Walden and Civil Disobedience (Penguin American Library) - Softcover

Thoreau, Henry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140390448 ISBN 13: 9780140390445

Verlag: Penguin Classics, 1984

Inhaltsangabe

Disdainful of America’s booming commercialism and industrialism, Henry David Thoreau left Concord, Massachusetts, in 1845 to live in solitude in the woods near Walden Pond. Walden, the account of his stay, conveys at once a naturalist’s wonder at the commonplace and a Transcendentalist’s yearning for spiritual truth and self-reliance. But even as Thoreau disentangled himself from worldly matters, his musings were often disturbed by his social conscience. Civil Disobedience, also included in this volume, expresses his antislavery and antiwar sentiments, and has influenced non-violent resistance movements worldwide. Both give a rewarding insight into a free-minded, principled and idiosyncratic man.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) was born in Concord, Massachusetts and educated at Harvard. He became a follower and a friend of Emerson, and described himself as a mystic and a transcendentalist. Although he published only two books in his lifetime, Walden (from which this book is taken) is regarded as a literary masterpeice and one of the most significant books of the 19th century.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

PENGUIN CLASSICS

WALDEN AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

HENRY DAVID THOREAU was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. Self-described as “a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot,” Thoreau was known for his extreme individualism, his preference for simple, austere living, and his revolt against the demands of society and government. The several years he spent in a homemade hut, writing and observing nature, resulted in Walden (1854). He was the author of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Civil Disobedience (1849), Excursions (1863), and The Maine Woods (1864). Thoreau died in Concord in 1862.

MICHAEL MEYER teaches American literature at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Several More Lives to Live, Thoreau’s Political Reputation in America–awarded the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize by the American Studies Association–and coauthor, with Walter Harding, of The New Thoreau Handbook. Mr. Meyer has published articles on Thoreau, in a variety of journals.

HENRY DAVID
THOREAU

Walden and
Civil Disobedience

With an Introduction by
MICHAEL MEYER

Introduction

On July 4, 1845, while many Americans waved miniature flags amid the sounds of firecrackers and bells in honor of their country’s independence, Henry David Thoreau unceremoniously moved his meager belongings from his parents’ home in Concord, Massachusetts, to a cabin beside Walden Pond, where he would quietly declare and celebrate his own independence. For Thoreau, the true America was yet to be discovered, and its revolution was still only a promise rather than an achievement. As the patriotic citizens of Concord noisily showed their colors, this native son methodically began weaving the flag of his disposition out of the hopeful green stuff he explored in the woods less than two miles from the center of town. Unlike Walt Whitman, who populated his writings with the “divine average,” Thoreau “never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” Thoreau demanded a singular relationship with nature that would allow him to leave behind the average and the mundane so that he could discover the liberating divinity within himself and his world. He pledged allegiance not to the Republic but to the individualism for which he stood.

Although Thoreau went to the pond for solitude, he was not entirely alone in spirit. On the day he settled into his ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin, Margaret Fuller, whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century appeared in February of the same year, published an article titled “Fourth of July” in the New York Daily Tribune. Instead of offering readers the usual holiday panegyric, Fuller chastised Americans for their toleration of slavery and their mean pursuit of wealth. She grieved that they were not as free and independent as their forefathers envisioned. Hearing little cause for hope in the country’s popular cry, she searched elsewhere for a voice that could lead a wayward nation back to “the narrow path” of virtue. According to Fuller, it was in “private lives, more than in public measures” that “the salvation of the country” was to be found. She called for “individuals” who could be “shining examples” and whose “deeply rooted characters . . . cannot be moved by flattery, by fear, even by hope, for they work in faith.” Fuller asked if there were any “on the threshold of manhood who have not yet chosen the broad way into which the multitude rushes, led by the banner on which, strange to say, the royal Eagle is blazoned, together with the word Expediency?” The individuals among her readers were urged to reject that well-traveled road and to pursue “the narrow, thorny path where Integrity leads.”

The language of Fuller’s article is worth preserving because it serves as an unintentional advertisement for Walden, though the book was not to be published until 1854, nine years later. The problem that she identifies—America’s slavish materialism—and the remedy she proposes—individual action based on principle—were among the chief reasons Thoreau took the path to the pond. If the narrator of Walden stands for anything, it is as an “example of the practicability of virtue,” the deeply rooted, self-cultivated individual who has the power to awaken his neighbors from their torpid lives of expediency to lives of principle. Fuller’s impassioned anticipation of Walden was a coincidence but not an accident, for she shared with Thoreau some of the same values and concerns that characterized the Transcendentalists of the period.

Because the Transcendentalists were eclectic rather than systematic, any brief description of their views tends to be reductive. For nearly every principle that can be attributed to the movement, it is possible to find a Transcendentalist whose values and attitudes would require a qualification. As James Freeman Clarke observed about himself and his contemporaries, the Transcendentalists were “a club of the likeminded, I suppose because no two of us thought alike.” The unity within this diversity was a feeling that American literature, philosophy, and religion, as well as government, society, and individuals, were not fulfilling the potential that the Transcendentalists believed was possible. Although Thoreau refused to be a member of any collective movement, he did occasionally refer to himself as a Transcendentalist (partially because this self-description could be counted on to confuse and dismay people). He sympathized with the Transcendentalists’ desire to move beyond the surfaces of American life—its commerce, technology, industrialism, and material progress—to a realization that these public phenomena were insignificant when compared with an individual’s spiritual life. “In the long run,” Thoreau declares in “Economy,” the first chapter of Walden, “men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.”

The targets that the Transcendentalists aimed at were not always identical, but they consistently aimed high. This small group of New England idealists (among the more famous in addition to Fuller were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, Elizabeth Peabody, Theodore Parker, Orestes Brownson, and Jones Very) had an impact on American culture and literature that is hardly reflected in the few activities that actually constituted the movement during the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, their primary activities were forms of self-expression rather than the kinds of social, economic, or political actions that the bustling nineteenth century would have been likely to comprehend. They discussed, wrote, and lived their ideas instead of inventing machines, initiating commercial enterprises, or introducing legislation. The major activities associated with the Transcendentalists as a group can be quickly summarized: some attempted to reform what Emerson eventually dismissed as “corpse-cold Unitarianism”; some participated in discussions of the times and the eternities during meetings of the informal Transcendental Club from 1836–40; some published and wrote for the Dial (1840–44), their quarterly journal of literature, philosophy, and religion; and some founded two different utopian communities, Brook Farm (1841–47) and the much less successful Fruitlands (1843–44).

Not all the Transcendentalists were involved with these projects or even supported them. Thoreau never considered himself a Unitarian (though...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Classics
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1984
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0140390448
• ISBN 13: 9780140390445
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 432
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland