alone with my mind.” Others say, “I have to struggle to make time to think.” “1 artificially make time to think.” “I block out time to think.” These formulations all depend on an “I” imagined as separate from the technology, a self that is able to put the technology aside so that it can function independently of its demands.  This formulation contrasts with a growing reality of lives lived in the continuous presence of screens” (Turkle 167).

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
Turkle's TED talk.

Explanation of I Am Rich.

Walden, the video game.

Class Discussion

General questions

• Does he suggest everyone should go live in the woods?
• Why a lake? "A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."1905 "It is perennially young" 1909; links it to himself 1909 an ascetic "hermit" (cf. 1924 as well for reference to hermit)

• ???What is he getting at with the questions on other planets on 1877?
• ???What kind of "dead man" is he talking about on 1878?
• Is his voice the same throughout the book? Does his tone change from beginning to end?

1. First paragraph -- What's meant by economy?
2. sojourner? What does "ascetic" mean?

Opening

1. Discuss the epigraph:
1. What time does it set?
2. Why a chanticleer?
3. Why wake neighbors up? Literal or figurative?
4. What ode is he referring to?
2. Why a "sojourner" (1872)
3. 1874 "Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? [. . .] pushing all these things before them." How does this scene play into the idea of economy?
4. 1875 "It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself." What's odd about this quote? What does he mean? And note the sentences which follow -- "Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he?"
5. "The mass of men" 1875
6. Why does he move to the woods? (1920 "I wished to live deliberately"; 1877, 1882(old edition1812, 1855,1817)

Materialism

•  "None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty" (1879) (1814 old)

•  "I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters." (1880) (1815 old) UNPACK THIS LINE

•  "Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation" (1892) (1827 old) WHAT DOES THIS CONNECT WITH -- SPIRITUALITY

•  "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things." (1899) (1834 old)

•  on furniture "the more you have of such things the poorer you are" (1842)

• Like Emerson, very aphoristic: one characteristic of common speech is proverbs -- does Thoreau use/make them?
• Attention to diction -- varies it for effect: see paragraph using business language -- see page 1882 as well for confluence of business language "transact some private business"
• Works by Analogy : 1977 for reason he uses them: see bottom of page (1879) (1814 old) for connection b/t man and root vegetables; connections b/t clothes and person 1844 (1819 old); comparison of "torpid" snake to man 1829; 1834; 1842 -- furniture is a trap/man gets caught in the trap/animals get caught in the trap -- note how often the analogies are connected to nature; 1856 railroad analogy to man's life -- though here it's connected to nature as well. ; 1867 great long analogy between the clay oozing out of the embankment and man and all living things

In Class Day 2 focus on asceticism and eastern philosophy; spring as metaphor for ____; artist of Kouroo as metaphor for ______, what Thoreau wanted readers to learn from the book;

General questions

•  Why a lake? "A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."(1969 bottom ; old 1905) "best preserves its purity"; "It is perennially young" (1973; old 1909); links it to himself (1974; old 1909) an ascetic "hermit" (cf. 1924 as well for reference to hermit)

• ???What is he getting at with the questions on other planets on 1877?
• ???What kind of "dead man" is he talking about on 1878?

"Former Inhabitants"

• What's the purpose of "Former Inhabitants" 1941?

"The Pond in Winter"

• What time is it 1954?
• What is the answer to question posed in the first paragraph 1954? FORWARD

"Spring"

• Note page 1971 "We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us" -- what is he getting at here?
• Is this still true? "Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness" 1973 What does Thoreau mean by this?
• "At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast." 1973

"Conclusion"

• What idea is he getting at here 1976 "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings."
• What is he getting at by the story of the artist in Kouroo? 1978
• 1980 -- why not live in the world? "I delight to come to my bearings -- not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may -- not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating" 1980
• Review last line 1982

Thoreau as a character/other characters:

• Toots his own horn "I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it" (1841)

Does meet people

• First mention of meeting a person at Walden 1829;

Non-Conformity

• "The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?" (1816)
• As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it." (1837). At a time when Egypt was all the rage, this is startling
• Establishes a reason/necessity for solitude 1879 -- contrasts a farmer with a student;

