![]() ![]() ![]() And third, quite often any words would be inadequate at expressing many of Thoreau's non-verbal insights into truth. He likes to tease, challenge, and even fool his readers. Thoreau, recognizing this, fills Walden with sarcasm, pardoxes, and double entendres (double meanings). Ironically, this logic is based on what most people say they believe. Second, its logic is based on a different understanding of life, quite contrary to what most people would call common sense. Thoreau does not hestitate to use metaphors, allusions, understatement, hyperbole, personification, irony, satire, metonymy, synecdoche, and oxymorons, and he can shift from a scientific to a transcendental point of view in mid-sentence. Nonetheless, Walden is a difficult book to read for three reasons: First, it was written by a gifted writer who uses surgically precise language, extended, allegorical metaphors, long and complex paragraphs and sentences, and vivid, detailed, and insightful descriptions. But I think Thoreau's words will be even more important in the future than they are now. Today, Thoreau's words are quoted with feeling by liberals, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, and conservatives alike. Events that seem to be completely unrelated to his stay at Walden Pond have been influenced by it, including the national park system, the British labor movement, the creation of India, the civil rights movement, the hippie revolution, the environmental movement, and the wilderness movement. White, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others), nature lovers and naturalists (John Burroughs, John Muir, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch, David Brower, and others), labor leaders and political reformers (Leo Tolstoy, Emma Goldman, Norman Thomas, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and others), and individuals everywhere who sought a better life. His words have influenced authors and artists (Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemmingway, E. He predicted in Walden, "When a man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis." Thoreau's careful observations and devastating conclusions have rippled into time, becoming stronger as the weaknesses Thoreau noted have become more pronounced. ![]() Instead of looking at just the problems of the 1850's, Thoreau based his philosophy on ageless truths from the past and looked into the future. ![]() Thoreau was not interested in "engineering for all America" but in re-engineering America itself. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!"Įmerson, considered the most brilliant thinker of his day, overestimated Thoreau's natural abilities, greatly underestimated Thoreau's accomplishments, and failed to see Thoreau's purpose. Wanting this instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Ralph Waldo Emerson could shake his head at Thoreau's funeral and say, "I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. He had published two books with unsatisfactory sales ( A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers sold fewer than three hundred copies), had managed to get one article approved for publication in the Atlantic Monthly, and had published some articles and excursions in a few other magazines. Nine years later, Thoreau published Walden about his life at the pond, a document that is just as revolutionary as Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, (published in 1848) but which finds the solution to the working man's problems through individual and peaceful methods.Īt the time of Thoreau's death in 1862, he was little known outside of Concord, Massachusetts. On July 4, 1845, as a statement of personal independence, Henry Thoreau (pronounced "thorough") (NOTE: No one called him "Henry David Thoreau" during his life) moved into a cabin at Walden Pond. Henry Thoreau's Text with Adjacent Thoreauvian Commentary Analysis and Notes on Walden - Henry Thoreau's Text with Adjacent Thoreauvian Commentary Analysis and Notes on Walden ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |