Word: thoreau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...roots whatever in American literary history, such as the University of California, can offer three times the number of courses that Harvard does. Stanford's American literary catalogue reads this way: three survey courses--beginning to 1850, 1850 to 1900, 1900 to present; Hawthorne and Melville; Emerson and Thoreau; Narrative Prose; Chief American Poets; Rise of Realism in American Fiction; Contemporary American Fiction...
...Pierpont Morgan the elder made the purchase of a yellow pine box in 1909. Legend had it that the box was carpentered by Henry David Thoreau in his dying year (1862). Loosely fitted in this wooden frame were 38 manuscript notebooks in which the author of Walden had kept his monumental (nearly two million words) Journal, written in the course of 24 years. The box also offered a mystery. It concerned a missing notebook dating from Thoreau's 23rd year (1840), in which the strongest love interest of the Concord bachelor's life was supposedly blighted. Discovered some...
...published for the first time under the title Consciousness in Concord, the "lost journal" is a minor tribute to the inspired eccentric that was Henry Thoreau. In miniature, the book shares the fascination of the Journal as a whole, which was somehow conceived as alms for oblivion-Thoreau's bribe to posterity to pay more attention to him than his Concord neighbors and writing peers...
Time v. Eternity. There is in this fragment Thoreau's reverence for Nature as a living Bible: "Nature is right, but man is straight. She erects no beams, she slants no rafters, and yet she builds stronger and truer than he." There is the mystical quest of the Absolute: "Speech is fractional, silence is integral." Thoreau early loathed the time-serving bondage in which he pictured most of his fellow men as trapped, leading lives of quiet desperation: "What is sacrificed to time is lost to eternity." Regarding newspaper-reading as a monstrous waste of time, Thoreau later played...
...transcendentalist, Thoreau saw spirit at the heart of matter. But he was never so genteel as to gag at reality. "Let a man reserve a good appetite for his peck of dirt," he wrote, "and expect his chief wealth in unwashed diamonds." At 23, Thoreau was already grappling with the central dilemma of his life, how to know himself and be himself under the raised eyebrow of conformist society: "It is always easy to infringe the law-but the Bedouins of the desert find it impossible to resist public opinion...