Social Criticism

• "The mass of men" 1810
• Noted the condition of the "operatives" 1820; "The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another [ . . . .] The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam" (1825); "for I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer" (1841)
• Comment on conversation at table: "cheese" 1879;
• "I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown." (1888)
• Applicability of his message to all 1979
• Anti-intellectualism in America 1977

Ironic humor/wit

• "I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience." 1808
• The confusion b/t man and scarecrow 1818;
• "I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one." (1833)
• suggests men are slaves "Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do, -- work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers" (1844)

• After a discussion of the fauna of the lake, laconically notes "These are all the animals of consequence which frequent it now" (1905). What's odd/ironic about this line? WHAT ANIMAL DOESN'T HE MENTION

In a letter a few years after Walden, he wrote "our souls (I use this word for want of a better)" (qtd. in Drake 72)

Drake, William. "Walden." Thoreau . Cliffwood , NJ : Prentice Hall. 71-91.

• What book was most often quoted in Narrative of Mary Rowlandson ? What author/book is most often quoted here?
• Emphasis on eastern spirituality instead of western religion "The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward" (1814) NOTE THAT HE LATER ADDS that he "loved so well the philosophy of India" (1839);
• Contrast the number of times the word god appears in Nature and in Walden
• Why combine the "old settler" and "elderly dame" in one paragraph? 1880 JOINING OF SPIRIT AND NATURE -- CREATOR AND CARETAKER. Why call them an "old settler" and "elderly dame"?

• Many references to bathing -- 1855, 1866, 1895 -- why? QUICK REFERENCE 1901 CF. WHITMAN AS WELL.
• What religions are often mentioned/referenced/used as symbols here? Why? EASTERN -- Confucious 1814, 1837, 1853cf. ,1913. pagoda, 1858, 1878, 1888, 1908 ; Ganges ; Ved 1921 -- and earlier ; 1954 Mahabharata; 1972;
• 1948 who is "the Visitor who never comes"?
• Pagan gods -- 1880
• What does he term "higher laws"? 1917 --SAVAGE INSTINCT! Why? -- cf. 1919
• What do you make of his comments on "generative energy" 1922?
• How does it connect to his earlier comment "Our whole life is startlingly moral . . ."
• Body/spirit dichotomy 1922
• ****CONNECTS LAKE TO SPIRITUALITY "the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important" (1853); bathing in the pond becomes "a religious exercise" (1854);
• *****CONNECTS HIS EMPHASIS ON THE PRESENT TO SPIRITUALITY: " In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us." (1858) CONNECT TO TRANSPARENT EYEBALL OF EMERSON? EMPHASIS ON THE PRESENT?

Romanticism

• Describe the Canadian wood cutter? 1883 Now why does T. include him? 1884 NATURAL -- STILL A CHILD

Readings/sources

• Many readings from American history/colonial times 1883 and earlier

Being Alive

• "The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?" (1855)
• "The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs." (Walden 1888) -- what is he talking about here?
• **** " and not till we are completely lost, or turned round -- for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost -- do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations." (1897)

• 1913, John Field 1914 -- insults all Irish 1915. Why include this incident? See quote on page 1916.

Structure

• Myth of the Hero?
• Economy: -- order of covering: clothing, housing "this outside garment of all" (1822), food (1835), furniture 1842); labor/work 1844; criticism of reform movements (but of course his book is one long essay on reform (1845),
• When does book open? Explain significance of date.
• What season does it open in? What season does it end in?
• At what time of day does "Sounds" open with 1866? When does it end?"'Sounds' begins with sounds of the afternoon, continues through the evening, the night, and ends with the cockcrowing of dawn" (Cavell 51)
• What about "Solitude"1175 - 1880?
• "Ponds"? 1899 HUCKLEBERRIES SUGGEST SUMMER
• Why move from "solitude" to "Visitors" 1881
• Note transitions b/t paragraph
• Why include the "Bean Field" chapter? "But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards -- raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men?" (1894) SEE ALSO "We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden." (1895)

Environmental concerns

• "The ornamented grounds of villas which will one day be built here may still preserve some trace of this." (1902)
• Page 1905 -- notes the loss of trees around the edge of the pond
• 1918 note on how he stopped shooting birds for specimens
• bison and nature/cranberries l93l

