Word: thoreau
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Things certainly have changed. As someone said, if armored cars had rolled into Harvard Square five years ago it would have been for a different reason. Now that the spirit of Wayne has replaced the spirit of Thoreau at Harvard, now that the "disturbances" of the Sixties are finally over, now that, as the Globe says, "the silly season has returned to Harvard," whatever force it is in America that wages wars of extermination may rouse itself again and prepare to engage, without fear of its conscience on the campuses, since that conscience is safely asleep. Mel Konner, Ph.D...
...done, and usefully, but not in a 400-page book. Among the subjects not mentioned are the Spanish-American War, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, the building of the Erie Canal, the suffragettes, baseball, universal secondary education and the establishment of the land-grant colleges, the writing of Thoreau, Melville, Twain, O'Neill, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway...
...Garin's concern is worthy and important, but, as always, good intent is no guarantee of understanding (as Thoreau well recognized when he remarked that if he knew for a certainty that a man was coming to his house with the conscious design of doing him good, he would run for his life). In this particular case Mr. Garin's knee-jerk panacea of conscription must be looked at a lot more closely and must not just be adopted because a certain Richard M. Nixon happened to support the all-volunteer military--after all so did George McGovern, Henry Rosovsky...
Before these two adversaries--master fishing guide Nichol Dance and encroaching novice Tom Skelton--die their beautiful deaths, McGuane unfolds the recesses of Tom Skelton's psyche. Skelton is a modern Thoreau. A refugee from prolonged drug miasmas and the turbulence of modern society, Skelton has retreated to his hometown to slow down his pace of life and get back to the core of his being, allowing just the essential eccentricities. His Walden is the ocean surrounding Key West...
Philosophy has historically been the province of a select few. If, as Thoreau said, "The great mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," their anguish can usually be traced to social conditions, to conditions made by men that can be changed by men. Workers control in the factories of this country, for example, would do much toward eradicating the sense of futility felt by the people who labor in them. The bigger questions can be examined only after this sort of immediate, resolvable problem has been tackled and a new society is being created. In this sense, then...