Word: thoreau
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Readers who liked Clarence Day's Life With Father and other such recent memoirs should be glad to meet Bertha Damon's Grandmother Griswold. Author Damon was brought up by her grandmother in a small Connecticut town according to the gospel of Thoreau. Plain living in the vegetarian Griswold household never quite achieved Thoreau's budget of 27? a week. But to little Bertha it seemed a narrow miss...
...Henry Thoreau says," Grandma would begin, and Bertha's heart would sink; she figured (rightly most times) that it meant beans again. Bertha's favorite poem (secretly) was a parody of Emerson, reading By the rude bridge that arched the flood . . . Here once the bean-fed Thoreau stood. . . . She was envious rather than horrified by cannibal stories. Grandma Griswold's favorite horror story was about a deacon who wanted a Cooked Meal at night and, mind you, got up the next morning and wanted another...
High thinking was promoted by barring all children's books, starting Bertha right off with Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen and, of course, Thoreau. Grandma allowed no gossip about people-"not people outside of books." Grandma disapproved of dolls and pets. Bertha once tried to hatch out an egg herself in order to acquire a pet, at last resigned herself to loving a tree...
...vain attempt to rescue a fugitive slave he charged the Boston courthouse singlehanded, after one man had been killed and while bullets were still flying, thought so little of the act that he barely noted it in his diary. Of sure taste, he inspired Emerson, recognized Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and Lowell when they were unknown, made critical appraisals of them which still stand. Readers of his Journals will have no difficulty in seeing why Emerson and Hawthorne praised him so highly, are likely to feel it more puzzling that he has been neglected for so long...
...process of crystallization since 1933, the MARS exhibition was actually one of the most effective presentations of modern architecture and planning ever made. As Frank Lloyd Wright has gone back to Thoreau for common sense on building (TIME, Jan. 17), MARS architects and engineers invoked the authority of the Elizabethan Sir Henry Wotton, Izaak Walton's fishing companion, whose The Elements of Architecture defined good building as "commoditie, firmeness and delight." A "needs" section of the exhibit contained nothing less than a scheme for remodeling London, notable for its acceptance of the present radiating arterial roads and the insertion...