Connection to Nature or other Emerson works

• "This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself." (Walden 1875) cf. Transparent eyeball

• page 1877; 1974, 1977, 1979 -- Thoreau offers his version of compensation -- cf. Brahma and Nature 1121; 1967-69 the clay and the embankment
• Desire to live life in the present: "In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line." (1815)
• "American Scholar" -- reference to part of men 1831

Train/industrialization

• What is his view of trains? CONFLICTING 1856 -- NEGATIVE, POSITIVE? 1868-69 -- CONNECTS TO THE SUN 1869 BUT SEE "IF" STATEMENTS; AND SEE 1872, 1905
• Leo Marx's the machine in the garden -- i.e. garden of Eden
• What do you make of his description of the contents to the train 1871-72?
• Note his comments on factory workers: suggests they are becoming "like that of the English" (1820) -- not a good comparison
• 1869 great comment on how the speed of transportation is connected to a speed in thought process

Anti-materialism

•  "None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty" (1814) NOTE THE LACK OF QUALIFIERS: "NONE" -- YOU HAVE TO LIVE AN ASCETIC LIFE

•  "I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters." (1815) UNPACK THIS LINE

•  "though I never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun" (1816)

•  "Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation" (1827)

•  "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things." (1834)

•  on furniture "the more you have of such things the poorer you are" (1842)

Style

• Often works with contrasts: cf. 1895 -- colony of muskrats v. colony of humans.
• Let's take a look at page 1897. What do you make of his comments on the night -- and then the end of the page? "Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations." (Walden 1897); -- SEE
• "I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me -- had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body." 1967
• AND "What is man but a mass of thawing clay" (1968)
• And "Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity." (1968)
• BEST ONE -- the insect eating its way out of the table -- "a resurrection" 1982
• 1981: how does he soften the attack? "WE" INCLUDES HIMSELF

Works by Analogy : 1977 for reason he uses them: see bottom of page 1814 for connection b/t man and root vegetables; connections b/t clothes and person 1819; comparison of "torpid" snake to man 1829; 1834; 1842 -- furniture is a trap/man gets caught in the trap/animals get caught in the trap -- note how often the analogies are connected to nature; 1856 railroad analogy to man's life -- though here it's connected to nature as well. ; 1867 great long analogy between the clay oozing out of the embankment and man and all living things

Group Questions

Group Questions #1

1. How does his emphasis on "I" -- and embrace of it -- effect our reading of the book (981)?
2. In the Puritan writers, we often read biblical excerpts. What spiritual guides are quoted here? What moral or lesson does he derive from them? What does this reveal about Thoreau's philosophy?
3. In a contemporary review in the National Anti-Slavery Standard , a critic wrote that in Walden "The author mercilessly probes the shallow conventionalism, the shams of the day; he proclaims war to the knife with all snobism. Penetrating to the very pith and core of modern society, he lays bare the worm of corruption which preys upon its vitals -- shows hideous rottenness concealed beneath a fair and alluring exterior" (qtd. in Harding 337).

What is the "shallow conventionalism" that he exposes? What are the "shams of the day"? What is the "worm of corruption" that is preying on society? (982, 983, 987, etc.)

4. List at least three philosophical connections among Walden and Emerson's Nature, "The American Scholar," or "Self Reliance" and explain them.

Group Questions #2

1. Why a pond? Consider this first from a literary symbolism point of view (i.e. generically, a body of water), than more particularly for Thoreau ( Walden Pond ). Does he mention this in the book? (1136 paragraph before "Spring")
2. Why the long, detailed descriptions of nature? For instance, see page 1139-1141 -- on the sand coming out of the embankment? How does this fit into the themes of the book?
3. In a chapter that we didn't read, Thoreau writes that

   not till we are completely lost, or turned round -- for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost -- do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. (1070)

What is he getting at here? Why do we have to get "lost" to find ourselves? Does this tie in with other ideas in Walden ? How? Where?

