Thoreau, Henry D, Walden Essay Example for Free

Thoreau, atomic number 1 D, Walden EssayHenry David Thoreau, who deals with nature, remain to this day slightlywhatthing of a mystery. He was an the Statesn essayist, poet, and sensible philosopher, best love for his autobiographical story of life in the woods, WALDEN (1854). Thoreau became one of the leading personalities in in the buff England Transcendentalism. Thoreaus primary music genre was essay, and his fascination with his immanent surroundings is reflected in art objecty of his writings dealing with tot tot eitheryy different subjects. intrinsic History of Massachusetts includes poetry, describes the Merrimack River, and discusses the best technique for spear fishing. Although he has had more interpreters than whatever of our other(a) writers on nature, his complex personality has eluded an forever-gathering host of senti workforcetal disciples, whom he would take a leak been the first of all in all to spurn , and nearly all his ingenious critics from Lo equitable and Stevenson to those of his centenary in 1917.He has been regarded as an American Diogenes and a rural Barnum as a narrow Puritan, as a rebel against Puritanism, as a Ger troops-Puritan romanticist as a sentimentalist as a poet-naturalist as a hermit worshiping genius as an anarchistic dreamer as a loafer, W here(predicate), amid these bewildering and often equally plausible interpretations, are we to find what he himself called his admittedly centre, if therefore he has one?Obviously, the answer should lie within the twenty volumes of his collected writings in part, however, it should be revealed by an examination of the influences that were most important in making him what he was. John Thoreau-one of Carlyles sincere, silent fathers of genius, who, in his bodulate of pencils and plumbago, was more intent on excellence than on pecuniary gain-and of Cynthia Dunbar, handsome and spirited, one of the most unending talkers ever seen in Concord, whom her staid fri endship was inclined non altogether to approve.His love of nature seems to defend been adumbrated in his mother certainly it was evoked very early, since he tells of the keen impression produced on his imagination, when he was only four or five historic period old, by the sight of Waldens fair waters and woods, which, he says, for a long time made the drapery of my dreams. Early, too, came the tendency to reverie and the love of solitude, although for some years he lived, like Wordsworth, mainly the life of glad beast movements, wandering over the countryside, to woods, lakes, and rivers-hunting, fishing, berry-picking, boating, swimming.Thoreau was associating with men on other soils than the raptures of y verbotenh in contact with nature and this habit grew until, at Harvard College, he nonrecreational little heed to the curriculum, and He embarked upon a long voyage of unchartered reading that profoundly influenced his spotter on nature and on human life . For the field o bservations of a student of nature Thoreau was praiseworthily endowed. There was a wonderful fitness, said Emerson, of body and mind. He had in high degree a species of dexterity non uncommon in the Yankee. He understood the relation between sensuous get-up-and-go and subtlety and the life of a naturalist The true man of science, he wrote in the Journal, willing know nature better by his finer organization he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. faultless perception in the metaphysical as well as the physical sphere he believed to be dependent on a fit body.The whole duty of man is to make to oneself a perfective tense body, a fit companion for the soul, since the bodily senses are channels through which we may receive inexpressible messages-subservient still to moral purposes, auxiliar to master. This relation between body and soul he was almost incessantly aware of certainly he never cultivated body for the sake of body, and, being a good New Engl ander, had no erotic strain.Nothing was more foreign to his nature than the sensuality of a certain eccentric of vigorous masculinity to be found in all ages, notably in the Renaissance, when poet and painter, as well as philosopher, had ground for saying that not all the snows of Caucasus could avail to allay the fires within me. Driven to select between body and soul, Thoreau would have had no hesitation I must confess there is nil so strange to me as my own body, he wrote in his Journal.I love any other piece of nature, almost, better. That is his view of body as body, merely body as minister of the divine he could not value too highly, and, if not of the Renaissance, he was equally not of the Middle Ages. He was indeed all- sentient. Other poets of nature have not been so fortunate. Thoreaus Taking nature as his province, Thoreau studied her faithfully, acquainting himself with her innumerable facts, her exact rules and laws, her endless diversity and loveliness of form an d movement, till he was prone to forget that familiarity of the part was but a means to knowledge of the whole.Yet inwardly he knew and remembered that to attain the true end, to penetrate to the reality beneath the show, he must stir the deeper currents of his own being, rouse himself out of that sleepwalking which, gibe to Carlyle, is what we please to call life. How could he skipe to read rightly the holy book of nature if he brought to it nothing better than the unreal light of the dream world in which the ordinary man lives without knowing it-that ordinary man of whom Plato says, dreaming and slumbering in this life, before he will awake here he arrives at the world below, and has his final quietus .Thoreaus subtle and ambiguous synthesis is founded on a fiction. His account of his tax resistance in the essay revises his tax resistance in the world, in his community of Concord. Thoreau tells us he finds in himself an instinct toward the higher, or spiritual, life, and anoth er toward a unrefined and savage one. He