The Portable Thoreau (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Thoreau, Henry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143106503 ISBN 13: 9780143106500

Verlag: Penguin Classics, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Self-described as 'a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot', Henry David Thoreau dedicated his life to preserving his freedom as a man and as an artist. Nature was the fountainhead of his inspiration and his refuge from what he considered the follies of society. Heedless of his friends' advice to live in a more orthodox manner, he determinedly pursued his own inner bent - that of a poet-philosopher - in prose and verse, in his masterpiece Walden, from which this work is taken. Edited by noted Thoreau scholar Jeffrey S. Cramer, this edition is the new standard for those interested in discovering the great thinker's influential ideas about everything from environmentalism to limited government.

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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 nineteenth century.

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Self-described as 'a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot', Henry David Thoreau dedicated his life to preserving his freedom as a man and as an artist. Nature was the fountainhead of his inspiration and his refuge from what he considered the follies of society. Heedless of his friends' advice to live in a more orthodox manner, he determinedly pursued his own inner bent - that of a poet-philosopher - in prose and verse, in his masterpiece Walden, from which this work is taken. Edit

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How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow…
 
—THOREAU IN HIS JOURNAL, AUGUST 19, 18511
 
When Thoreau moved from Concord to New York in 1843, ostensibly to be the tutor for the children of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother, William, he was situating himself in the center of the American publishing world. Although for various reasons, including an overwhelming sense of homesickness, he returned to Concord and remained there for the rest of his life, it is clear that at this point Thoreau was determined to be a writer. Whatever else he may have been—social reformer, naturalist, surveyor, pencil-maker, teacher—his work, as he would write in his journal on October 18, 1856, “is writing, and I do not hesitate, though I know that no subject is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary standards.”2
 
Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau on July 12, 1817, in Concord, and he died in Concord on May 6, 1862. During his forty-four years, or, more precisely, during the twenty-four years when he was actively writing, he wrote works that have become classics of American literature—Walden, a book on deliberate and purposeful living; “Civil Disobedience,” a treatise on a person’s rights and duties in relation to an unjust government; and “Walking,” a piece on man’s place in Nature—in addition to writing a two-million-word journal.
 
Thoreau’s success as a writer lies in the truth he utters. The questions he asks himself are the questions every individual, at his or her most attentive and sentient moments, asks. As he wrote, “These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.”3 Because the answers change, however, not only from generation to generation but for each individual from year to year, his writings are works to which we return, texts constantly reflecting our own evolution.
 
“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit,” Thoreau wrote in the “Reading” chapter of Walden, “is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”4 Reading in the way Thoreau meant, you will meet with a realization that many other readers will fail to achieve, which ultimately means that a good book must not only be written by a good writer but that it must be read by a good reader.
 
One way to be a good reader is to understand the nature of an essay. Wendell Berry defined it best in writing about Edward Abbey’s essay “Down the River with Henry Thoreau”: “It is an essay in the literal sense: a trial. Mr. Abbey tries himself against Thoreau and Thoreau against himself; he tries himself and Thoreau against the river; he tries himself and Thoreau and the river against modern times, and vice versa.”5 This is how a reader should approach any piece by Thoreau.
 
Thoreau gave more than seventy lectures between his first in 1838 and his last in 1860. Sometimes he found members of his audience reading the newspaper. He once overheard one person say to another, “What does he lecture for?”6 But some reviews of his talks indicated a man who could move his audience. A talk on “Economy” in 1848 caused The Salem Observer to write that his lecture was “interspersed observations, speculations, and suggestions upon dress, fashions, food, dwellings, furniture, &c., &c., sufficiently queer to keep the audience in almost constant mirth, and sufficiently wise and new to afford many good practical hints and precepts.”7 And The Eastern Argus Semi-Weekly of Portland, Maine, wrote the following year that his talk “was unique, original, comical, and high-falutin. It kept the audience wide awake, and pleasantly excited for nearly two hours.”8 A decade later, The Liberator wrote of Thoreau’s talk on John Brown that a “very large audience listened to this lecture, crowding the hall half an hour before the time of its commencement, and giving hearty applause to some of the most energetic expressions of the speaker.”9
 
Thoreau wrote in his journal on December 6, 1854: “After lecturing twice this winter I feel that I am in danger of cheapening myself by trying to become a successful lecturer, i.e., to interest my audiences. I am disappointed to find that most that I am and value myself for is lost, or worse than lost, on my audience.”10 The lyceum, however, served as a testing ground for much of his writing. Early versions of what would become essays or sections of his books were given as lectures, some multiple times in different locations with audiences of differing backgrounds. That much of his work was originally presented, at least in part, on the lecture circuit accounts for the directness with which Thoreau approached his readers. For Thoreau there was always an audience, not an imagined reader but a real man or woman sitting in the front row looking in his eyes and listening to his words. “I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture anywhere…that there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country,” he wrote in “Life Without Principle,” resolving “that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent.”11
 
“I would rather write books than lectures,”12 Thoreau confessed in his journal. “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book,” Thoreau wrote in Walden, perhaps understanding at this point the type of work he was trying to present. “The book exists for us, perchance,” he went on to say, “which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.”13 With wisdom we also learn not to do desperate things such as his neighbors, living their “lives of quiet desperation,”14 were doing. It was important “so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”15 It was pivotal to Thoreau’s philosophy that action follow thought. “What I began by reading,” he wrote in 1841, “I must finish by acting.”16
 
Although Thoreau wrote that “the writer must to some extent inspire himself,”17 no discussion of Thoreau can ignore the influence of Emerson. Although some tend to downplay the influence of Emerson over the young Thoreau, it is impossible to think of Thoreau without hearing echoes of Emerson. This in no way diminishes Thoreau but adds to an understanding of him. Emerson himself knew that it was “easy to see that the debt is immense to past thought. None escapes it. The originals are not original. There is imitation, model and suggestion, to the very archangels, if we knew their history.”18
 
Emerson was one of the leading men of letters of his day and the center of the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Classics
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0143106503
• ISBN 13: 9780143106500
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 656
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Penguin Books Limited; productsafety@penguin.co.uk; ; One Embassy Gardens, 8 Viaduct Gardens; London; SW11 7BW; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Penguin Books Limited; productsafety@penguin.co.uk; ; One Embassy Gardens, 8 Viaduct Gardens; London; SW11 7BW; Vereinigtes Königreich