Word: thoreau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...town, Griffin points down Concord’s tony main street. “Thoreau would have walked around here as a boy, gone to Starbucks maybe,” he quips. It is clear that he tells this joke a few times a week...
...doing good, that is one of the professions which are full," wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1854, in acknowledgment of America's generous spirit. If it was full then, the field of philanthropy has burst its seams since Sept. 11. In a month and a half, Americans have given compassion, toil and more than $1 billion to salve the wounds of that day. Even before terror struck, philanthropic activity had reached an all-time high, in monetary terms and in the diversity of charitable organizations. The technology boom of the 1990s created a new breed of Carnegies and Astors...
...story to me, I thought the story was funny, but also obscurely dislocating, ominous. I wondered: Is this an individual quirk? Or is it possible that, without our noticing, the previously literate American middle class, which used to be required to slog at least through a little Dickens or Thoreau or even Vonnegut or Morrison in order to get through high school, has deserted books altogether? Or leap-frogged electronically beyond them? We wake up every few months and find ourselves in a weird new world. Do the educated and successful and privileged classes of the information-saturated post-industrial...
Harvard’s soul is in the Yard, where ghosts walk. To sleep where your heroes slept—Thoreau, Emerson, Gertrude Stein, Franklin Roosevelt—to follow the paths they walked on, is a rare privilege in a young country. I come from Los Angeles, a city famous for obliterating all traces of its past. In the Yard, the trees are saturated with the spirits of great women and men, as well as the thousands of mere mortals who occupied this ground in an unbroken line that extends far past the founding of the republic itself...
...Simplify, said Thoreau, who married no one. Monogamy is complexity enough. One of my favorite cases involves a former president of France, who had a wife but also many mistresses. He possessed, evidently, an orderly mind. Five days of the week, as I heard the story, he took a different mistress out to dinner, always dining on the same night with the same woman at the same restaurant. Thursday meant Babette and Le Cochon D'Or, or somesuch. Tuesday meant Francoise and Le Bistro de L'Ennuie. This was cosmopolitan but drearily bureaucratic polygamy, and I cannot help wondering...