reverences them both I love the wild no less than the good. For wildness and goodness must ever be separate.Thoreau repudiates the physical life with the astounding statement in Walden of all booksNature is hard to be overcome but she must be overcome. In this new context it appears that Nature is abruptly reorient with the feminine, the carnivorous, and the carnal though a mans spiritual life is startlingly moral one is nonetheless liable(predicate) to temptations from the merely physical, or feminine urges to indulge in a slimy beastly life of eating, drinking, and dedifferentiated sensuality.Thoreau speaks as a man to other men, in the hectoring tone of a Puritan preacher, warning his readers not against damnation (in which he cannot believe-he is too canny, too Yankee) but against succumbing to their own lower natures We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. Sensuality takes ma ny forms but it is all one-one vice. All purity is one. Though sexuality of any kind is foreign to Walden, chastity is evoked as a value, and a chapter which began with an extravagant paean to wildness concludes with a denunciation of the unnamed sexual instincts. I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject, I care not how obscene my words are, but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity Thoreaus extensive accounts of his house in Walden demonstrate a lively clench of issues in current architectural thought. Pinning down his intellectual sources, however, often proves difficult, and it is uncertain whether or not he knew the villa books firsthand.There is some evidence that he was familiar with pour down, albeit at a later designation than the Walden experiment. He mentions Downings A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841) and The Fruits and Fruit Trees of North America (1845) in a brief enumeration of books on a friends shelf in 1857, and in a journal entry of 1852, he critiques the notion that one should take up a handful of the terra firma at your feet paint your house that colour, a amour propre that had appeared in Downings writings in 1846 and 1850.Joseph J.Moldenhauer argues, however, that Thoreaus source was quite William Wordsworths Guide to the Lakes (1810), a copy of which Thoreau owned (the fifth edition, of 1835, is an American compilation), in which the handful of the earth conceit is attributed to Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) in conversation. Moldenhauer stresses that Thoreaus knowledge of Downing is circumstantial rather than documentary nonetheless, the circumstantial evidence seems strong, given that Downing was at the height of his popularity and influence at the very moment of Thoreaus 1852 remarks . Elsewhere Thoreaus Nature is unsentimental, existentialist.In liveliness organism Neighbours, for instance, Thoreau observes an ant war of nearly Homeric proportion s and examines two maimed soldier ants under a microscope the elongate with the human world is too obvious to be emphasized . Although Thoreau introduces the irreconcilability of man and Nature in Walden, in The Maine Woods (1864) he gives the inscrutability of Nature its fullest treatment. In each of Thoreaus threesome quests into the forest of Maine he foregrounds an epistemological crisis which in conclusion reveals the inscrutability of Nature, and the inability of man, as Melville might suggest, to pierce through the agoneeboard mask of Nature.In Ktaadn, Thoreau introduces the epistemological themes that he will develop further in Chesuncook and Allegash and East Branch. Each of these three excursions is an extravagant wandering from elegance out into the wild interior of Maine, and then back to civilization (although it must be noted that none of the three excursions is completely circular in the first and third journeys. Thoreau and his companions leave from Boston, but only return as far as Bangor in the imprimatur journey Thoreau leaves from Boston and returns to Oldtown, just a bit past Bangor).The central opposition at work in all three excursions is the pedigree between civilization and Nature, the tamed and the primitive. The hallmarks of civilization are money, property, politics, and machines, such as the railroad and steamboat the wilderness features wild animals, tangled plants, bugs, mountains, rivers, and background Ktaadn. Ktaadn, the first excursion, takes place in 1846. The themes of Ktaadn are grounded in the relationship between civilized man and primitive Nature.Thoreau sets out from Boston into the wilderness of Maine in order to ascend wear Ktaadn in an effort to re-establish an pilot film relation with Nature, to push beyond boundaries into the realm of the Indian storm-bird Pomolawho, according to Penobscot legend, lives on Mount Ktaadn-where man and Nature unite and ultimate truths are revealed. He never reaches the sum mit of Mount Ktaadn, however, and Thoreau makes it sluttish that Nature remains ultimately inscrutable. Speaking of Ktaadn, Thoreau writes It was vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits.Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more solo than you can imagine. There is less of substantial thought and fair understanding in him than in the plains where men inhabit. His reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtle, like the air. Vast, Titanic, inhuman. Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the plains. She seems to say sternly, Why came here before your time.This ground is not prepared for you. Thoreau writes Talk of mysteries Think of our life in nature, daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks. Having sought the unification of man and Nature, and fail ed. But, just as Thoreau fails to reach the pilfer of Ktaadn, none have gone high enough up the mountain to find the origin of the spring. Thoreaus second journey into the wilderness of Maine occurs in 1853. Thoreau more fully develops a series of oppositions introduced in Ktaadn.In Chesuncook Thoreau explores the contrast between civilization and wilderness, the civilized and the primitive, the present and the past, lower uses of Nature and higher laws, the indiscriminate hunter and the poet, and good and discipline. In his excursion, Thoreau appetitees to recapture the past-to relive what the Jesuit missionaries experienced when travelling through the primitive wilderness uninfluenced by civilized man-but he is unable to he is tainted by the corrosive effect of civilization. Thoreau makes this clear central crisis the destruction of the moose by Thoreaus band of indiscriminate hunters.Framed by suggestive allusions to Mount Ktaadn, Thoreaus participation in the killing of the mo ose provokes the wrath of Nature against Thoreau, thereby cutting off any chance. Thoreau may have had of succeeding where he failed in Ktaadn to establish an original relation with Nature, to go beyond boundaries and express truth . In Chesuncook Thoreau laments his only half-willed participation in the destruction of Nature in A Minor Bird the narrator tries to understand what there is within man that would cause him to silence any song of Nature, whether that song be in-or-out of key.The suggestion in A Minor Bird is that there is some mysterious separation between man and Nature, a disharmony. Thoreau reflects on the relentless, inevitable coming of civilization, and the destruction of Nature, which this advance brings with it. This poses a serious problem, for the Poet, notes Thoreau, and draws power and inspiration from contact with primitive Nature. In the end Thoreau suggests that perhaps man can preserve some of the raw wilderness left in America (through some form of park system or similar venture).This solution is Thoreaus problematic judge at a mediating agree between the relentless progress of civilization and the need of the Poet to tap into the inscrutable power within Nature, the Poets muse. In the past, Nature was untouched and available to the Poet in the present, Nature is quickly receding. Thoreau introduces the idea of Nature as conjecture in Chesuncook. Thoreau is doubly-damned the mythological tablets that only the poet can read are being destroyed by civilization, and the poet himself has been so corrupted by civilization that even he can no longer read the a few(prenominal) glowing wood chips that remain.The poet yearns for communication with Nature, but he cannot bridge the gulf, which separates them. In the end, Thoreau symbolically resigns himself to his fate when hop and Indian Joe pass by Ktaadn on their way back home, they do not even attempt to climb. Thoreau complains testily in his Journal (1852). unmatchable needs dista nce to be able to focus his vision. One needs space and freedom of movement to refocus his vision, keep it unconstrained by familiarity, habit and custom.In Thoreaus view, lack of originality and morning freshness amounts to near blindness. What makes nature nonhuman, but, for that very reason, also a perfect conversationist is that nature is ever original, lacking intention and memory. Both, in Thoreaus eyes, are socially conditioned and therefore suspect, the first associated with private interest, the second, with the bonds of tradition. Natural existence, on the other hand, is superior to petty concerns and designs, it unfolds spontaneously moment-by-moment, offering itself to man as a pure tonic. Vista and novelty are what Thoreau treasures most in relationships and communication, and these natures would provide amply . Until recently, Thoreaus scientific interests and pursuits were dismissed by critics as amateur and sloppy science coupled with a declined prose style. Only re cently, with the 1993 military issue of Faith in a Seeda collection of not just his late natural history essays but also including the first publication of his unfinished manuscriptshas it become apparent that Thoreau had accomplished something important.In Faith, he demonstrated by observation, experimentation and analysis, how 99 percent of forest seeds are dispersed and how forests change over time, and regenerate after fire or human destruction. Thoreau worked at his familys pencil factory in 1837-38, 1844, and 1849-50. He had a natural gift for mechanics. According to Henry Petroski, Thoreau discovered how to make a good pencil out of inferior graphite by using clay as the binder this cheat improved upon graphite found in New Hampshire in 1821 by Charles Dunbar.Later, Thoreau converted the factory to producing plumbago, utilize to ink typesetting machines. Frequent contact with minute particles of graphite may have weakened his lungs. He travelled to Quebec once, drape Cod twice, and Maine three times these landscapes inspired his excursion essays, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel intineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy. Thoreau was not without his critics.Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreaus endorsement of living alone in natural simplicity, apart from modern society to be a mark of unmanliness Thoreaus content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had water and tended with womanish solicitude for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself.He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences. Stevenson was sickly much of his life, bed-ridden and cared for by his mother and wife, but craved a life of adventure and travel. However, English novelist George Eliot, writing in the Westminster Review, characterized such critics as uninspired and narrow-minded packvery wise in their own eyeswho would have every mans life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them, may discourage Mr.Thoreau and this episode in his history, as unpractical and dreamy. Throughout the 19th century, Thoreau was dismissed as a bothersome provincial, hostile to material progress. In a later era, his devotion to the causes of abolition, Native Americans, and wilderness preservation have marked him as a visionary.