Word: thoreau
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...your bed, hold the book over you, and let the words just pour down." Next year, to the two courses he now teaches to Harvard and Radcliffe students, he will add English V-the Boylston course in creative writing, limited to 20 select students (among its famed grads: Emerson, Thoreau, John Dos Passos, Walter Lippmann). As a full professor, Spencer will earn $9,600; the Boylston Chair itself pays only in prestige, though legend accords its holder the right to pasture a cow in Harvard Yard...
Jean Giono has been called the French Thoreau. Giono's dusty Provençal towns and Alpine foothills are a long way from Walden Pond, but he writes with a Thoreau-like conviction that the only good life is the "natural" (non-city) life. And like Thoreau, who once spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax, Giono went to jail rather than obey his government's mobilization order in September...
...Giono has little of Thoreau's warm passion for facts of nature, even less of his intellectual Puritanism. Born in 1895, at Manosque, Basses-Alpes, of French-Italian stock, Giono is essentially a nature-loving mystic. He is a teller of wry, earthy stories of the peasants in whom he professes to see the joy of the good life embodied. He has written about these people, sometimes bafflingly but always with zest and imagination, in The Song of the World, Harvest, and Joy of Man's Desiring...
...issues and effort of the Civil War produced the moral writings of Emerson and Thoreau, Walt Whitman's best poetry, Abraham Lincoln's speeches, and Mark Twain's best book (Huckleberry Finn). They also proved that history's greatest democracy was not going the way of democratic Athens, for the war's dead were scarcely settled in their graves when the Robber Barons took over their country. They were able to do so because practically every American intensely admired them, and hoped to be a Robber Baron himself. The result of their enterprise...
...mass of men," wrote Thoreau from the fir-scented tranquillity of Walden Pond, "lead lives of quiet desperation." In periods of accelerated history, the organic rot of Rome, the collapse of the Middle Ages, the gigantic life & death struggles of 20th-century civilization, this desperation takes on a new intensity. Its symbol in our time is the emigre, the political fugitive...