tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22861113606932181922024-03-05T05:26:45.216-05:00The Sages of ConcordProviding a bully pulpit, a perch, a roof, a soap box for fiddlers, Quakers, Seekers, roosters, malcontents, true radicals, free thinkers or anyone with a beating heart and a working mind.
In the spirit of Thoreau's chanticleer.
"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up."Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.comBlogger85125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-86603833641895957682017-09-16T14:47:00.001-05:002017-09-16T21:13:02.182-05:00Sages of Concord #62: The True American<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<header style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 20px 0px 0px;"><div class="author" style="color: #990101; float: left; font-size: 18px; font-weight: 700; margin: -10px 0px 0px; width: 401.328px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-eogRh7Ys7yidcO7U0Bs2tzT-efuBHRuIiTWEh4dv2NsoW9Lpk5F5jitw2eSt7S5il9_MDzDUWS1SvDVVaGkNpDxTekDLIBloAx_t7_gRjS-rOsED011CeW0tkBCS44PtoVJtBIHncP8v/s1600/DavidLevine.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="394" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-eogRh7Ys7yidcO7U0Bs2tzT-efuBHRuIiTWEh4dv2NsoW9Lpk5F5jitw2eSt7S5il9_MDzDUWS1SvDVVaGkNpDxTekDLIBloAx_t7_gRjS-rOsED011CeW0tkBCS44PtoVJtBIHncP8v/s320/DavidLevine.gif" width="243" /></a></div>
<br />
<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/robert-pogue-harrison/" style="color: #990101; text-decoration-line: none;">Robert Pogue Harrison</a></div>
<div class="details" style="float: right; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; margin: -5px 0px 0px; text-align: right; text-transform: uppercase; width: 179.688px;">
<time><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/issues/2017/08/17/" style="color: #999999; text-decoration-line: none;">AUGUST 17, 2017 ISSUE</a></time></div>
</header><section class="article_body" style="background-color: white; clear: both; margin: 0px 20px 0px 0px; padding-top: 20px;"><section class="reviewed_articles" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); clear: both; line-height: 1.3em; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 20px 0px; width: 599px;"><article style="padding: 0px 0px 15px;"><h4 style="line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "times new roman" , "times" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><i>From THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS</i></span></span></h4>
<h4 style="line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "times new roman" , "times" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><i>http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/17/henry-david-thoreau-true-american/</i></span></span></h4>
<div>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "times new roman" , "times" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
<h4 style="color: inherit; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/022634469X?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=022634469X" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(239, 239, 239); color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Henry David Thoreau: A Life</a><img alt="" height="1" src="https://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thneyoreofbo-20&l=as2&o=1&a=022634469X" style="border: none !important; height: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="1" /></h4>
<div class="attribution" style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px;">
by Laura Dassow Walls</div>
<div class="details" style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px;">
University of Chicago Press, 615 pp., $35.00</div>
</article><article style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px; padding: 0px 0px 15px;"><h4 style="color: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807098132?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0807098132" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(239, 239, 239); color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Walden</a><img alt="" height="1" src="https://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thneyoreofbo-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0807098132" style="border: none !important; height: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="1" /></h4>
<div class="attribution">
by Henry David Thoreau, with an introduction and annotations by Bill McKibben</div>
<div class="details">
Beacon, 312 pp., $10.95 (paper)</div>
</article><article style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px; padding: 0px 0px 15px;"><h4 style="color: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/039918466X?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=039918466X" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(239, 239, 239); color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau</a><img alt="" height="1" src="https://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thneyoreofbo-20&l=as2&o=1&a=039918466X" style="border: none !important; height: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="1" /></h4>
<div class="attribution">
by Kevin Dann</div>
<div class="details">
TarcherPerigee, 387 pp., $30.00</div>
</article><article style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px; padding: 0px 0px 15px;"><h4 style="color: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300223765?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0300223765" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(239, 239, 239); color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Thoreau’s Animals</a><img alt="" height="1" src="https://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thneyoreofbo-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0300223765" style="border: none !important; height: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="1" /></h4>
<div class="attribution">
by Henry David Thoreau, edited by Geoff Wisner and illustrated by Debby Cotter Kaspari</div>
<div class="details">
Yale University Press, 256 pp., $30.00</div>
</article><article style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px; padding: 0px 0px 15px;"><h4 style="color: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520294041?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0520294041" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(239, 239, 239); color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Thoreau and the Language of Trees</a><img alt="" height="1" src="https://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thneyoreofbo-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0520294041" style="border: none !important; height: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="1" /></h4>
<div class="attribution">
by Richard Higgins, with a foreword by Robert D. Richardson and photographs by Richard Higgins</div>
<div class="details">
University of California Press, 230 pp., $24.95From the New York Review of Books</div>
</article><article style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px; padding: 0px 0px 15px;"><h4 style="color: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674545095?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0674545095" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(239, 239, 239); color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years</a><img alt="" height="1" src="https://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thneyoreofbo-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0674545095" style="border: none !important; height: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="1" /></h4>
<div class="attribution">
by Robert M. Thorson</div>
<div class="details">
Harvard University Press, 315 pp., $29.95</div>
</article><article style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px; padding: 0px 0px 15px;"><h4 style="color: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;">
This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal</h4>
<div class="attribution">
an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, June 2–September 10, 2017; and the Concord Museum, Concord, Massachusetts, September 29, 2017–January 21, 2018</div>
<div class="details">
</div>
</article><article style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px; padding: 0px 0px 15px;"><h4 style="color: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1625342403?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1625342403" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(239, 239, 239); color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">When I Came to Die: Process and Prophecy in Thoreau’s Vision of Dying</a><img alt="" height="1" src="https://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thneyoreofbo-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1625342403" style="border: none !important; height: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="1" /></h4>
<div class="attribution">
by Audrey Raden</div>
<div class="details">
University of Massachusetts Press, 156 pp., $90.00; $27.95 (paper)</div>
</article><article style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px; padding: 0px 0px 15px;"><h4 style="color: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674088476?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0674088476" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(239, 239, 239); color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau</a><img alt="" height="1" src="https://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thneyoreofbo-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0674088476" style="border: none !important; height: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="1" /></h4>
<div class="attribution">
by Branka Arsić</div>
<div class="details">
Harvard Universtiy Press, 455 pp., $51.50</div>
</article><article style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 14px; padding: 0px 0px 15px;"><h4 style="color: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300214774?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0300214774" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(239, 239, 239); color: #333333; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Thoreau’s Wildflowers</a><img alt="" height="1" src="https://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thneyoreofbo-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0300214774" style="border: none !important; height: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" width="1" /></h4>
<div class="attribution">
by Henry David Thoreau, edited by Geoff Wisner and illustrated by Barry Moser</div>
<div class="details">
Yale University Press, 300 pp., $30.00</div>
</article></section><figure class="wp-caption alignright illustration" data-id="11816" style="color: #333333; float: right; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 5px 0px 20px 20px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://shop.nybooks.com/products/henry-thoreau-1987" style="color: #990101; text-decoration-line: none;"><img alt="Henry Thoreau" class="size-full wp-image-11816" src="https://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/1987/01/henry-thoreau_1987-01-15.gif" style="border: 0px; height: auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle; width: 250px;" /></a><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" style="font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.3em; padding: 5px 0px 0px; text-align: center; width: 250px;"><small style="clear: both; display: block; float: right; font-size: 10px; padding: 0px 0px 5px;">Henry Thoreau; drawing by David Levine</small></figcaption></figure><div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
This year America celebrates the bicentennial birthday of Henry David Thoreau with many excellent publications about his life, legacy, and love of the natural world. Only his fellow citizens are likely to lend an ear to them. Unlike his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau hardly makes it onto the list of notable American authors outside his home country. His peculiar brand of American nativism has little international appeal, for as Emerson wrote in his funeral eulogy of May 9, 1862:</div>
<blockquote style="border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 20px;">
<div style="font-size: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 15px;">
No truer American existed than Thoreau. His preference of his country and condition was genuine, and his aversation from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
These days the question of what it means to be a “true” American resists rational analysis. Whatever one can say about Americans that is true, the opposite is equally true. We are the most godless and most religious, the most puritanical and most libertine, the most charitable and most heartless of societies. We espouse the maxim “that government is best which governs least,” yet look to government to address our every problem. Our environmental conscientiousness is outmatched only by our environmental recklessness. We are outlaws obsessed by the rule of law, individualists devoted to communitarian values, a nation of fat people with anorexic standards of beauty. The only things we love more than nature’s wilderness are our cars, malls, and digital technology. The paradoxes of the American psyche go back at least as far as our Declaration of Independence, in which slave owners proclaimed that all men are endowed by their creator with an unalienable right to liberty.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
In this sense Thoreau was truly American. In her splendid new biography, <i>Henry David Thoreau: A Life</i>, Laura Dassow Walls, a professor of English literature at the University of Notre Dame, offers a multifaceted view of the many contradictions of his personality.<iframe class="teads-resize" mtmid="m104" mtmparent="m13" style="border-style: none !important; border-width: initial !important; display: block !important; height: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; min-height: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 599px;"></iframe></div>
<div class="teads-inread sm-screen" mtmparent="m13" style="box-sizing: content-box; color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; height: 331px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 550px; overflow: hidden; transition: height 0s;">
<div mtmparent="m13" style="margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; position: relative;">
<div class="teads-ui-components-label" mtmparent="m13" style="color: #aaaaaa; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif !important; font-size: 10px !important; height: 21px !important; letter-spacing: 0.3px !important; line-height: 21px !important; margin-bottom: 0px !important; text-align: center !important; text-transform: uppercase !important;">
ADVERTISING</div>
<div class="teads-player" id="teads0" mtmparent="m13" style="margin-bottom: 0px !important;">
<iframe frameborder="0" mtmid="m59" mtmparent="m13" scrolling="no" style="border-style: initial !important; border-width: 0px !important; display: block; float: none !important; height: 310px !important; margin: 0px !important; max-height: 310px !important; overflow: hidden !important; padding: 0px !important; width: 550px !important;"></iframe></div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Thoreau has come “down to us in ice, chilled into a misanthrope, prickly with spines, isolated as a hermit and nag,” she writes, acknowledging that he did his fair share to earn that reputation. He was prickly enough that their friend Elizabeth Hoar confided to Emerson, “I love Henry, but do not like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon take the arm of an elm tree.” From early on people accused him of hypocrisy, censuring him for championing self-sufficiency while he occasionally returned home for dinner during the years he lived at Walden Pond. (“No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry,” writes Walls.)<span id="fnr-1" style="font-size: 12.75px; line-height: 0; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/17/henry-david-thoreau-true-american/#fn-1" style="color: #990101; text-decoration-line: none;">1</a></span></div>
<div class="initial" style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 30px;">
Walls does not deny that Thoreau was “occasionally hermitous, and even a nag,” yet in her full-bodied portrait he comes alive also as “a loving son, a devoted friend, a lively and charismatic presence who filled the room, laughed and danced, sang and teased and wept.” The citizens of Concord loved him dearly because, in addition to being nettlesome, he was genuine and kind.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
In a finely tuned discussion of his ambivalent sexuality—one that avoids excessive speculation without avoiding the topic altogether, as many scholars tend to do—Walls concludes that Thoreau, who probably died a virgin, was drawn to men and women equally. With Aristophanic flair, he noted in his journal: “I love men with the same distinction that I love woman—as if my friend were of some third sex.”</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Thoreau’s friendship with Margaret Fuller—editor of the Transcendentalist journal <i>The Dial</i>—reveals the extent to which he was free of resentment, vanity, or sexism. In 1840, when he submitted an ambitious essay and a poem to <i>The Dial</i>, Fuller sent him a rejection letter that would have unhinged most other nineteenth-century American men with a Harvard degree, saying of the essay that its thoughts were “so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without pain…but seem to hear the grating of tools on the mosaic.” As for the poem, she objected to its “want of fluent music,” comparing it to a “bare hill which the warm gales of spring have not visited.” Thoreau took her criticisms to heart and learned from them. They subsequently became good friends.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Was Thoreau egotistical? Surely, yet as Walls writes, “injustice to another made him storm with the passionate and sleepless rage that powered his great writings of political protest”—writings like “Civil Disobedience” and his fiery defense of the abolitionist John Brown.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