4. Consider the following from a contemporary critic:

   There are four related but distinct "matters' with which the book concerns itself, and they might be enumerated as follows: (1) The life of quiet desperation which most men lead. (2) The economic fallacy which is responsible for the situation in which they find themselves. (3) What the life close to nature is and what rewards it offers. (4) The "higher laws' which man begins, through some transcendental process, to perceive if he faithfully climbs the stepladder of nature whose first rung is "wilderness,' whose second is some such gentle and austere but not artificial life as Thoreau himself was leading, and whose third is the transcendental insight he only occasionally reached (Krutch qtd. in Cavell)

What evidence can you find in the text for answers to these questions?

5. Which questions (note the plural) on the Final Essay Assignment could you connect to Walden? Why/how?

Images From the Past (and the Present)

Funny Times. Dec. 2009. 5. Print

Walden as pop icon accoutrement

Real Life Artists of Kouroo

“In the United States, when it comes to improving health, people tend to focus on exercise and what we put into our mouths — organic foods, omega-3’s, micronutrients. We spend nearly $30 billion a year on vitamins and supplements alone. Yet in Ikaria and the other places like it, diet only partly explained higher life expectancy. Exercise — at least the way we think of it, as willful, dutiful, physical activity — played a small role at best.

Social structure might turn out to be more important. In Sardinia, a cultural attitude that celebrated the elderly kept them engaged in the community and in extended-family homes until they were in their 100s. Studies have linked early retirement among some workers in industrialized economies to reduced life expectancy. In Okinawa, there’s none of this artificial punctuation of life. Instead, the notion of ikigai — “the reason for which you wake up in the morning” — suffuses people’s entire adult lives. It gets centenarians out of bed and out of the easy chair to teach karate, or to guide the village spiritually, or to pass down traditions to children. The Nicoyans in Costa Rica use the term plan de vida to describe a lifelong sense of purpose. As Dr. Robert Butler, the first director of the National Institute on Aging, once told me, being able to define your life meaning adds to your life expectancy.” (Buettner)

“The big aha for me, having studied populations of the long-lived for nearly a decade, is how the factors that encourage longevity reinforce one another over the long term. For people to adopt a healthful lifestyle, I have become convinced, they need to live in an ecosystem, so to speak, that makes it possible. As soon as you take culture, belonging, purpose or religion out of the picture, the foundation for long healthy lives collapses. The power of such an environment lies in the mutually reinforcing relationships among lots of small nudges and default choices. There’s no silver bullet to keep death and the diseases of old age at bay. If there’s anything close to a secret, it’s silver buckshot” (Buettner)

DAN BUETTNER “The Island Where People Forgot to Die.”  New York Times. 24 October 2012. Web. 24 October 2012

Hudson River School of Artists

Designation applied to the earliest distinctively American landscape specialists. Their work combined meticulous, factual description with romantic feeling for the beauty, grandeur, and nobility of American scenery. Active from the 1820s, nearly all were native-born, although most studied and traveled in Europe. There they absorbed traditional skills and theories, but their attention to American subjects gave their work an indigenous flavor and helped to crystallize an optimistic national consciousness. The style peaked from the 1840s through early 1860s. By about 1880 it had gone out of fashion. Although centered in New York and bound by friendships, the Hudson River School painters never formally organized. Originally a derogatory tag, the name came later, when the style was seen as naive, finicky, and provincial. Usage of the term has been inconsistent. Some observers have employed it to embrace all realistic nineteenth-century landscapes, but art historians today generally limit its applicability to a smaller group of painters whose work most consistently exemplifies the School's salient characteristics. Thomas Cole's landscapes proved pivotal to the birth of the School. Such earlier landscapists as Alvan Fisher and Thomas Doughty are variously considered precursors or early adherents. Core members of the School include Asher B. Durand, John Kensett, Worthington Whittredge, and Jasper Cropsey. Although some writers include them, Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Church, and Martin Johnson Heade, among other major landscapists, are often now seen as related figures whose interests diverged from those of the central group. Typical Hudson River School landscapes picture undefiled scenery of the northeastern United States, chiefly New England and New York State. The Hudson River Valley, including the Catskill Mountains, served as the earliest and most frequent locus of activity. Views may be intimate or sweeping, but vegetation, rocks, clouds, and other features are acutely observed, often painted with tiny brushes for maximum detail. Light is carefully rendered, but also controlled to contribute to harmonious or even transcendental effects. Typically, the mood of the paintings is pastoral and poetic, although some convey the awesome impassivity of untouched nature. Painters and contemporary observers frequently read patriotic meanings into the views, which were seen as evidence of the young country's inherent greatness and possible superiority to the Old World. Moreover, interpreting the landscapes as evidence of God's handiwork, many also read moral and spiritual messages there. Hudson River School painting paralleled contemporaneous literary responses to landscape, as in James Fenimore Cooper's novels, the poetry of William Cullen Bryant, and the philosophical ruminations of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The period's responsiveness to nature benefited from familiarity with English romantic art and literature, as well as by an urbanizing population's nostalgia for the country.

