Word: thoreau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During the last decade of his life, Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) began a systematic survey of the Massachusetts vegetation surrounding Concord, where he lived in the third-floor attic of his parents' house. His mission, as he told his journal, was "to find God in nature," the Transcendental imperative he absorbed from his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. True, the 26 months Thoreau had spent living alone in a cabin by Walden Pond, memorialized in Walden (1854), involved a similar quest for some "trace of the Ineffable," but now he wanted to remove himself from the center of his observations...
...hopes that when the deans meet that no one brings up two old dreamers, those roamers of open fields, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Class of 1821, and Henry David Thoreau, Class of 1837. Writing of his fellow alumnus, Emerson observed, "He declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well... He was therefore secure of his leisure...
...that has been eagerly abetted by Madison Avenue. These days it's impossible to turn on a television or open a magazine without being assaulted by a barrage of ads that use skillfully packaged images of wilderness activities to rev the engine of consumerism. In 1851, when Henry David Thoreau declared, "In wildness is the preservation of the world," he could not have foreseen that wilderness, as an idea, would one day be used to sell everything from SUVs to soda pop. Disconcerting though this development may be, it happens to come with a substantial upside; because wilderness...
Perhaps this tendency of the American Self evidences itself nowhere more clearly than in environmentalist literature and eco-criticism. It wasn't narcissism but selflessness--in the most authentic sense of the term, the vanishing of the self--that led Thoreau to tell us about his life in the woods: it was his conviction that individual choices possess some kind of cosmic exemplary significance. Walden is a sort of spiritual biography of man in Nature, told through Thoreau's experience in the woods. The notion is that experience is transcendent of the personal, and indexes the general...
Some seniors who are not my blockmates have used their time to grow as individuals, just as Thoreau did by skipping pebbles at Walden Pond. A few go rockclimbing and one just learned how to play Mah Jong, but for many, all this free time hasn't exactly produced a transcendental effect: that is, seniors thinking, reflecting and growing as people...