His protests were not only political. Like Emerson, Thoreau believed that education was democracy’s highest calling. Upon graduating from Harvard in 1837, he was offered a dream job at Concord’s Center Grammar School, with a lofty salary of $500 a year. He made it clear when he accepted the teaching position that he did not believe in flogging students, yet after the deacon insisted that he administer “corporeal chastisement, the corner-stone of a sound education,” Thoreau disciplined some of his students with a ferule (he did not own a cowhide for flogging). He felt so stained by his act of “uncivil obedience” that he went to the deacon that same evening and resigned, ending his career as a public school teacher ten days after it had begun.</div>
<div data-google-query-id="CMv0kOa4qtYCFZBCNwodJDIIsQ" id="article-p1" style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px; text-align: center;">
<div id="google_ads_iframe_/6105283/300x250-ArticleP1_0__container__" mtmparent="m49" style="border: 0pt none; display: inline-block; height: 250px; width: 300px;">
<iframe data-is-safeframe="true" frameborder="0" height="250" id="google_ads_iframe_/6105283/300x250-ArticleP1_0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" mtmid="m89" mtmparent="m49" name="" scrolling="no" src="https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-10/html/container.html" style="border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; vertical-align: bottom;" title="3rd party ad content" width="300"></iframe></div>
</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
If Thoreau was a hermit, he had a strange way of expressing it. In 1842, three years before building his cabin at Walden Pond, he wrote in his journal: “I have no private good—unless it be my peculiar ability to serve the public—this is the only individual property.” By “public” Thoreau meant many things: the human community of Concord where he spent most of his life, rooted like a tree; the surrounding woods, waters, and wildlife that community shared in common; and the country at large. In everything he did and wrote, Thoreau identified himself first and foremost as a citizen, not only of his hometown and the American republic, but of the natural world that provided them with their material foundations.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Walls suggests that Frederick Douglass and the radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips played a decisive part in Thoreau’s decision to build a cabin at Walden and sojourn there for two years and two months. These abolitionists, each in his own way, convinced Thoreau that “a million men are of no importance compared with one man…[who is prepared] to do right.” Like them, Thoreau wanted to stand as a majority of one. “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already,” he wrote in “Civil Disobedience.”</div>
<div class="initial" style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 30px;">
It was as a citizen of Concord, hence of America, that Thoreau took up residence at Walden on Independence Day 1845.<span id="fnr-2" style="font-size: 12.75px; line-height: 0; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/17/henry-david-thoreau-true-american/#fn-2" style="color: #990101; text-decoration-line: none;">2</a></span> He went there not to isolate himself but to situate himself “a mile from any neighbor”—distant enough for independence, yet close enough to remain within earshot. <i>Walden</i> addresses itself to “you…who are said to live in New England,” and its epigraph declares its intention “to wake my neighbors up.”</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Wake them up to what? To the fact that America was still waiting to be discovered, that his neighbors had given up prematurely on its promise of freedom, independence, and God’s heaven on earth. The Puritan pilgrims had brought with them to the New World an infinite expectation, only to succumb to disappointment after setting foot on a continent they saw as wild and harsh, not at all the Eden they had hoped for. Thoreau went to Walden to discover for himself whether America—“this new yet unapproachable America,” as Emerson called it—amounted to a false promise, or whether it did indeed contain a paradise that was not only approachable but touchable.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
What he found is that “we occupy the heaven of the gods without knowing it.” Paradise exists all around us, in America’s “wildness,” the natural environment of the continent. In the contact between his own body and America’s forests, meadows, lakes, rivers, mountains, and animals, Thoreau discovered what he called “hard matter in its home.” That home was the “hard bottom” or “reality” that we crave. “I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound,” he wrote in his journal. “Daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!… <i>Contact! Contact!</i>”</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
The tactile transcendence of America’s wildness opens its prospects to those who would wake up to it. One need not travel to sublime mountain ranges or remote wilderness areas to access it. It lies before us, in what Thoreau called the day’s dawning. “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.” Only such expectation brings forth that heightening of the senses that allows America to appear in its dawning ecstasies; and lest we take the notion of dawn too literally, Thoreau declares: “Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
It is impossible to overstate the importance of anticipation in Thoreau’s philosophy of sense perception and spiritual elevation. In another bicentennial biography, <i>Expect Great Things</i>, Kevin Dann lays great stress on the fact that for Thoreau “anticipation precedes discovery.” Dann’s biography concentrates more on Thoreau’s rich psychic life than on his multidimensional life as friend, family member, Concord citizen, political activist, and writer. Through a sympathetic reading of his journal above all, Dann seeks to gain access to the inward paradise of perception that Thoreau inhabited during the last decade or two of his life.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Dann argues that Thoreau cultivated the “thrilled and expectant mood” (Thoreau’s words) because he believed that we only see what we are prepared to see. According to Thoreau:</div>
<blockquote style="border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 20px;">
<div style="font-size: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Objects are concealed from our view not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because there is no intention of the mind and eye toward them…. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, not a grain more.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Thoreau believed in the shamanistic power of expectation. Dann’s biography in fact gets its title from what it takes to be a doctrinal statement that Thoreau recorded in his journal: “In the long run, we find what we expect. We shall be fortunate then if we expect great things.”</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Yet it is not enough merely to expect. To deepen and expand the horizon of perception, one must acquire an exacting empirical knowledge of the natural world in its endless particularities, for the intention of the eye follows the intention of the mind. That is why, after graduating from Harvard, Thoreau spent a great deal of time studying the geology and ecology of New England, reading as many accounts as he could of its native species, whether by contemporaries or earlier generations of American naturalists, botanists, farmers, and explorers. In time he became a first-rate naturalist himself, adding his own discoveries to the archival record.</div>
<figure class="wp-caption alignright" data-id="58025" style="color: #333333; float: right; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 5px 0px 20px 20px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/harrison_2-081717.jpg" style="color: #990101; text-decoration-line: none;"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-58025" height="2062" sizes="(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px" src="https://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/harrison_2-081717.jpg" srcset="http://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/harrison_2-081717.jpg 1600w, http://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/harrison_2-081717-97x125.jpg 97w, http://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/harrison_2-081717-768x990.jpg 768w" style="border: 0px; height: auto; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle; width: 250px;" width="1600" /></a><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" style="font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.3em; padding: 5px 0px 0px; text-align: center; width: 250px;"><small style="clear: both; display: block; float: right; font-size: 10px; padding: 0px 0px 5px;">Concord Museum</small><div class="clearfix">
</div>
Henry David Thoreau, 1861; ambrotype by Edward Sidney Dunshee</figcaption></figure><div class="initial" style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 30px;">
<i>Thoreau’s Animals</i>, edited and introduced by Geoff Wisner, offers an engaging and often entertaining selection of Thoreau’s writings about the wild and domestic animal species he came upon in the forests, farms, and wetlands in and around Concord. It is a companion volume to <i>Thoreau’s Wildflowers</i>, and together the two volumes throw into relief the degree to which Thoreau was almost superhumanly awake to the flora and fauna of his surrounding environment. There is more here than testimony of Thoreau’s much-vaunted “powers of observation.” The volumes offer clear evidence that in his later adult life Thoreau had thoroughly cleansed the doors of perception, and that the world appeared to him as infinite in its local manifestations.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
The same holds true for the enchanting book <i>Thoreau and the Language of Trees</i>, by Richard Higgins. In lucid and elegant prose, Higgins traces Thoreau’s deep love affair with various arboreal species, like the white pine of Maine, which, in a formulation that unsettled an editor, he claimed was “as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” Each of Higgins’s ten chapters contains an essay, followed by pertinent passages from Thoreau. One gets to the end of this book fully persuaded by Higgins’s claim that Thoreau was captivated by trees, and that “they played a significant role in his creativity as a writer, his work as a naturalist, his philosophical thought, and even his inner life.” In a beautiful touch, Higgins adds: “It sometimes seems that he could see the sap flowing beneath their bark.”</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
<i>Walden</i>—republished by Beacon Press this year with an inspired introduction by Bill McKibben about Thoreau’s relevance to our own spiritually impoverished reality—is arguably the most important work of literary nonfiction in the American canon. Thanks to that book, subtitled “A Life in the Woods,” the image of Thoreau as a lover of woods and trees is entrenched in the American imagination. Yet in <i>The Boatman</i>, Robert M. Thorson reminds us that in the last decade of his life Thoreau devoted a great deal more attention to rivers, especially the three main rivers around Concord (the Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord, known to the seventeenth-century Puritans who settled the valley as the South, North, and Great Rivers). Thorson’s book offers the reader an in-depth account of Thoreau’s lifelong love of boats, his skill as a navigator, his intimate knowledge of the waterways around Concord, and his extensive survey of the Concord River.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
“Henry’s unheralded river book is his journal,” writes Thorson. Thoreau’s Journal contains some two million words written over twenty years.<span id="fnr-3" style="font-size: 12.75px; line-height: 0; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/17/henry-david-thoreau-true-american/#fn-3" style="color: #990101; text-decoration-line: none;">3 </a></span>The Journal is the main focus of an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, “This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal,” which brings together nearly one hundred relics of this American saint, including the small green desk on which he wrote most of his life work, the flute with which he enchanted Margaret Fuller and other humans and nonhumans alike, as well as more than twenty of his Journal notebooks, many of his letters, books from his personal library, the only two photographs for which he ever sat, and even some pressed plants from his herbarium. Those many readers and scholars who have increasingly come to consider Thoreau’s Journal his main literary achievement will want to make a pilgrimage this summer to the Morgan.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Both Thorson and Walls make a point of stressing that Thoreau was fully cognizant of what today we call the “anthropocene,” or the era when most of the planet has been touched or altered by human beings. When Thoreau embarked on an excursion to Mount Katahdin in Maine, for example, he imagined he would be venturing into pristine territory, only to find that humans had left their mark in even the state’s most remote regions. In his introduction to <i>Walden</i>, McKibben writes that Thoreau’s expedition “took him through the heart of that then-mighty wilderness,” yet as Walls remarks in a moving passage:</div>
<blockquote style="border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 20px;">
<div style="font-size: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Even where the road ended, the houses did not, and even after the last house, there were logging camps and blacksmith forges, dams and log booms, trails rutted with use, even a billboard. The untouched forest had been logged, each tree cut and branded, its destiny not to reach for the heavens but to drop downstream through the falls to the sawmills.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Or as Thoreau noted in his journal: “It is vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.”</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Thoreau was either resigned to or remarkably sanguine about humanity’s transformative as well as destructive impact on nature. He did not approve of the way “human activity was now the dominant agency driving landscape change,” as Thorson puts it, yet he quietly accepted it as part of the ongoing, ever-changing history of the earth.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
What saved Thoreau from a gnashing of teeth was his awareness of how much wildness still surrounded him. One can’t help but marvel at the rapture that the sight of things like huckleberries, turtles, or wildflowers would inspire in him. There was clearly a sublimated libidinal surplus within him—nourished by his lifelong chastity—that rendered his relation to nature thoroughly erotic and ecstatic, even in the midst of the anthropocene spectacle in its most demoralizing forms.</div>
<div class="initial" style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 30px;">
Kevin Dann claims that “throughout his life, Thoreau was certain that his ‘property’—his soul—was immortal, destined to go to God again when he died.” That may or may not be true, yet it is certain that Thoreau believed there was more than enough heaven in this world to go around. For all his personal contradictions, he saw none between his immortal soul and the “hard matter” of his body, or between a transcendent heaven and a mortal earth.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Thoreau declared that he went to the Walden woods “to front only the essential facts of life,” for he did not want, when it came time for him to die, to “discover that I had not lived.” In her poignant and eloquent book, <i>When I Came to Die</i>, Audrey Raden shows how, for Thoreau, death and dying were among the most essential facts of life, and that to live life to the fullest meant to live it in full awareness of its mortality.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
In <i>Bird Relics</i>, Branka Arsić delves into Thoreau’s writings, with particular attention to the Indian Notebooks and unpublished bird notebooks, to trace the way his thinking about nature developed over the years into a kind of pan-vitalism, which sees the generative forces of life at work in death, disease, and natural decay. For Thoreau the latter are not opposed to, but are part of, life. Arsić gives due emphasis to the crucial part that the death of his brother John played in Thoreau’s understanding of the all-encompassing force of life. Thoreau was so deeply bonded with his brother that, in a psychic if not physical sense, he died with John in 1842. His grief was as intense as it was prolonged and, as Arsić suggests, it helped incubate his philosophy of life. He emerged from it believing that whatever was alive in John lived on in the regenerative nature of the surrounding landscape. Thoreau’s grief lies behind his calm acceptance of death, which life absorbs back into itself and from which it engenders new life.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