"Hudson River School." The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists. Ed. Ann Lee Morgan, Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 22 November 2009

The Garden of Eden (1828)	The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton) (1836)	The Departure (1837)	The Return (1837)
The Past (1838)	The Present (1838)	L'Allegro (Italian Sunset) (1845)	Il Penseroso (1845)

Thomas Cole pictures from Wikipedia

Links

Best starting point: Thoreau page on the American Transcendentalist Web

1848 ESSAY ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ANCIENT HINDOO

A MANUAL OF BUDDHISM THAT THOREAU MIGHT HAVE READ .

Blueprint of Thoreau's cabin

The Who "My Generation" Starts at 2:00 min.

Review of a biography of Thoreau as a young man: great intro into his work.

Quotes from Critics

"To discover how to earn and spend our most wakeful hours -- whatever we are doing -- is the task of Walden as a whole" (Cavell 14)

 © 2009 David Bordelon

Sattelmeyer, Robert. "The Remaking of Walden ." Walden Civil Disobedience and Other Writings . Ed. William Rossi. New York : Norton, 2008. 489-507. Print.

"although there are seven identifiable manuscript drafts (or, more precisely, partial drafts) of Walden , ranging from 1846 to 1854, its composition mainly took place in two phases. The first stage includes the first draft written at Walden in 1846-47 [ . . . . ] The second stage consists of the four successive partial drafts written between 1852 and the book's publication in 1854" (Sattelmeyer 491).

"The early chapters, particularly "Economy' and "Where I lived, and What I Lived for,' betray their lineage as lecture material in a number of ways, the most obvious of which is their rhetorically high profile: they are more satriric, hyperbolic, confrontational, and full of invective than the later chapters. "I should not presume to talk so much about myself and my affairs as I shall in this lecture,' the first version of Walden begins [ . . . . ] it was not until the post-1852 revisions that the phrase "Addressed to My Townsmen' was dropped from Thoreau's working title" (Sattelmeyer 493)

"in the first draft his account of himself ends quite lamely -- "Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed' -- for clearly Thoreau did not yet realize what the experience signified for himself, however much he was aware of its exemplary potential for his contemporaries" (Sattelmeyer 493)

"The clearest indication of this change [from the social critic to a more internal gaze] may be seen in the character of the narrator and his rhetoric in the second half of the book, the portion that was mostly written after 1852. From "The Ponds' on, the book is more introspective, meditative, and descriptive and contains relatively few passages of sustained satire." (Sattelmeyer 494)

"The cumulative effect of these additions was to alter the focus of the book radically. In the early versions the critique of American culture dominated ("Economy' and "Where I lived, and What Lived for') still make up nearly a third of the finished book, and represented an even larger proportion in the early drafts), in which the story of Thoreau's own life served, as we have already seen, as a counterpoint" (Sattelmeyer 495)

"with the annual cycle developed and amplified, there exists for the first time a "story' with a kind of plot: the journey or quest of the narrator passing through various changes marked by the progress of the season and advancing toward some [495] kind of self-knowledge" (Sattelmeyer 495-6)

"In January [1852] -- the tenth anniversary of his brother John's death and very close to the time he began working on the manuscript again -- he asked himself in the journal:

But why I changed? why I left the woods? I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished myself back. I do not know any better how I ever came to go there. Perhaps it is none of my business, even if it is yours . . . . I must say that I do not know what made me leave the pond. I left it as unaccountably as I went to it. To speak sincerely, I went there because I had got ready to go; I left it for the same reason. (Sattelmeyer 497)

