Course Links Quick Links |
|
||||||||||
Terms | Life | Times | Class Discussion | Group Questions | Links | Pictures | Quotes from Critics
Introduction 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. 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 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 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 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.
Walden, the video game. General questions
Opening
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) what is the tone throughout the book? Is it elevated? Informal? How can you tell? Find a passage , 1865 -- "Harper" -- brand name
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)
"Former Inhabitants"
"The Pond in Winter"
"Spring"
"Conclusion"
Thoreau as a character/other characters:
Does meet people
Non-Conformity
Social Criticism
Ironic humor/wit
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.
Romanticism
Readings/sources
Being Alive
Structure
Environmental concerns
Connection to Nature or other Emerson works
Train/industrialization
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
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 #1
Group Questions #2
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.
Thomas Cole pictures from Wikipedia 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 . The Who "My Generation" Starts at 2:00 min. Review of a biography of Thoreau as a young man: great intro into his work. "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) |