It is no doubt because he lived a life of daily contact with the real—with nature in its everyday miracles—that Thoreau died a “beautiful death,” as it was called in those days. It was beautiful not because it was painless (he died of tuberculosis in his family home at forty-four) but because he faced his approaching death with remarkable serenity and even cheerfulness, convinced that death was not so much the termination as the consummation of life.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
When Thoreau’s abolitionist friend Parker Pillsbury visited him shortly before he died and found him “deathly weak and pale,” he took his hand and remarked to Thoreau, “I suppose this is the best you can do now.” Thoreau smiled and “gasped a faint assent.” When Pillsbury then said, “The outworks seem almost ready to give way,” Thoreau whispered, “Yes,—but as long as she cracks she holds.” This was a saying common among boys skating on the thinning ice of lakes and ponds, meaning that as long as the ice cracks, winter still holds.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
By his own account Pillsbury then remarked to Thoreau, “You seem so near the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.” Thoreau’s answer remains, for all intents and purposes, his last word: “One world at a time.”</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Thoreau had an almost mystical reverence for facts, above all the fact of death. In <i>Walden</i> he wrote:</div>
<blockquote style="border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 20px;">
<div style="font-size: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 15px;">
If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Among Americans nothing has more authority than facts. Of course the contrary is also true (a quarter of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth; more than three quarters believe there is indisputable evidence that aliens have visited our planet). Is it true that we crave reality? Yes, but we crave irreality just as much if not more. Our addiction to our television, computer, and cell phone screens confirms as much. As for death, it does not seem that today we have a knack for concluding our mortal careers “happily.”</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
I believe there are two immensely important Thoreauvian legacies that call out for retrieval among his fellow citizens today. One is learning to live deliberately, fronting “only the essential facts of life,” so that death may be lived for what it is—the natural, and not tragic, outcome of life.</div>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
The other equally important lesson is how to touch the hard matter of the world, how to see the world again in its full range of detail, diversity, and infinite reach. Nothing has suffered greater impoverishment in our era than our ability to see the visible world. It has become increasingly invisible to us as we succumb to the sorcery of our digital screens. It will take the likes of Henry David Thoreau, the most keen-sighted American of all, to teach us how to discover America again and see it for what it is.</div>
<div class="pagination foot" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 20px 0px; padding-bottom: 20px; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="footnotes" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 10px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px;">
<ol style="list-style-type: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<li id="fn-1" style="line-height: 1.4em; margin: 10px 0px;"><span class="marker" style="display: block; float: left; font-weight: 700;">1</span><div style="margin-left: 15px;">
The view of Thoreau as a hypocritical jerk is alive and well. In an article about <i>Walden</i> in <i>The New Yorker</i> (October 19, 2015), Kathryn Schulz works herself into a froth of indignation as she denounces him for his “hypocrisy, his sanctimony, his dour asceticism, and his scorn,” claiming, as many others before her have, that “he was as parochial as he was egotistical.” Thoreau does Schulz one better in <i>Walden</i>, where he writes: “I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.” <a class="footnoteBackLink" href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/17/henry-david-thoreau-true-american/#fnr-1" style="color: #990101; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></div>
</li>
<li id="fn-2" style="line-height: 1.4em; margin: 10px 0px;"><span class="marker" style="display: block; float: left; font-weight: 700;">2</span><div style="margin-left: 15px;">
On the symbolic meaning of Thoreau’s departure from Concord to the shores of Walden Pond on Independence Day, see Stanley Cavell’s <i>The Senses of Walden</i> (Viking, 1972), still one of the most thoughtful books about <i>Walden</i> ever published. <a class="footnoteBackLink" href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/17/henry-david-thoreau-true-american/#fnr-2" style="color: #990101; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></div>
</li>
<li id="fn-3" style="line-height: 1.4em; margin: 10px 0px;"><span class="marker" style="display: block; float: left; font-weight: 700;">3</span><div style="margin-left: 15px;">
See <i>The Journal, 1837–1861</i>, edited by Damion Searls with a preface by John R. Stilgoe (New York Review Books, 2009). ↩</div>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
</section></div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-47200662174095722492017-09-11T21:30:00.001-05:002020-03-28T01:30:39.453-05:00FULLER'S SAGE ADVICE TO THOREAU: The Sages of Concord #61<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuMzo9lyCQWKiCxcZxzGzlZxZvpml89JopYbbZr2PINVp1b_cqMO9Ip3s-VuK3zbfAd3SeWlY6XHn1f73S-jhJgzyBHj-YbG4HXuXqd1xxZC8l1L0AfcG-PAhxe7mohXtJ15mECUgPw5et/s1600/fullerthoreau.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="321" data-original-width="600" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuMzo9lyCQWKiCxcZxzGzlZxZvpml89JopYbbZr2PINVp1b_cqMO9Ip3s-VuK3zbfAd3SeWlY6XHn1f73S-jhJgzyBHj-YbG4HXuXqd1xxZC8l1L0AfcG-PAhxe7mohXtJ15mECUgPw5et/s640/fullerthoreau.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<h1 class="entry-title" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #262626; font-family: fira-sans, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 2.25em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-weight: 200; line-height: 1em; margin: -3px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="background: rgb(255 , 219 , 0); border: 0px; box-shadow: rgb(255 , 219 , 0) -10px 0px 0px , rgb(255 , 219 , 0) 10px 0px 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; left: 10px; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline;">The Art of Constructive Criticism: Trailblazing Feminist Margaret Fuller Rejects Young Thoreau and Helps Him Improve His Writing</span></h1>
<h2 style="background-color: white; border-bottom-color: rgb(217, 217, 217); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #262626; font-family: fira-sans, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 1.25em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 1.25em 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1.5em 40px; vertical-align: baseline;">
“I can have no advice or criticism for a person so sincere; but, if I give my impression of him, I will say, ‘He says too constantly of Nature, she is mine.’ She is not yours till you have been more hers.”</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<u>BY MARIA POPOVA</u></h3>
<div class="entry_content" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #262626; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1112429786/braipick-20" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><img class="cover" height="290" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/heraldsofamericanliterature1.jpg?w=680&ssl=1" style="border: 0px; display: block; float: right; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 0.7em 0px 0.7em 40px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 200px;" width="200" /></a>Few things reveal your intellect and your generosity of spirit — the parallel powers of your heart and mind — better than how you give feedback, especially if it is to a friend and especially if the work in question leaves something to be desired. Evidence like Samuel Beckett’s <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/15/samuel-beckett-constructive-criticism/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">masterwork of tough love</a> and poet Thom Gunn’s <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/19/oliver-sacks-thom-gunn-writing/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">role in Oliver Sacks’s evolution as a writer</a>further impresses how rare the masters of this delicate, monumental art of constructive criticism are.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
But there is no greater genius at it than trailblazing journalist, essayist, and editor <span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Margaret Fuller</span> (May 23, 1810–July 19, 1850), whose 1845 book <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Woman in the Nineteenth Century</em> endures as a foundational text of feminism. It originated as an essay titled “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman ver<span id="goog_295411232"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_295411233"></span>sus Women,” published two years earlier in the influential Transcendentalist magazine <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Dial</em>, of which Fuller had become founding editor — elected over <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/tag/ralph-waldo-emerson/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>, who was also being considered for the position — in 1839.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/30/margaret-fuller-thoreau-letter/">https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/30/margaret-fuller-thoreau-letter/</a></div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
In the fall of 1841 — shortly after moving into Emerson’s house and around the time he was contemplating <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/10/thoreau-hard-work-efficiency/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the true measure of meaningful labor</a> in his famous diary — 24-year-old <span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Henry David Thoreau</span>, urged by Emerson, submitted one of his poems to <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Dial</em>. What he received from Fuller was a rejection on the surface but an enormous and generous gift at its heart — in a lengthy and immeasurably beautiful letter, she delineated the reasons for the poem’s rejection and offered caring constructive feedback on how to improve not only his writing but the very soul from which it springs.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Fuller’s masterpiece of constructive criticism is preserved in the original by <a href="http://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/reveal/#nav_top" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Project REVEAL</a> at Harry Ransom Center and was included in the 1907 volume <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1112429786/braipick-20" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Heralds of American Literature: A Group of Patriot Writers of the Revolutionary and National Periods</em></span></a> (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/heralds-of-american-literature-a-group-of-patriot-writers-of-the-revolutionary-and-national-periods/oclc/269349&referer=brief_results" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">public library</em></a>) by essayist and literary culture champion Annie Russell Marble.</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<figure class="wp-caption alignnone" style="background: rgb(230, 230, 230); border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0.8em 0px 1.5em; padding: 20px 20px 5px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/#nav_top" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><img alt="" height="372" src="https://i1.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/margaretfuller_thoreau.jpg?w=600&ssl=1" style="border: 0px; display: block; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="600" /></a><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" style="border: 0px; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: fira-sans; font-size: 0.9em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.7em; margin: 0px; padding: 10px 0px 5px; vertical-align: baseline;">Fuller’s original handwritten letter to Thoreau (Harry Ransom Center)</figcaption></figure><br />
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
On October 18, 1841, Fuller — herself only thirty-one — writes:</div>
<blockquote style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: url("images/sprites.png"); background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px -73px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 1.25em 0px 1.4em; min-height: 60px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 100px; quotes: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
<div style="border: 0px; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: fira-sans; font-size: 1.2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 1.4em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
I do not find the poem on the mountains improved by mere compression, though it might be by fusion and glow. Its merits to me are, a noble recognition of Nature, two or three manly thoughts, and, in one place, a plaintive music.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
With great sensitivity to every artist’s vulnerable tendency to take criticism of his or her work as criticism of his or her character, Fuller envelops her critique of Thoreau the poet in great warmth for Thoreau the person, assuring him that behind his mediocre poem lies great potential — but making clear that he must work diligently at it in order to attain it:</div>
<blockquote style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: url("images/sprites.png"); background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px -73px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 1.25em 0px 1.4em; min-height: 60px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 100px; quotes: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
<div style="border: 0px; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: fira-sans; font-size: 1.2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 1.4em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Yet, now that I have some knowledge of the man, it seems there is no objection I could make to his lines (with the exception of such offenses against taste as the lines about the humors of the eye…), which I would not make to himself. He is healthful, rare, of open eye, ready hand, and noble scope. He sets no limits to his life, nor to the invasions of nature; he is not willfully pragmatical, cautious, ascetic, or fantastical. But he is as yet a somewhat bare hill, which the warm gales of Spring have not visited… He will find the generous office that shall educate him…</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Although she is only seven years Thoreau’s senior, barely in her thirties herself, Fuller brims with precocious wisdom. More than a century before Grace Paley asserted in <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/29/grace-paley-advice-to-writers" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">her advice to aspiring writers</a> that “in order to function in their trade, writers must live in the world,” Fuller gently points Thoreau to the greatest education for a writer — life itself, the richness of experience amassed by living it, and the enlarging effects of human relationships:</div>
<blockquote style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: url("images/sprites.png"); background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px -73px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 1.25em 0px 1.4em; min-height: 60px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 100px; quotes: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
<div style="border: 0px; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: fira-sans; font-size: 1.2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 1.4em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
The unfolding of affections, a wider and deeper human experience, the harmonizing influences of other natures, will mould the man and melt his verse. He will seek thought less and find knowledge the more. I can have no advice or criticism for a person so sincere; but, if I give my impression of him, I will say, “He says too constantly of Nature, she is mine.” She is not yours till you have been more hers. Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture. Say not so confidently, all places, all occasions are alike. This will never come true till you have found it false.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
After encouraging him to keep submitting his work and to write to her, Fuller — a century before George Orwell’s famous admonition against <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/18/george-orwell-writing-politics-and-the-english-language/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“stale metaphors, similes and idioms”</a> — adds:</div>