On the "altered tone of Thoreau's thinking, is the chapter "Higher Laws,' most of which was added, apparently, during the fourth through the seventh versions. It had started out as a treatise on fishing and hunting, leading to a discussion of diet and advocating vegetarianism on both economic and philosophical grounds. In this respect it was consistent with the emphasis on reform and the subject matter of the early versions. Until the sixth version, in fact, it carried the title "Animal Food.'" (Sattelmeyer 498)

"The new proportions [with an emphasis on personal growth] suggest, of course, that Thoreau became increasingly concerned with his own awakening and less obsessed with waking up his neighbors" (Sattelmeyer 500)

In the "Conclusion," after the passage beginning "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there" he has in a manuscript "If the reader think that I am vainglorious, and set myself above others, I assure him that I could tell a pitiful story respecting myself as well as him if my spirits held out, could encourage him with a sufficient list of failures, and flow humbly as the gutters. I think worse of myself than he is likely to think of me, and better too, being better acquainted with the man.. Finally, I will tell him this secret, if he will not abuse my confidence -- I put the best face on the matter" (qtd. in Sattelmeyer 501)

"Besides the emphasis on the seasons and the corresponding story of individual growth, the most important major change between the early and later versions of Walden lies in the more learned and scientific cast of the later additions and revisions" (Sattelmeyer 502)

"In the finished version of Walden Thoreau is a scientist ; not a scientist in precisely the sense we assume the term to mean today, but a scientist nevertheless, one who believed that the results of his investigations into nature expressed actual and not merely "poetic' truth." (Sattelmeyer 502)

"'Spring' -- and especially the climatic account of thawing sand and clay in the railroad cut -- contains not only the apogee of Thoreau's personal growth and rebirth but also the conclusion of his scientific investigation of the laws that underlie natural phenomena" (Sattelmeyer 502)

Johnson, Barbara. "A Hound, A Bay Horse, and a Turtle Dove: Obscurity in Walden ." Walden Civil Disobedience and Other Writings . Ed. William Rossi. New York : Norton, 2008. 482-489. Print.

"Thoreau has chosen to use three symbols that clearly are symbols but that do not really symbolize anything outside themselves. They are figures for which no literal, proper term can be substituted. They are, in other words, catachreses -- "figures of abuse," figurative substitutes for a literal term that does not exist. Like the "legs' and "arms' of our favorite recliner, Thoreau's hound, horse, and dove belong to a world of homely figurative richness, yet the impersonal literality they seem to presuppose is nowhere to be found. The structure of catachretic symbolism is thus the very structure of transference and loss. Through it Thoreau makes us see that every lost object is always, in a sense, a catachresis, a figurative substitute for nothing that ever could be literal" (Johnson 487).

Rossi, William. "The Journal and Walden ." Walden Civil Disobedience and Other Writings . Ed. William Rossi. New York : Norton, 2008. 313-375. Print.

"IN Transcendentalist theory, post-Puritan self-examination and romantic self-expression combine in a conception of the primary function of journal composition as a means of giving form to those moments of insight that define the journalist's imaginative and spiritual life. The writer's journal thus bears witness to an on-going process of 'self-culture,' or the discovery and expression of transpersonal truth in his or her deeper "nature,' a process epitomized in the creation of poetry. As Emerson puts it in 'The Poet,' 'The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression'" (Rossi 314-15).

"In preparing for publication various writings begun or continued at the Pond, he did not hesitate to remove pages form his journal as he needed them for draft. Apparently, at this point Thoreau thought of his journal primarily as a collection of discrete fragments to be assembled into larger wholes in the process of winnowing them "into Lectures' and then "in due time from Lectures into Essays'" (Rossi 316).

"Considering the observation, thought, and time Thoreau committed to the Journal's keeping in the early 1850s, then, it is not surprising that he began to preserve his volumes intact, making careful indexes and numbering the volumes sequentially. Rather than removing pages for literary draft, as he had done during and for some time after his stay at Walden, he now recopied passages deemed appropriate (and in several cases, drafted intentionally) for Walden and transferred them to a separate draft-in-progress" (Rossi 317)