Word: thoreau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...months ago things were looking pretty grim for Walter Hesford, a graduate student in American literature who'd just finished up a 516-page thesis on Thoreau. Hesford had started looking for a teaching job almost two years before, but so far almost 100 letters to schools as far away as Nigeria had managed to turn up only a thick stack of rejections. The months dragged on, and Hesford conscientiously saved his rejection letters, took to drinking paper cupfuls of Mogen David wine during undergraduate tutorials and waited for Commencement. Then came a break--an offer from Birzelt College...
...Coffee hour with Joel Porte, professor of English. A caveat--along with the free coffee may be an unprecedented amount of brown-nosing. Porte is an expert on Emerson and Thoreau so expect the ubiquitous ego-deflating frosh to be in attendance, mouthing quotes from The American Scholar or Civil Disobedience...
...more Americans than ever were braving blisters, bites and backaches to hear the babble of clear streams and have night skies as a ceiling-to savor, in Thoreau's phrase, "life near the bone where it is sweetest." And despite all the rush and crowding, those with stamina and imagination were still not too late to find adventure in tranquil places...
...people at Harvard--and the theory is true. Harvard is a center of scholarship and thinking. Another theory stresses how Harvard cuts students adrift from their old ways of thinking, until if they still can't choose where to live and what to live for, they at least share Thoreau's suspicion that resignation to a predetermined role would just mean confirmed desperation...
...like many others on the Cape: have traded their economic security (both were successful teachers before coming to the cape) in exchange for an unhurried, solitary and peaceful existence. On the weekends they walk the beaches, or visit the ponds in Wellfleet that Thoreau made famous. And they enjoy driving to Race Point beach in Provincetown--the tip of the Cape--and photographing the sunsets...