<blockquote style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: url("images/sprites.png"); background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px -73px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 1.25em 0px 1.4em; min-height: 60px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 100px; quotes: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
<div style="border: 0px; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: fira-sans; font-size: 1.2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 1.4em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Will you finish the poem in your own way, and send it for the ‘Dial’? Leave out</div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: fira-sans; font-size: 1.2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 1.4em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
“And seem to milk the sky.”</div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: fira-sans; font-size: 1.2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 1.4em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
The image is too low; Mr. Emerson thought so too.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
She ends with the kind of signature that embodies what Virginia Woolf meant in calling letter-writing <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/20/the-humane-art-virginia-woolf/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“the humane art”</a> and makes one wistful for its death:</div>
<blockquote style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: url("images/sprites.png"); background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px -73px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: initial; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 1.25em 0px 1.4em; min-height: 60px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 100px; quotes: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
<div style="border: 0px; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: fira-sans; font-size: 1.2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 1.4em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Farewell! May truth be irradiated by Beauty! Let me know whether you go to the lonely hut, and write to me about Shakespeare, if you read him there. I have many thoughts about him, which I have never yet been led to express.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: fira-sans; font-size: 1.2em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 1.4em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Margaret F.</div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<figure class="wp-caption alignnone" style="background: rgb(230, 230, 230); border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0.8em 0px 1.5em; padding: 20px 20px 5px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/09/13/henry-builds-a-cabin/" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><img class="aligncenter" height="384" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/henrybuildsacabin19.jpg?w=600&ssl=1" style="border: 0px; display: block; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="500" /></a><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" style="border: 0px; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: fira-sans; font-size: 0.9em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: 1.7em; margin: 0px; padding: 10px 0px 5px; vertical-align: baseline;">Illustration from ‘Henry Builds a Cabin,’ a children’s book about Thoreau’s philosophy. Click image for more.</figcaption></figure><br />
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Thoreau did go to the lonely hut to be owned by Nature, sequestering himself in the humble cabin <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/09/13/henry-builds-a-cabin/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">he built with his own hands</a> to write the very work for which he is remembered today. <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,”</em> he reflected in <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/07/12/thoreau-on-success/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Walden</em></a> — the most enduring masterwork of his meditations on those essential facts of life learned during his time in that lonely hut. There, he clearly took Fuller’s invaluable advice to heart — the shift she encouraged in his writing and his way of being is palpable both in <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Walden</em> and in <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/23/thoreau-on-libraries/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the beautiful journals</a> he kept while living in the woods.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
As for Shakespeare, he did read and admire him: <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“A genius — a Shakespeare, for instance — would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the world,”</em> Thoreau wrote in the very journals that made the history of his interior parish more interesting than any history of the world.</div>
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, serif, Georgia; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.825em; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Complement with Thoreau on <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/17/thoreau-walking/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the spiritual rewards of walking</a> and <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/20/thoreau-awake/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(225, 155, 155); border-bottom-style: solid; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-top-style: initial; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #c33737; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">what it really means to be awake</a>.</div>
</div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-76260657002327717612017-08-30T09:22:00.000-05:002017-08-30T09:30:29.326-05:00Sages of Concord #60: Thoreau's Wilderness Legacy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
"(Robert) <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 17px;">Frost was on record praising “Walden” as one of his favorite books because it was miraculously “a tale of adventure,” a “declaration of independence” and a “gospel of wisdom” all rolled into one. When Walden Pond came up, however, Frost confessed to Udall that he never visited the Concord sanctuary for fear of heartbreak. “I couldn’t bear to go,” he said. Instead, Frost found the spirit of Thoreau alive in his beloved Green Mountains of Vermont."<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/books/review/douglas-brinkley-thoreaus-wilderness-legacy-walden-pond.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/books/review/douglas-brinkley-thoreaus-wilderness-legacy-walden-pond.html<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwfzgMhdVPdy4u8bO5ZnkEWfDRCXOyirbMlOXUTmGnSCEwGEh-zOH199ujyK_VCrQBu13_jxTESzqfBQUAL2LqKywk4S31wDEMcLRZNdops967ghW7fuXpQ21LLA2BM-8y1ZMiXIZMnmYU/s1600/The-Two-Guides.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="310" data-original-width="470" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwfzgMhdVPdy4u8bO5ZnkEWfDRCXOyirbMlOXUTmGnSCEwGEh-zOH199ujyK_VCrQBu13_jxTESzqfBQUAL2LqKywk4S31wDEMcLRZNdops967ghW7fuXpQ21LLA2BM-8y1ZMiXIZMnmYU/s640/The-Two-Guides.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Two Guides by Winslow Homer<br />
<br />
<br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</a></span><br />
<div class="story-body story-body-1" style="flex-grow: 0; position: relative; width: 705px;">
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="662" data-total-count="662" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.625rem; margin: 0px 0px 1em 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
On April 23, 1851, Henry David Thoreau spoke at the Concord Lyceum about the interrelationship of God, man and nature. It was the opening salvo of the modern American conservation movement. Equating sauntering with absolute freedom, Thoreau, whose “Walden” would be published three years later, ended his oration with eight words that in coming decades helped save the Maine woods, Cape Cod, Yosemite and other treasured American landscapes: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” The sentiment became popularized when The Atlantic published Thoreau’s essay “Walking” in May 1862, with the line as the centerpiece, a month after his death.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="902" data-total-count="1564" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.625rem; margin: 0px 0px 1em 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
This July 12 will be Thoreau’s 200th birthday. Lovers of his back-to-nature musings will flock to the shores of Walden Pond to celebrate his literary greatness. I’ll be one of them. But our pilgrimages to honor Thoreau shouldn’t be confined to wood-fringed Concord. Thoreau, toward the end of his life, famously called for townships to have “a park, or rather a primitive forest, of 500 or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.” A full 14 years before Congress established Yellowstone National Park (America’s first) in 1872, Thoreau, courtesy of this visionary preservationist offering, helped inspire our magnificent National Parks system. The true largess of Thoreau, then, can perhaps best be discovered by experiencing one of the outdoor temples that his “in wildness” declaration helped protect.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="736" data-total-count="2300" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.625rem; margin: 0px 0px 1em 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Most Americans know Thoreau from reading “Walden,” with its simple assertion, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” But it’s the “in wildness” epigram that’s near scripture for environmentalists rallying against hyper-industrialization and climate change. Just as Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” nourished the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., his kinetic “in wildness” precept has electrified the literary imaginations of Barry Lopez, T. C. Boyle, Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, David Quammen, Edward Hoagland, Carl Hiaasen, Rick Bass, Gary Snyder, Louise Erdrich and other wilderness warriors safeguarding our cherished public lands.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="451" data-total-count="2751" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.625rem; margin: 0px 0px 1em 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
The environmental activist John Muir, who worshiped Thoreau — particularly the passage in “The Maine Woods” (1864) that called for “national preserves” — acknowledged that the Concord sage spurred his Yosemite protection advocacy. Often borrowing from his literary hero’s dictum, Muir harnessed Thoreau’s statement to promote his drive to save California wilderness from ruin. “Civilization,” Muir wrote, “needs pure wildness.”</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="777" data-total-count="3528" id="story-continues-1" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.625rem; margin: 0px 0px 1em 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Theodore Roosevelt, who saved over 234 million acres of wild America as president from 1901 to 1909, was so taken with “The Maine Woods” and “Walking” that as a Harvard undergraduate he climbed Mount Katahdin to follow in Thoreau’s footsteps. Around 2000, a modern-day Thoreauvian, Roxanne Quimby, co-founder of Burt’s Bees, started buying up the Maine acreage her literary hero often tramped. Once Quimby acquired Thoreau’s North Woods stamping grounds she donated 87,563 acres to the Interior Department. In August 2016, President Obama, on the eve of the National Park Service centennial, established Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument from her holdings. (Sadly, the Trump administration is now reviewing opening it to timber harvesting and hunting. )</div>
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div class="story-body-supplemental" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; font-family: nyt-cheltenham, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 16px; justify-content: space-between; text-align: start;">
<div class="story-body story-body-2" style="flex-grow: 0; position: relative; width: 705px;">
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="595" data-total-count="4123" id="story-continues-3" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Rose Kennedy, the mother of the 35th president, spent much of her childhood in Concord, and she treasured both the book “Walden” and the pond. When her husband, Joseph Kennedy, bought a home in Hyannis Port in 1928, she read Thoreau’s less well-known “Cape Cod” (1865) and was awe-struck. Thoreau had first hiked the Outer Cape’s shoreline in 1849 and began composing reflections for public lectures. Young Jack Kennedy, influenced by his mother, adopted Thoreau’s elevated notion of Cape Cod as being where “a man can stand” and “put all of America behind him” as his own.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="1288" data-total-count="5411" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Coinciding with the Kennedys’ move to Cape Cod was the publication of Henry Beston’s book “The Outermost House” (1928). Beston spent a solitary year on the Outer Cape, journaling about the migrations of shore and seabirds, the headlong waves, the glories of sand dunes, the pageantry of the stars. Born in 1888 to an upper-middle-class Catholic clan in Quincy, Mass., Beston was encouraged at an early age by his parents to explore the Cape. As an Atlantic Monthly correspondent, a farmer of herbs, a rustic wanderer and a writer of children’s books, Beston fell in love with the primitive grandeur of the New England seaside. When he turned 38, he purchased 50 acres of dunes near the town of Eastham on the outermost beach of Cape Cod. His small Fo’castle residence — a locally built home with 10 windows offering unobstructed views of the Atlantic — offered Beston the kind of Walden-like solitude he craved. The National Park Service of the 1950s adopted “The Outermost House” and “Cape Cod” as justifications for establishing a 44,000-acre national seashore of secluded beaches and mysterious bogs in coastal Massachusetts. Likewise, Senator John Kennedy, inspired by Thoreau and Beston, introduced legislation in 1959 to establish Cape Cod National Seashore.</div>
<div aria-labeledby="newsletter-promo-heading" class="newsletter-signup auto-newsletter" data-newsletter-productcode="" data-newsletter-producttitle="" id="newsletter-promo" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(226, 226, 226); border-top: 1px solid rgb(226, 226, 226); clear: left; float: left; margin: 7px 30px 15px 75px; padding-bottom: 15px; padding-top: 15px; width: 300px;">
<h2 class="visually-hidden" id="newsletter-promo-heading" style="border: 0px; clip: rect(0px 0px 0px 0px); font-size: 1.25rem; height: 1px; line-height: 1.375rem; margin: -1px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; position: absolute; width: 1px;">
Newsletter Sign Up</h2>
<a class="visually-hidden skip-to-text-link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/books/review/douglas-brinkley-thoreaus-wilderness-legacy-walden-pond.html#continues-post-newsletter" style="border: 0px; clip: rect(0px 0px 0px 0px); color: #326891; height: 1px; margin: -1px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; position: absolute; text-decoration-line: none; width: 1px;">Continue reading the main story</a></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="772" data-total-count="6183" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Just as Muir’s book “Our National Parks” had helped save the High Sierras of California, “Cape Cod” served as an important catalyst for protecting what Thoreau called “the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts.” In a 1959 New York Times article titled “Walking in Thoreau’s Footsteps on Cape Cod,” Caroline Bates enthusiastically embraced the national seashore effort. “The adventurer in search of wild America,” she wrote, “visits this coast for the same reason that Thoreau did.” As president, in 1961, Kennedy pushed a Cape Cod N.S. bill through Congress. (The Trump administration, in an unprecedented act, has suspended the local commission that regulates Cape Cod N.S. in possible preparation for gutting environmental protections there.)</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="854" data-total-count="7037" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Thoreau became the all-seasons environmental guru of the Long Sixties (1960–74). After Rachel Carson learned she had breast cancer, she adopted a sentence from “Walden,” which she always kept at her bedside, to spur on her writing of “Silent Spring”: “If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is indeed short at the longest.” Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society used the “in wildness” quote on his nonprofit’s stationery. David Brower of the Sierra Club published a book titled “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World” with excerpts from Thoreau’s nature writings accompanied by the landscape photography of Eliot Porter. “To me, it seems that much of what Henry David Thoreau wrote more than a century ago was less timely in his day than it is on ours,” Brower offered in the introduction.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="450" data-total-count="7487" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
Thoreau’s first book, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (1849), was an inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” (1957). The following year, in his novel “The Dharma Bums,” Kerouac called for a “rucksack revolution” of young people searching for Thoreauvian enlightenment in wildness. Thoreau’s Concord, Kerouac insisted after visiting Walden, was best experienced in “blue aquamarine in October red sereness.”</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="1032" data-total-count="8519" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
The last time our country rolled out the red carpet for Thoreau was in 1962, the year “Silent Spring” was published and the 100th anniversary of his death. Kennedy’s secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, sponsored a remembrance held at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown. The Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas and Robert Frost spoke about Thoreau’s enduring greatness. When Udall squired Frost around the arboretum-like grounds that afternoon, they discussed how Thoreau animated the Yosemite campaign (through Muir) and Cape Cod (through Beston). Frost was on record praising “Walden” as one of his favorite books because it was miraculously “a tale of adventure,” a “declaration of independence” and a “gospel of wisdom” all rolled into one. When Walden Pond came up, however, Frost confessed to Udall that he never visited the Concord sanctuary for fear of heartbreak. “I couldn’t bear to go,” he said. Instead, Frost found the spirit of Thoreau alive in his beloved Green Mountains of Vermont.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-node-uid="1" data-para-count="499" data-total-count="9018" style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.625rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 75px; max-width: none; width: 570px;">
So this summer, if, like Frost, you’re looking for Thoreauvian inspiration but feel hemmed in by Concord or intimidated by tourists at Walden, I recommend sojourning to Yosemite or Cape Cod or Katahdin or along one of America’s stupendous rivers. Or, for that matter, your local “township” park. Because Thoreau insisted on the preservation of wildness, we have millions of acres of public lands to explore — and the sanctity of Cape Cod and Katahdin to defend from profiteers and bandits.</div>
<footer class="story-footer story-content" style="clear: both; margin-left: 75px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 24px; max-width: none; position: relative; width: 570px;"><div class="story-meta">
<div class="story-notes">
<div style="font-family: nyt-franklin, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem; line-height: 1.125rem; margin-bottom: 1em;">
Douglas Brinkley is professor of history at Rice University and the author of “Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America.”</div>
</div>
<div class="story-print-citation" style="color: #999999; font-family: nyt-franklin, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 0.6875rem; line-height: 0.9375rem; margin-bottom: 1em;">
A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2017, on Page BR12 of the <span itemprop="printEdition">Sunday Book Review</span> with the headline: Thoreau and the Legacy of Wilderness. <span class="story-footer-links" style="display: inline-block;"><a href="http://www.nytreprints.com/" style="color: #999999; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Order Reprints</a><span class="pipe" style="color: #cccccc; margin: 0px 3px;">|</span> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/pages/todayspaper/index.html" style="color: #999999; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Today's Paper</a><span class="pipe" style="color: #cccccc; margin: 0px 3px;">|</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp839RF.html?campaignId=48JQY" style="color: #999999; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Subscribe</a></span></div>
</div>
</footer></div>
</div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-4064646804636372492017-07-20T20:05:00.002-05:002017-07-20T20:09:21.644-05:00Sages of Concord #59: A SLACKER AND A HYPOCRITE?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
" . . .<span style="background-color: white; color: #02141f; font-family: "georgia" , "cambria" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 17px;">for all his nature loving, he also loved tools and machines and gadgets. Carpenter, house painter, boatwright, arborist—he truly was as close to self-sufficient as anyone could be in 19th century America. He was Concord’s handyman—the ideal handyman in what might be considered America’s ideal town, since Thoreau’s clients for home repair and gardening included Emerson, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #02141f; font-family: "georgia" , "cambria" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 17px;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiSrWmbJw1q3hWVXPYARcUvuXP8N7rWZsfdOTZogSYPez3Y4lny3FExuJM-Emm1mIVSk0NiLQtqG6Bp_aNtW3__NFXIDI23c6upUkYGHqmcOFzbYxK16guPI_mU9TrjrtjIHYR447Ezte9/s1600/FullBeardGraphic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="997" data-original-width="948" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiSrWmbJw1q3hWVXPYARcUvuXP8N7rWZsfdOTZogSYPez3Y4lny3FExuJM-Emm1mIVSk0NiLQtqG6Bp_aNtW3__NFXIDI23c6upUkYGHqmcOFzbYxK16guPI_mU9TrjrtjIHYR447Ezte9/s640/FullBeardGraphic.jpg" width="608" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/was-thoreau-just-a-slacker-and-a-hypocrite">http://www.thedailybeast.com/was-thoreau-just-a-slacker-and-a-hypocrite</a></div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-54989085238479128322017-07-19T21:10:00.000-05:002017-07-19T21:11:07.062-05:00Sages of Concord #58 Opening Address at Thoreau Bicentennial<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<a href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2017/07/henry-david-thoreau-no-pond-scum-risked-his-neck-for-racial-justice.html">Wen Stephenson’s opening address at Thoreau Bicentennial </a><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><a href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2017/07/henry-david-thoreau-no-pond-scum-risked-his-neck-for-racial-justice.html"><img border="0" data-original-height="244" data-original-width="188" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGrZ1fr5pf_A-kg1a90G1005lQgChyphenhyphenVUxj3pnWsPJvFOoy_VxJhZNK8EdpvvyxhQ_WxgYhUInc_IZDCRM3tixBrgYjElApuANJI2zk2683BCC_9_wGzWPdXIukvr02FJlF2Rp2wpQNaJ40/s640/Colorized+Henry.jpg" width="493" /></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">By <a href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2017/07/henry-david-thoreau-no-pond-scum-risked-his-neck-for-racial-justice.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;">Wen Stephenson</a></strong></div>
<br />
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;">
<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Adapted from Wen Stephenson’s opening address at the <a href="http://www.thoreausociety.org/event/thoreau-bicentennial-gathering-celebrating-life-works-and-legacy-henry-david-thoreau" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Thoreau Bicentennial </a></em><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"> </strong><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">gathering in Concord, MA, on July 12, 2017—Thoreau’s 200<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 12px; line-height: 0; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">th</span> birthday—and from his Beacon Press book, </em><a href="http://www.beacon.org/What-Were-Fighting-For-Now-is-Each-Other-P1245.aspx" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice.</a></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
There’s a popular image of Henry David Thoreau as an apolitical hermit, a recluse, aloof and detached, even misanthropic, a crank indulging his private fantasy in his cabin in the woods. This has always been a caricature; his active involvement in the Underground Railroad and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act put the lie to it. We know that he helped multiple fugitives on their way to Canada, guarding over them in his family’s house—the Thoreau family were committed abolitionists, especially his mother and sisters—even escorting them onto the trains, which entailed no small personal risk. And of course, we know that he wrote and spoke forcefully and without compromise against slavery and for human freedom.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
But in the fall of 1859, Thoreau’s principles would be put even further to the test. When the news arrived in Concord, in October 1859, of John Brown’s deadly raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, reactions were sharply divided. The whole country was in an uproar. Even Brown’s erstwhile supporters quickly distanced themselves. Most of his co-conspirators—many with close ties to Concord—went into hiding, several fleeing to Canada. The atmosphere was not just tense but dangerous for anyone voicing solidarity with Brown.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
Into this picture steps forty-two-year-old Henry Thoreau. He was incensed by what he saw as the timid and hypocritical reactions of his neighbors, and of the press, and let it be known that he would speak in support of Brown at Concord’s First Church on October 30. Thoreau rang the town bell himself to announce the speech because Concord’s selectmen had refused. The address he gave was “<a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/thoreau_001.asp" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">A Plea for Captain John Brown</a>.”</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
It was Thoreau’s most radical moment. He was the first in Concord, and among the first and most prominent in the country, to come to Brown’s defense. Within days he would repeat the speech to large audiences in Worcester and Boston—where he stood in at the last moment for Frederick Douglass, who had been chased into Canada by federal marshals despite having played no part in the Harpers Ferry raid.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
The speech itself is stunning. What Thoreau was saying in his “Plea” for Brown was the same thing he’d said a decade earlier in “Civil Disobedience”—“action from principle…is essentially revolutionary”—only now in far stronger terms, and this time with real skin in the game. What was once a kind of philosophical exercise was now in deadly earnest: Brown’s raid and certain execution—and the risk of publicly aligning oneself with him—made Thoreau’s night in jail look like child’s play.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
On December 2, Brown was hanged in Virginia. The next day, Thoreau himself would become an accomplice to the escape of a desperate Harpers Ferry conspirator, Francis Jackson Merriam, personally taking him out of Concord by wagon to the train in Acton. Thoreau didn’t know Merriam’s identity (he was told only to call him “Lockwood”), but he surely knew what he was doing and the risk he was taking—that this was a wanted man, with a price on his head.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px; text-align: center;">
. . .</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
On July 4, 1854, with <a href="http://www.beacon.org/Walden-P1282.aspx" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Walden</em></a> in final page proofs, Thoreau mounted a platform at Harmony Grove in Framingham—alongside William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and other prominent abolitionists—and addressed a fiery antislavery rally (literally fiery: Garrison lit copies of the Fugitive Slave Act and US Constitution on fire). His speech, called “<a href="http://thoreau.eserver.org/slavery.html" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Slavery in Massachusetts</a>,” is merciless, indicting the commonwealth for the moral complacency and hypocrisy of its participation in human bondage, sending escaped slaves, free human beings, back into slavery. It was enough to shake even Thoreau’s sense of nature’s harmony:</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 60px;">
<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">I walk toward one of our ponds, but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?…Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.</em></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
And yet, there in the final moments of the speech, he finds some reassurance:</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 60px;">
<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">But it chanced the other day that I scented a white water-lily, and a season I had waited for had arrived.…What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower! I shall not so soon despair of the world for it, notwithstanding slavery, and the cowardice and want of principle of Northern men. It suggests what kind of laws have prevailed the longest and widest, and still prevail, and that the time may come when man’s deeds will smell as sweet. Such is the odor which the plant emits. If Nature can compound this fragrance still annually, I shall believe her still young and full of vigor, her integrity and genius unimpaired, and that there is virtue even in man, too, who is fitted to perceive and love it. It reminds me that Nature has been partner to no Missouri Compromise. I scent no compromise in the fragrance of the water-lily.</em></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
Sorry, but the person who wrote and spoke those words was not “pond scum,” he was not a misanthrope, regardless of what anyone at <a href="http://thoreau.eserver.org/slavery.html" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The New Yorker</em></a> magazine may say. Like all of us, he had his flaws—and yes, he could be annoying as hell. But no misanthrope speaks and acts—indeed, risks his own neck—on behalf of his fellow human beings in the way Henry Thoreau did.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
“The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.”</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
You see, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that the remembrance of his country merely spoiled Thoreau’s walk. I think the remembrance of his country revealed the walk’s true purpose. I believe his solitary and profoundly moral, even spiritual awakening in nature led him back to society and to a radical political engagement on behalf of other people—his neighbors, whether follow citizens of Concord or the fugitives who took refuge in Walden’s woods. Because for Henry Thoreau, to live in harmony with nature is to act in solidarity with our fellow human beings.</div>
<div class="entry-body font-entrybody" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 16px !important; line-height: 1.6em !important; visibility: visible;">
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">About the author </strong></div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/.a/6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c90bac5d970b-popup" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; float: left; text-decoration-line: none;"><img alt="Wen Stephenson" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c90bac5d970b img-responsive" src="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/.a/6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c90bac5d970b-120wi" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" title="Wen Stephenson" /></a>Wen Stephenson</strong>, an independent journalist and activist, writes for <a href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/wen-stephenson/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Nation</em></a>and is the author of <a href="http://www.beacon.org/What-Were-Fighting-For-Now-is-Each-Other-P1143.aspx" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice</em></a>. Follow him on Twitter at <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://twitter.com/wenstephenson" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">@wenstephenson</a></strong>.</div>
</div>
<div class="entry-footer" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
<div class="entry-footer-info font-entryfooter" style="box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgb(119, 119, 119) !important; font-family: "Crete Round"; font-size: 15px !important; line-height: 1.6em !important; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px; visibility: visible;">
<span class="post-footers" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Posted at 09:16 AM in <a href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/activism/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;">Activism</a>, <a href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/nature_the_environment/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;">Environment and Conservation</a>, <a href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/walden/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;">Walden</a>, <a href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/wen-stephenson/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; opacity: 0.7; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none !important;">Wen Stephenson</a>, <a href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/what-were-fighting-for-now-is-each-other/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;">What We're Fighting For Now Is Each Other</a> </span><span class="separator" style="box-sizing: border-box;">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2017/07/henry-david-thoreau-no-pond-scum-risked-his-neck-for-racial-justice.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;">Permalink</a> <span class="separator" style="box-sizing: border-box;">| </span><a class="entry-comments" href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2017/07/henry-david-thoreau-no-pond-scum-risked-his-neck-for-racial-justice.html#comments" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #05729f; text-decoration-line: none;">Comments (0)</a></div>
</div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-20895302532959373042017-07-04T08:21:00.002-05:002017-07-09T07:03:48.533-05:00Sages of Concord #57: A Fourth of July Rally<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<a href="https://www.masshist.org/database/431">https://www.masshist.org/database/431</a><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtU5QxY8nDSunMxSvGcuoZiwni9NICsGSuBJ9v2AzZOGcyICSk3hiPI_gb5yWvC9g5WzEkyHSlwDl4yaTbbJUqV5DvJEe_z-GJoLG_6UpLbKyZe5bWS7n2PGGacD_pYcv_P7UnM4PdUgxJ/s1600/July4+No+Slavery.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="715" data-original-width="1600" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtU5QxY8nDSunMxSvGcuoZiwni9NICsGSuBJ9v2AzZOGcyICSk3hiPI_gb5yWvC9g5WzEkyHSlwDl4yaTbbJUqV5DvJEe_z-GJoLG_6UpLbKyZe5bWS7n2PGGacD_pYcv_P7UnM4PdUgxJ/s640/July4+No+Slavery.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="description" style="background-color: white; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
from Massachusetts Historical Society: </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
Broadside advertising a Fourth of July rally sponsored by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1854. Noted abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and Henry David Thoreau addressed the crowd. In a dramatic climax, Garrison burned copies of the Fugitive Slave Law and the United States Constitution.</div>
</div>
<h2 class="ctitle" style="background-color: white; border: none; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 2rem 0px 0.5rem;">
</h2>
<div class="contextual" style="background-color: white; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
<h2 style="border: none; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 2rem 0px 0.5rem;">
A sweltering day in July</h2>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
"And let all the people say, Amen!" exclaimed William Lloyd Garrison. The hundreds of abolitionists assembled at Harmony Grove, a splendid picnicking area in Framingham, about sixteen miles outside of Boston, roared back "Amen!" again and again. More than the extreme heat of July, as one unsympathetic Boston newspaper shrugged, had excited the passion of the crowd. For the Commonwealth's abolitionist community, July 4, 1854 would be a day to recognize the nation's greatest sin and to mourn the death of freedom.</div>
<h2 style="border: none; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 2rem 0px 0.5rem;">
Kindling for the fire</h2>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
At the end of May, after furious national debate, Congress turned the Kansas-Nebraska act into law, thus permitting western settlers to legally establish slavery in the territories. The legislation, in effect, repealed the Compromise of 1820 and opened the continent, perhaps even the North, to slavery. Northerners who previously had rejected the abolitionists' dire warnings began to see the expansive and explosive power of slave owners and their allies in the North. With the nation burning red hot over enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Law created a raging blast furnace of hate and fear. Free Soil and Liberty party members, political abolitionists of varying stripes, and "Conscience" Whigs forged a coalition, soon labeled the Republican party, that dedicated itself to halting the spread of slavery.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
The same month, state and federal authorities in Boston, Massachusetts, seized Anthony Burns as a fugitive slave. After an interracial abolitionist rescue effort failed to free Burns, authorities surrounded the courthouse holding him with an iron chain and rings of police, cavalry, and several artillery companies. Judge Edward G. Loring declared Burns an escaped slave and ordered him returned to his owner in Virginia. Hundreds of U.S. military bayonets, at a cost of $100,000, insured Burns's safe conduct through the streets of Boston to the city wharf and then to reenslavement. Loring's disgraceful order, according to Garrison, had converted a man into a thing, the Declaration of Independence into a lie, "the Golden Rule [into] an absurdity, and Jesus of Nazareth [into] an imposter."</div>
<h2 style="border: none; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 2rem 0px 0.5rem;">
At the rally in Framingham, a spark ignites</h2>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
To mark the dark days of 1854, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society called for a rally on July 4 amid the bucolic oaks of Framingham's Grove. The Society conducted July 4 ceremonies at the same spot at Harmony Grove between 1846 and 1865, but this one would be particularly memorable. Organizers had formed a small amphitheater before a stage decorated with two white flags bearing the names of Kansas and Nebraska and banners proclaiming "Virginia" and "Redeem Massachusetts." Above, hung an inverted U.S. flag draped with black crepe. Just before the speakers took to the platform, the irrepressible William C. Nell hurriedly placed a portrait of Garrison between the two state's banners, symbolically breaking the chains binding Massachusetts to Virginia.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
The rally began with a prayer and a hymn. Then Garrison launched into one of the most controversial performances of his career. "To-day, we are called to celebrate the seventy-eighth anniversary of American Independence. In what spirit?" he asked, "with what purpose? to what end?" The Declaration of Independence had declared "that all men are created equal ... It is not a declaration of equality of property, bodily strength or beauty, intellectually or moral development, industrial or inventive powers, but equality of RIGHTS--not of one race, but of all races."</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
Since the early 1830s, Garrisonian antislavery advocates had adopted the message of black abolitionists in denouncing the sin of slavery and of racial prejudice. In words familiar to his audience, Garrison repeated the decades-old warnings that freedom did not exist in the South; who there, he declared, could "avow his belief in the inalienable rights of man, irrespective of complexional caste?" The church in the South, a frequent target of abolitionists, lay outside of Christendom, and was nothing but a "cage of unclean birds, and the synagogue of Satan." Garrison ventured into new territory with his warning that slavery had strengthened--not weakened--since he had begun his antislavery career. Slavery and its minions jeopardized freedom everywhere and its advocates, he warned, intended to tighten their grasp over the Caribbean, expand into Central and South America, and even extend the cursed institution into the Pacific. Freedom was disappearing. What could there be to celebrate on July 4? he asked.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
Garrison then produced a copy of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and put a match to it. Amid cries of "Amen" the hated document burned to a cinder. Then he produced copies of Judge Edward G. Loring's decision to send Anthony Burns back to slavery and Judge Benjamin R. Curtis's comments to the U.S. grand jury considering charges of constructive treason against those who had participated in the failed attempt to free Burns. As Martin Luther had burned copies of canon law and the papal bull excommunicating him from the Catholic Church for heresy, Garrison consigned each to the flames. Holding up a copy of the U.S. Constitution, he branded it as "the source and parent of all the other atrocities--'a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.'" As the nation's founding document burned to ashes, he cried out: "So perish all compromises with tyranny!"</div>
<h2 style="border: none; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 2rem 0px 0.5rem;">
The public reacts</h2>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
Most of the audience roared its approval but some hissed and groused. Later, many of the state's daily newspapers condemned Garrison's actions. Charles Remond, the great African American abolitionist from Salem, immediately leapt from his seat to defend his good friend. Garrison had acted, Remond announced to the multitudes, in the name of three million slaves. Moncure Daniel Conway, a student at the Harvard Divinity School, mounted the stage and confessed that he was from Virginia and knew his fellow Southerners well. On the subject of slavery, their minds were "diseased," perfectly "insane." He was astonished to have been born in a place where "white men owned slaves" and now, because of what had happened to Anthony Burns, he lived in a place where "white men were slaves."</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
After the rally broke for a long and well-deserved lunch, Sojourner Truth addressed the throng, warning that God "would yet execute his judgments upon the white people for their oppression and cruelty." Wendell Phillips, Lucy Stone, John Pierpont, Stephen S. Foster, and others added their voices to Garrison's. At about 3:30 p.m., Henry David Thoreau mounted the speaker's platform. With <em>Walden</em> fresh in the bookstores and the Burns affair eating at his conscience, Thoreau uttered his disgust for those in Massachusetts who willingly aided slavery. In an address that would later be published as "Slavery in Massachusetts," Thoreau advised the gathering that the "Law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free."</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
At the close of the meeting, Garrison resumed his place beneath the banners and flags. When he had begun agitating against the institution of slavery more than twenty years earlier, nearly everyone believed that the institution of slavery would not survive a close scrutiny of the nation's founding documents. Abolitionists assumed that the Founding Fathers had intended to put slavery on the road to extinction. Even the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society had appended copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence to their pamphlets, believing that if anyone actually read those sacred words slavery would have to end. But when James Madison's notes from the Constitutional Convention were published in the early 1840s, the truth proved shocking. Many abolitionists who had believed in an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution discovered that the Fathers had traded union and white liberty for black slavery. No longer could Garrison and his allies believe in the Union, much less see the Constitution as inherently antislavery. It was, they sadly discovered, a wicked document, the true underpinning for the institution of slavery. "The only remedy in our case," Garrison exclaimed at the close of the July 4 ceremonies, "is A DISSOLUTION OF THE UNION."</div>
</div>
<h2 class="rtitle" style="background-color: white; border: none; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 2rem 0px 0.5rem;">
Suggestions for further reading</h2>
<div class="readings" style="background-color: white; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
Finkleman, Paul. "Garrison's Constitution: The Covenant with Death and How it was Made." <em>Prologue: A Quarterly Publication of the National Archives and Records Administration</em> (Winter 2000): 231-245.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Francis Jackson Garrison. <em>William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of his Life Told by his Children</em>, Vol. 3, 1841-1860. New York: Century Co., 1889.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
<em>The Liberator</em>, vol. 24, nos. 27-29 (July 7, 14, 21, 1854). These issues contain descriptions of the rally and excerpts of the speeches given.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
<br />
Mayer, Henry. <em>All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery</em>. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
Merrill, Walter M. <em>Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of William Lloyd Garrison</em>. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
Perry, Lewis. <em>Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought</em>. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973. For more information on the Anthony Burns affair, see our <a href="https://www.masshist.org/objects/cabinet/february2002/february2002.html" style="color: #00b4ff; text-decoration-line: none;" title="February 2002, From Our Cabinet ">February 2002, "From our cabinet"</a> feature. For detailed information about Thoreau's speech at Harmony Grove see the website of the <a href="http://www.walden.org/institute/thoreau/life/Lecturing/43_Lecture.htm" style="color: #00b4ff; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Walden Woods Project: Home Page">Walden Woods Project.</a></div>
</div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-44990441671221950112017-06-30T22:38:00.001-05:002017-07-09T07:02:19.961-05:00Sages of Concord #56: A Wild & Disobedient Life<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://radioopensource.org/a-wild-disobedient-life-henry-david-thoreau-at-200-pt-1/"> http://radioopensource.org/a-wild-disobedient-life-henry-david-thoreau-at-200-pt-1/</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguBSvSUGkFqlEowwpYNsW5f1Amwxu02Q4ihd41Lr_8b1qcYI9PSK7h4nLtlkgHTGrTYLTafCSxhoaHCh4XApklKYMWMRSA1HeoGYKWwkkpdDMV47H0SsJhc5NYNTFWg-QDTMFkobSjkQNL/s1600/NC+Wyeth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="452" data-original-width="371" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguBSvSUGkFqlEowwpYNsW5f1Amwxu02Q4ihd41Lr_8b1qcYI9PSK7h4nLtlkgHTGrTYLTafCSxhoaHCh4XApklKYMWMRSA1HeoGYKWwkkpdDMV47H0SsJhc5NYNTFWg-QDTMFkobSjkQNL/s640/NC+Wyeth.jpg" width="524" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">N. C. Wyeth</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<h2 style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Bitter; font-size: 30px; line-height: 36px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 16.45px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
A Wild & Disobedient Life</h2>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Henry David Thoreau, on his 200</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">th</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> birthday, is an American immortal who got there the hard way – against the grain of his town and his times. By now he’s the heroic non-conformist who modeled his brief life on religious convictions: that every human being has an original relation with divine spirit, and that on earth a man must become a majority of one. So he made a dissenting record living apart, and walking the woods more like a Native American, he felt, than a Yankee. Never to church, never married, never voted and didn’t pay his taxes. He talked to the trees as almost-people, and he caressed the fish in his stream like almost-children. Manly and able “but rarely tender,” he won Emerson’s obituary praise that flatters us, too: “no truer American existed,” Emerson said, than Henry Thoreau. The prophet of Concord is our subject this hour on Open Source. </span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 1.5em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://radioopensource.org/a-wild-disobedient-life-henry-david-thoreau-at-200-pt-1/">Open Source</a></span></div>
<br /></div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-48546393876187496142017-06-24T17:39:00.003-05:002017-06-24T17:51:13.743-05:00Sages Of Concord #55: The Glory of Friendship<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<br />
<div dir="rtl" style="text-align: right;">
<span style="background-color: #444444; color: #cccccc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiivY7_oIBelxGLbeYtQE4Vn6_BZUlV6iKR1y8aBxqIzH7mgXwziOxHZG8x7e56qC6giIE8YE-y91h4dC7o0IAiZVcmG1t9Z4lm4m5UY0nMahDdliesHcrD0jI4UygX5XWfrfLqivWqAsLn/s1600/Snap+the+Whip.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="393" data-original-width="667" height="376" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiivY7_oIBelxGLbeYtQE4Vn6_BZUlV6iKR1y8aBxqIzH7mgXwziOxHZG8x7e56qC6giIE8YE-y91h4dC7o0IAiZVcmG1t9Z4lm4m5UY0nMahDdliesHcrD0jI4UygX5XWfrfLqivWqAsLn/s640/Snap+the+Whip.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Winslow Homer: Snap The Whip</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</span></div>
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, not the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship."<br />
RW Emerson<br />
<div dir="rtl" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-71308611353778183512017-06-18T22:13:00.002-05:002017-06-18T22:13:57.212-05:00Sages of Concord #54: That Devilish Iron Horse<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifVVCR8aq-8Lly6C80WvlUu3kGt1D6u-shFNoR_tuRWAajRBlNbjAHE0WyOcCVWU5vOHYYEo2ixc-ju1UR60qmEdpT7zDC0bHCYdHVuflHZIt9G1xYSHgMxhjxvbovdLDkhJSwaQ_Wr3lL/s1600/MonsterTrain.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="276" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifVVCR8aq-8Lly6C80WvlUu3kGt1D6u-shFNoR_tuRWAajRBlNbjAHE0WyOcCVWU5vOHYYEo2ixc-ju1UR60qmEdpT7zDC0bHCYdHVuflHZIt9G1xYSHgMxhjxvbovdLDkhJSwaQ_Wr3lL/s640/MonsterTrain.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">MaxPixelLocomotiveComposition<br /><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The Boiling spring is turned into a</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">tank for the Iron Horse to drink at, and the Walden Woods have been cut and dried for his fodder. That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending whinner (sic) is heard throughout the town, has defiled the Boiling Spring with his feet and drunk it up, and browsed off all the wood around the pond. . . He robs the country babies of milk, with the breath of his nostrils polluting the air. That Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, insidiously introduced by mercenary Greeks. With the scream of a hawk he beats the bush for men, the man-harrier, and carries them to his infernal home by thousands for his progeny. Where is the country's champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and throw a victorious and avenging lance against this bloated pest?</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
from the Journal of HD Thoreau, June 17, 1853</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-4458602024335365152017-06-17T23:40:00.000-05:002017-07-19T21:11:56.529-05:00The Sages of Concord #53: The Antony Burns Affair<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieGSrpLEqpaJHuSyrQrUFlxqCOi97q1BPtyTDCezjzCbAmelwmhJbqCDJKkfRSniw2oNlO1Aqi7quAe12TllbEdZBMgPwsVm_l07K0XSghNlIvofBost2Kgkl6xFQHejDHwerc-ySGSxbq/s1600/Burns+and+Sims.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="354" height="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieGSrpLEqpaJHuSyrQrUFlxqCOi97q1BPtyTDCezjzCbAmelwmhJbqCDJKkfRSniw2oNlO1Aqi7quAe12TllbEdZBMgPwsVm_l07K0XSghNlIvofBost2Kgkl6xFQHejDHwerc-ySGSxbq/s640/Burns+and+Sims.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Thoreau's Journal - June 16, 1854</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
[After fugitive slave Anthony Burns was captured, arrested, and re-enslaved]</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-top: 6px;">
"I had never respected this government. But I had foolishly thought I might manage to live here, attending to my private affairs and forget it....I feel that to some extent the state has fatally interfered with my just and proper business. I am surprised to see men going about their business as if nothing had happened...It is not an era of repose. If we would save our lives, we must fight for them."</div>
<div>
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">thanks to Bill Schecter of the Thoreau Society</span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-33653647952655980082017-06-14T21:43:00.000-05:002018-11-12T14:19:32.777-05:00100 REFLECTIONS:The Sages of Concord #52 The Colt & The Butterfly<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMveUzcsDHQQKw8T5LmnN7qRtfyfdSTr-EKGQVey_IWT_a9zI2ts8eN0AzNYFsIcAIdjTIjkAofcUVwFaBg7OBjZyvoG4_jJBSXb33-xsysFgj8dLlsppHWLSHswyTcoFh4yawEWBlHWIO/s1600/mother-foal4-372x251_1_-358x240.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="358" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMveUzcsDHQQKw8T5LmnN7qRtfyfdSTr-EKGQVey_IWT_a9zI2ts8eN0AzNYFsIcAIdjTIjkAofcUVwFaBg7OBjZyvoG4_jJBSXb33-xsysFgj8dLlsppHWLSHswyTcoFh4yawEWBlHWIO/s640/mother-foal4-372x251_1_-358x240.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
"Watson had a colt born about ten or eleven the last evening. I went out to see it early this morning, as it lay in the cold pasture. It got up alarmed and trotted about on its long, large legs, and even nibbled a little grass, and behaved altogether as if it had been an inhabitant of this planet for some years at least. They are as precocious as young partridges. It ran about most of the day with its mother. Watson was surprise to see it so much larger than the night before. Probably they expand at once on coming to the light and air, like a butterfly that has just come out of its chrysalis."<br />
<br />
HD Thoreu's Journal: June 14, 1857</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-82242771414016114712017-06-12T14:40:00.001-05:002017-07-18T12:37:46.684-05:00100 REFLECTIONS: Emancipation and Self-Emancipation #51<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;">EMANCIPATION AND SELF-EMANCIPATION</span></span></h3>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHAz1FitTKknZsr5h9lxVCO3ypVuqAeyCktEQD2umQcX6I3FhdCTK2XguQ61zaD415l-FeIYYdM21y5k1OqDip2JSKI1BLWXyGrUH4tetk9WmPJkIvfhW0Wu-7u3XxJGMz2bVvz-22Gdaj/s1600/diego+Rivera+panel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="400" height="584" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHAz1FitTKknZsr5h9lxVCO3ypVuqAeyCktEQD2umQcX6I3FhdCTK2XguQ61zaD415l-FeIYYdM21y5k1OqDip2JSKI1BLWXyGrUH4tetk9WmPJkIvfhW0Wu-7u3XxJGMz2bVvz-22Gdaj/s640/diego+Rivera+panel.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #101010; font-family: calluna; font-size: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: start;">Panel from Diego Rivera’s mural at Pennsylvania’s</em><a href="http://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-366" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #68818e; font-family: calluna; font-size: 20px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: start;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Unity House</em></a><em style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #101010; font-family: calluna; font-size: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: start;">,</em></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-weight: normal;">"Freedom is one of the ideas we cannot do without. . . .One of the important meanings of Thoreau's life, and of Walden, is the imperative of freedom or liberation. . .Walden is about self-emancipation, but not at the expense of ignoring the problem of external, physical freedom. The Thoreau who sought his own freedom was, inevitably, involved in the political movement to abolish slavery, and his involvement grew rather than diminished as time went on."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-weight: normal;"> from <i>Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind</i> by Robert Richardson, Jr.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #101010; font-family: calluna; font-size: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
Upon the capture and arrest of <a href="http://www.peoplesworld.org/today-in-labor-history-john-brown-s-raid-on-harpers-ferry/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #68818e; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">abolitionist John Brown</a>, a man ran to the church tower in the center of Concord Massachusetts. He was full of fury and pain. Of lithe and willowy build, this impassioned human being was known locally more as a contemplator than a man of action. Yet here he was streaking to ring a clarion bell.</div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #101010; font-family: calluna; font-size: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
He was harkening to his fellow citizens, not only an alarm of the week’s events, but also a warning of dark days ahead unless the scourge of slavery was expunged from the land. It was October 30, 1859. That man was Henry David Thoreau.</div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #101010; font-family: calluna; font-size: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
Some short-lived acts speak volumes of the person. So it was that autumn day in the life of Henry David Thoreau. Its message rung out loud and clear as did the pealing of the bell warning of consequences for his town and country if the inhumanity and genocide of slavery were to continue.</div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #101010; font-family: calluna; font-size: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
from "HD Thoreau: Bright Glows the Pond" by Len Yanielli</div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #101010; font-family: calluna; font-size: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
as appearing in Peoples World: http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/henry-david-thoreau-bright-glows-the-pond/</div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #101010; font-family: calluna; font-size: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-33255814987581708652017-06-10T23:43:00.002-05:002017-07-19T21:12:55.957-05:00Sages of Concord #50: What Use?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #0c0c0c; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 16.5px; text-indent: 1.65px;">“What use is a house,” Thoreau wrote a friend in 1860, “if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAMpYQyDr272A_y-9lCkfTjhzTAvaH7qmpMINHtLJhkyjvZbRwetZaPuQga5WCxc4KzPBKQ6sDrJ1EGVemZ7FagZSOdzaJU7JrE09JmacGQgzYOJVUFP6BLNOoXcr3p45f8puN-sWsof20/s1600/cambio-clinatico-300x200.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="300" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAMpYQyDr272A_y-9lCkfTjhzTAvaH7qmpMINHtLJhkyjvZbRwetZaPuQga5WCxc4KzPBKQ6sDrJ1EGVemZ7FagZSOdzaJU7JrE09JmacGQgzYOJVUFP6BLNOoXcr3p45f8puN-sWsof20/s640/cambio-clinatico-300x200.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">cambio-clinatico-300x200</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</span></div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-55698198430286953492017-06-08T23:24:00.002-05:002017-06-08T23:26:28.886-05:00Sages of Concord #49 (aka The Walden Pond Society)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Thoreau's Journal: 16-Apr-1857</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
Almost a month ago, at the post-office, Abel Brooks, who is pretty deaf, sidling up to me, observed in a loud voice, which all could hear, “Let me see, your society is pretty large, ain’t it?” “Oh, yes, large enough,” said I, not knowing what he meant. “There’s Stewart belongs to it, and Collier, he’s one of them, and Emerson, and my boarder” (Pulsifer), “and Channing, I believe, I think he goes there.” “You mean the walkers; don’t you?” “Ye-es,<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;"> I call you the Society. All go to the woods; don’t you?” “Do you miss any of your wood?” I asked. “No, I hain’t worried any yet. I believe you’re a pretty clever set, as good as the average,” etc., etc.</span></div>
<div class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
<div style="font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Telling Sanborn of this, he said that, when he first came to town and boarded at Holbrook’s, he asked H. how many religious societies there were in town. H. said that there were three,—the Unitarian, the Orthodox, and the Walden Pond Society.</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 6px;">
from the Blog of Henry David Thoreau: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/iThoreau">https://www.facebook.com/iThoreau</a></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvccboL1b7T2v3dE2SQ21HR6OVesBWIhZ0iAzOQXQhzeUlhd8VGK5upIixmmCf2QrEMDEYWK-0h2jM3w3v0GwiXIHriSRvRGZkil-1ENE45VtFdlwWR_WFTo_ioRqaECFlDR5D_FUfYROI/s1600/W+Homer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="364" data-original-width="500" height="464" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvccboL1b7T2v3dE2SQ21HR6OVesBWIhZ0iAzOQXQhzeUlhd8VGK5upIixmmCf2QrEMDEYWK-0h2jM3w3v0GwiXIHriSRvRGZkil-1ENE45VtFdlwWR_WFTo_ioRqaECFlDR5D_FUfYROI/s640/W+Homer.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Winslow Homer: White Mountain Wagon</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-43700796763547261552017-06-07T22:35:00.000-05:002017-06-07T22:39:21.779-05:00100 REFLECTIONS: The Sages of Concord #48<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN54j-8NgmRnngLUNKJ8BQtqgiEIl3U8jasvGZz-VQdiuG9ASNiaZSKvfatALG-YYQ7aaZR73BpJxyBK0rbHG1a1R9ZyP7cvm9hjFx3gj8eBCU_T_xSAft3-MqnWogkL8hlyrFpAZChkGd/s1600/IMG_3200.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN54j-8NgmRnngLUNKJ8BQtqgiEIl3U8jasvGZz-VQdiuG9ASNiaZSKvfatALG-YYQ7aaZR73BpJxyBK0rbHG1a1R9ZyP7cvm9hjFx3gj8eBCU_T_xSAft3-MqnWogkL8hlyrFpAZChkGd/s640/IMG_3200.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Bob Fisher</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
"When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. . . Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; not do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk. But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?"<br />
<br />
<b><i>Walden</i></b>, The Ponds by HD Thoreau</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-60530238399272941312017-06-05T22:58:00.002-05:002017-09-11T21:14:54.289-05:00THOREAU ON FULLER: The Sages of Concord #47<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipLhwislGT8bHhQiEk_S8MBuiAcC5zKwMajxBgHtXsIzNGq48N2GzOzBGSVuyDtPNDUrgPg2pouwnbYKMsM-Hy5q2O3GWGrIDgga5YTNPu5up1cnWNYmFGoHA-g7S0OVtCvjrXWwZrNMp9/s1600/Painting_of_Margaret_Fuller.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="758" data-original-width="548" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipLhwislGT8bHhQiEk_S8MBuiAcC5zKwMajxBgHtXsIzNGq48N2GzOzBGSVuyDtPNDUrgPg2pouwnbYKMsM-Hy5q2O3GWGrIDgga5YTNPu5up1cnWNYmFGoHA-g7S0OVtCvjrXWwZrNMp9/s640/Painting_of_Margaret_Fuller.jpg" width="462" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><h3>
Margaret Fuller, author of Woman of the Nineteenth Century</h3>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<br />
Thoreau <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">thought highly of the book, suggesting that its strength came in part from Fuller's conversational ability. As he called it, it was "rich extempore writing, talking with pen in hand." </span></div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">from <i>Margaret Fuller: Writing A Woman's Life </i>by Donna </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Dickenson</span></div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-12953352945068642742017-06-03T23:51:00.001-05:002017-06-03T23:51:57.652-05:00100 REFLECTIONS #46<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz8Zaw0tay77Ybh8k25Zd3xKYVVQ8T6N292bdTJ7ytOnh7ssGBIl52u1s7pgRdpFBom54lcZnC3RWJBiPrrkKvk3VmTnI87w9lG6BkCrzqFfAni332F0E6Nv8cfxU_ARTpFFChbdhVgsCL/s1600/unnamed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="887" data-original-width="887" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz8Zaw0tay77Ybh8k25Zd3xKYVVQ8T6N292bdTJ7ytOnh7ssGBIl52u1s7pgRdpFBom54lcZnC3RWJBiPrrkKvk3VmTnI87w9lG6BkCrzqFfAni332F0E6Nv8cfxU_ARTpFFChbdhVgsCL/s640/unnamed.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Walden Pond, then and now. Wood Engraving by Michael McCurdy. Photo by <a aria-controls="js_5r9" aria-describedby="js_5ra" aria-haspopup="true" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100001489063543&extragetparams=%7B%22directed_target_id%22%3A0%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/ali.fisher.353" id="js_5rb" style="background-color: white; color: #365899; cursor: pointer; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: left; text-decoration-line: none;">Ali Fisher</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick, too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line."<br />
<br />
from Economy, <i>Walden</i></div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-70740623601794419992017-06-02T20:40:00.000-05:002017-06-02T20:40:06.976-05:00100 REFLECTIONS: The Sages of Concord #45<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3dic73F3lRfOkrZl72EduN1QvudbUKhtpPcPxdeaZ-1AvsUIEm95dP3rTyPgZiZ89Q1Ye_COszQNGdgmGCuSAHNp89jei0HfdbnXtBwbhDqEjCjMoEo6v2c59NMpS-x_iEPHZyc-JTMYn/s1600/walt-whitman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="326" data-original-width="250" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3dic73F3lRfOkrZl72EduN1QvudbUKhtpPcPxdeaZ-1AvsUIEm95dP3rTyPgZiZ89Q1Ye_COszQNGdgmGCuSAHNp89jei0HfdbnXtBwbhDqEjCjMoEo6v2c59NMpS-x_iEPHZyc-JTMYn/s640/walt-whitman.jpg" width="490" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><h2>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">"Be curious, not judgmental."</span></h2>
<h3>
<b><span style="font-size: large;">Walt Whitman</span></b></h3>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-41759608078699582812017-05-31T20:59:00.003-05:002017-05-31T21:03:05.199-05:00100 REFLECTIONS: The Sages of Concord #44<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/thoreau-radical-seasons/"><span style="font-size: large;">Thoreau: A Radical for all Seasons</span></a></h2>
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiY2VhkkpQicVAS36lU38CeZ9RIxacdG20NxeiWYdbF5cY7y5iKj5psdeBoajpbUnHIkRQ2g63Q6JdNb2keiPvaRzm8Sm4-Xq6bPpxyMna4aa4Nn-E0yeslBRsYOl0w-zwqeXnrC18xmzw/s1600/Thoreau-Ventura_img.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1550" data-original-width="1440" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiY2VhkkpQicVAS36lU38CeZ9RIxacdG20NxeiWYdbF5cY7y5iKj5psdeBoajpbUnHIkRQ2g63Q6JdNb2keiPvaRzm8Sm4-Xq6bPpxyMna4aa4Nn-E0yeslBRsYOl0w-zwqeXnrC18xmzw/s640/Thoreau-Ventura_img.jpg" width="594" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Illustration by Andrea Ventura</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
" . . . Thoreau was an abolitionist who brought Frederick Douglass to speak at the Concord Lyceum—a kind of community university—and participated in the Underground Railroad, to the point of risking charges of treason by helping enslaved people flee to Canada. While living at Walden, Thoreau hosted the annual festival of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, where the speakers included Lewis Hayden, who had escaped slavery in Kentucky. . ."</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-top: 6px;">
<a href="http://bobcfisher.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="color: #365899; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://www.thenation.com/article/thoreau-radical-seasons/</a></div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-75338540774776426712017-05-26T22:36:00.003-05:002017-05-31T20:56:00.816-05:00100 REFLECTIONS: Happy Birthday Waldo #43<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqAd-UbcmAFAduZ37pzH3CujiH-_vOSBYnOZ4Su3ZWkgK1mfzcWU9CXzjJIga8oFXdfip0YJ8vdgX27ZXJ9qGsdl5PTrm86zymfGPzxhAo-Ua66MrlRwv-g_MBsHbYKc66-5_ur0zmzRMS/s1600/EmersonsRevolution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="437" data-original-width="329" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqAd-UbcmAFAduZ37pzH3CujiH-_vOSBYnOZ4Su3ZWkgK1mfzcWU9CXzjJIga8oFXdfip0YJ8vdgX27ZXJ9qGsdl5PTrm86zymfGPzxhAo-Ua66MrlRwv-g_MBsHbYKc66-5_ur0zmzRMS/s640/EmersonsRevolution.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">HAPPY BIRTHDAY RALPH WALDO EMERSON<br />
<br />
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;">"Although Thoreau and Emerson were deeply involved in their work, they did not allow themselves to be distracted from the demands of friendship. They thought about it constantly and wrote about it at length. For both men, however, friendship presented a dilemma, since their expectations of it were never fully met by the reality. This was as true in their own relationship as it was in their relationships with others. They dreamed of ideal friendship while experiencing the human variety."</span></h4>
<div>
<span style="font-size: small;"> from <i>MY FRIEND, MY FRIEND</i> by Harmon Smith</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-5632442064018097082017-05-24T20:05:00.001-05:002017-05-24T20:22:47.674-05:00100 REFLECTIONS: The Sages of Concord #42<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h1 class="bookTitle" id="bookTitle" itemprop="name" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 20px; line-height: 26px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 2px; width: 455px;">
The Thoreau You Don't Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant</h1>
<div class="stacked" id="bookAuthors" style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<span class="by smallText" style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 14px;">by</span> <span itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a class="authorName" href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6414.Robert_Sullivan" itemprop="url" style="color: #333333; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 19.8px; text-decoration-line: none;">Robert Sullivan</a></span></div>
<div class="uitext stacked hreview-aggregate" id="bookMeta" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating" style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; position: relative;">
<span class="stars staticStars" style="background-repeat: no-repeat; color: #aaaaaa; display: inline-block; font-size: 0px; height: 15px; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 75px;"><span class="staticStar p10" style="background-image: url("data:image/png; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 15px; float: left; height: 15px; width: 15px;"></span><span class="staticStar p10" style="background-image: url("data:image/png; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 15px; float: left; height: 15px; width: 15px;"></span><span class="staticStar p10" style="background-image: url("data:image/png; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 15px; float: left; height: 15px; width: 15px;"></span><span class="staticStar p6" style="background-image: url("data:image/png; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 15px; float: left; height: 15px; width: 15px;"></span><span class="staticStar p0" style="background-image: url("data:image/png; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 15px; float: left; height: 15px; width: 15px;"></span></span> <span class="value rating">3.77</span> <span class="greyText" style="color: #999999;"> · </span> <a class="actionLinkLite" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6163774-the-thoreau-you-don-t-know#" id="rating_details" style="color: #00635d; cursor: pointer; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="rating_graph" id="rating_graph" style="cursor: pointer;"><span style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 238, 221); display: inline-block; line-height: 0; padding: 2px; vertical-align: middle;"><svg height="15" width="16"><g transform="translate(0,0)"><rect cursor="" fill-opacity="1" fill="rgb(33,86,37)" height="2" stroke-opacity="0" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="none" width="7.384615384615385" x="0" y="0"></rect><rect cursor="" fill-opacity="1" fill="rgb(33,86,37)" height="2" stroke-opacity="0" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="none" width="16" x="0" y="3"></rect><rect cursor="" fill-opacity="1" fill="rgb(33,86,37)" height="2" stroke-opacity="0" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="none" width="9.384615384615385" x="0" y="6"></rect><rect cursor="" fill-opacity="1" fill="rgb(33,86,37)" height="2" stroke-opacity="0" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="none" width="2.1538461538461537" x="0" y="9"></rect><rect cursor="" fill-opacity="1" fill="rgb(33,86,37)" height="2" stroke-opacity="0" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="none" width="0.6153846153846154" x="0" y="12"></rect></g></svg></span> </span>Rating Details</a><span class="greyText" style="color: #999999;"> · </span> <a class="actionLinkLite votes" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6163774-the-thoreau-you-don-t-know#other_reviews" style="color: #00635d; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="value-title" itemprop="ratingCount" title="231">231 Ratings</span> </a><span class="greyText" style="color: #999999;"> · </span> <a class="actionLinkLite" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6163774-the-thoreau-you-don-t-know#other_reviews" style="color: #00635d; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="count"><span class="value-title" title="59">59</span></span> Reviews</a></div>
<div id="descriptionContainer" style="background-color: white; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); color: #181818; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<div class="readable stacked" id="description" style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 10px; right: 0px;">
<span id="freeText8632070187436935307"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-top: 18px; padding: 0px;">
<span id="freeText8632070187436935307">Henry David Thoreau is one of those authors that readers think they know, even if they don't. He's the solitary curmudgeon with the shack out in the woods, the mystic worshipping solemnly in the quiet church of nature. He's our national Natural Man, the prophet of environmentalism. But here Robert Sullivan—who himself has been called an "urban Thoreau" (<i>New York Times Book Review</i>)—presents the Thoreau you don't know: the activist, the organizer, the gregarious adventurer, the guy who likes to go camping with friends (even if they sometimes accidentally burn the woods down). Sullivan argues that Walden was a book intended to revive America, a communal work forever pigeonholed as a reclusive one, and this misreading is at the heart of our troubled relationship with the environment today. Sullivan shows us not a lonely eccentric but a man in his growing village: a man who danced and sang, who worked throughout his short life at the family pencil-making business, and moved into his parents' house after leaving Walden, but always paid his father rent. Passionate yet whimsical, <i>The Thoreau You Don't Know</i> asks us to re-examine our everyday relationship with the natural world, and one another.<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6163774-the-thoreau-you-don-t-know">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6163774-the-thoreau-you-don-t-know</a></span></div>
<span id="freeText8632070187436935307">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaK0XQjI6LfMlhp4p78Bc7RbvVuEv2GD2nl-OZ3mbOzAEW5UiejgxjJeXCyQ0ZjHLwIksUlugJac0NLctnmaBimXo3LHE-EkGc4lty9gcnsZjkvHTvQCXCdDexPZdP5wTlXt_0vpGIfQ7R/s1600/MMEmerson+w+Thoreau.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="460" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaK0XQjI6LfMlhp4p78Bc7RbvVuEv2GD2nl-OZ3mbOzAEW5UiejgxjJeXCyQ0ZjHLwIksUlugJac0NLctnmaBimXo3LHE-EkGc4lty9gcnsZjkvHTvQCXCdDexPZdP5wTlXt_0vpGIfQ7R/s640/MMEmerson+w+Thoreau.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">HD Thoreau with RW Emerson's amazing aunt Mary Moody Emerson</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</span></div>
</div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-76922669404866411872017-05-23T09:26:00.001-05:002017-05-23T09:29:14.645-05:00100 REFLECTIONS: The Sages of Concord #41<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKmR2E5px3ujOuhAeefvc1CrGwrJInO12hojOmF4ehsvlWOv8cZwH8_frL-U6UPF0JZkmFi4mt9UZ9CATTnK4m3eajDR8fAfmsoP-RnNZ2EJe-Wb7wDiIM6vLvZVPHuN9Q8iWmkyqDAYwC/s1600/MFuller.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKmR2E5px3ujOuhAeefvc1CrGwrJInO12hojOmF4ehsvlWOv8cZwH8_frL-U6UPF0JZkmFi4mt9UZ9CATTnK4m3eajDR8fAfmsoP-RnNZ2EJe-Wb7wDiIM6vLvZVPHuN9Q8iWmkyqDAYwC/s640/MFuller.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
HAPPY 207th BIRTHDAY, MARGARET FULLER </h2>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<a href="http://margaretfuller.org/index.php/resources/learning-activities">The Rediscovery of Margaret Fuller</a><br />
<br />
<h2 class="art-postheader">
<a href="http://margaretfuller.org/index.php/resources/learning-activities/107-rediscovery-deiss">The Rediscovery of Margaret Fuller</a></h2>
<div class="art-postheadericons art-metadata-icons">
<span class="art-postdateicon"><time datetime="2011-07-14T16:55:05-04:00" itemprop="datePublished">Published: 14 July 2011</time></span> | Hits: 4995</div>
<div class="art-postcontent clearfix">
<div class="art-article">
<b>THE REDISCOVERY OF MARGARET FULLER</b><br />
By Joseph Jay Deiss<b>, </b><i>Christian Science Monitor</i>, January 21, 1974<b> </b><br />
These are days when Margaret Fuller, America's first liberated woman, may well come into her own at last — that full flowering she found so impossible even in transcendental New England. The current rediscovery of Margaret coincides with the demands of our times. She was a woman who defied a man's world to express herself as a woman. In her short life (1810-1850) she did her "own thing" in Cambridge, in Boston, in New York, in Europe — to the horror of many and the delight of some.<br />
Always candid about her feelings, she wrote to her friend William Henry Channing - "I love best to be a woman, but womanhood at present is too straitly bound to give me scope. At hours I live truly as a woman, at others I stifle. . . Men disappoint me so. I weary in this playground of boys! . . . I wish I were a man and then there would be one."<br />
Margaret stretched the bounds of 19th-century womanhood to its limits. Her life was full of firsts for an American woman. She was the first woman to be admitted to the Harvard College library. She was the first woman in a public position to deplore the evil treatment of red men. As editor of the transcendentalist <i>Dial</i>, she was the first woman magazine editor. As crusading columnist and critic for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, she was not only the first woman journalist but the first paid literary critic of either sex. Traveling abroad for Greeley, she was the first woman foreign correspondent.<br />
Her dispatches covering the French siege of Rome in 1849 made her the first woman war correspondent. She became an underground agent of the exiled Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, and thus the first American woman partisan in a foreign revolution. Her book, <i>Woman in the Nineteenth Century </i>(1845), was the first vigorous plea for women's rights in America; it was a sensation.<br />
It could not have failed to vex and stir her contemporaries when she flatly demanded “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.” One of her extraordinary insights especially enraged the male chauvinists of her time. “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-36683262460415171632017-05-21T21:32:00.001-05:002017-05-21T21:32:22.967-05:00100 REFLECTIONS: The Sages of Concord #41<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The frog had eyed the heavens from his marsh, until his mind was filled with visions, and he saw more than belongs to this fenny earth. He mistrusted that he was become a dreamer and visionary. Leaping across the swamp to his fellow, what was his joy and consolation to find that he too had seen the same sights in the heavens, he too had dreamed the same dreams!<br />
<br />
Journal, May 21, 1851<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYbwo9Xuqc0kSx5rQv4bC9Vuoik9lzxb8T7TMFpNLCMbqn4qJ2bCW6kGRnezD9HxwkXh1shHPnq40ovB3fDyIX-mGxNSDEXwe-pUWS8tSH65clNMd2-aGO9q9Hf7ISUQGJwpnJ50XsH9Sb/s1600/frogs-fancy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYbwo9Xuqc0kSx5rQv4bC9Vuoik9lzxb8T7TMFpNLCMbqn4qJ2bCW6kGRnezD9HxwkXh1shHPnq40ovB3fDyIX-mGxNSDEXwe-pUWS8tSH65clNMd2-aGO9q9Hf7ISUQGJwpnJ50XsH9Sb/s640/frogs-fancy.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-72348246555961422402017-05-19T20:37:00.000-05:002017-05-19T20:37:06.150-05:00100 REFLECTIONS: The Sages of Concord #40<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
The Finest Qualities of Our Nature</h3>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWfePbDJrDtOXW06u0Yt-fZynLUv1sKcvKQNhtOVzVV354_PYxdDkhiVSFa4GCbViDdp4zSOSPrqlrjAwwMeir9mMya2svCCYKojWHvTDi-CnG9EH6T6dQpf8gcWo_exHekaSv3rqS7exf/s1600/DSC02938+%25284%2529.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWfePbDJrDtOXW06u0Yt-fZynLUv1sKcvKQNhtOVzVV354_PYxdDkhiVSFa4GCbViDdp4zSOSPrqlrjAwwMeir9mMya2svCCYKojWHvTDi-CnG9EH6T6dQpf8gcWo_exHekaSv3rqS7exf/s640/DSC02938+%25284%2529.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
"The finest qualities of our nature , like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly."</div>
<div>
Economy<i>, Walden</i></div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2286111360693218192.post-12178947411441275422017-05-18T20:14:00.000-05:002017-05-18T20:17:20.585-05:00100 REFLECTIONS: The Sages of Concord #39<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
</h2>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLz9NMGj7YXQMi3EPHQddO98hTCaT-fsU2rQxd2hi2HuAoVowUbTt05lGPwStXhKvXyWrxl9xLQ_2FoGhjyKLwa56r6864RdqlCIVfAH9TOQ_FNUyFRN7f6kVKGMYxb9KKWij7jZNJDooy/s1600/ParcelOfVainStrivings.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLz9NMGj7YXQMi3EPHQddO98hTCaT-fsU2rQxd2hi2HuAoVowUbTt05lGPwStXhKvXyWrxl9xLQ_2FoGhjyKLwa56r6864RdqlCIVfAH9TOQ_FNUyFRN7f6kVKGMYxb9KKWij7jZNJDooy/s640/ParcelOfVainStrivings.jpg" width="474" /></a></div>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
I AM A PARCEL OF VAIN STRIVINGS TIED</div>
</h2>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"></span></div>
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">by HD Thoreau</span></h3>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">I am a parcel of vain strivings tied</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">By a chance bond together,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">D</span><span style="font-size: small;">angling this way and that, their links</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Were made so loose and wide,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Methinks,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">For milder weather</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">A bunch of violets without their roots,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">And sorrel intermixed,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Encircled by a wisp of straw</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Once coiled about their shoots,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The law</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">By which I'm fixed</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">A nosegay which Time clutched from out</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Those fair Elysian fields,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">With weeds and broken stems in haste,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Doth make the rabble rout</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">That waste</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The day he yields.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Drinking my juices up,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">With no roots in the land</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">To keep my branches green,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">But stand</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">In a bare cup.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Some tender buds were left upon my stem</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">In mimicry of life,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">But ah! the children will not know,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Till time has withered them,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The woe</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">With which they're rife.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">But now I see I was not plucked for naught,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">And after in life's vase</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Of glass set while I might survive, </span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">But by a kind hand brought</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Alive</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">To a strange place.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">That struck thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">And by another year,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Such as God knows, with freer air,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">More fruits with fairer flowers</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Will bear,</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">While I droop here.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
Bob Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10677112315573347556noreply@blogger.com0