http://www.walden.org/Institute/thoreau ... horeau.asp
Henry Seidel Canby: Thoreau

This Canby's valuable biography of Thoreau.

Tom

Robert Tulip wrote:Thoreau's mentality, of an endless frontier abundance, is the great American delusion. Thoreau imagines the world as infinite when it it most definitely finite, hence the love-hate relationship people have with him. He muddles together beautiful ecological ideas with completely unrealistic dreams about their real potential as alternative methods of human life. The sacred grove is a beautiful dream, possible in protected contexts but impossible en masse.

Hello Robert,
I certainly agree with everything you've said about the unsustainability of hunting-gathering, but I don't agree that Thoreau truly advocates this as a life for the masses to emulate. I think there is a difference between what HDT himself identifies with and holds as an ideal and what he believes can obtain in the world in which he lives. At least, I do not find any explicit statements from him that the errors in living that he points out can be corrected through a back-to-nature movement, similar to the uncorrupted Indian way of life. I see him as too much of a practical Yankee and as one respectful of realities, to propose that we should cancel civilization.

I should have page and line references handy, as Tom does. HDT says that others should not fell trees to build cabins as he did, because modern production methods can make material available at less cost and more efficiently. The "suburban box" of the average person can be entirely adequate constructed out of such materials. He also says that civilization is a net plus, that it has benefits for us if we can only learn to plot our own destinies independently, rather than being mastered by desire for goods and enslaved to traditional thinking. He says we can have the advantages of civilization while avoiding its evils.

He was prescient, I think, about resource limits, not so much in
Walden, but in other works such as the essay "Walking." What Thoreau does stand for, in my mind, is the need for humans to place restraints on appetites that can become insatiable. We are but one species, but we act as if no others matter. He was not a humanist in the sense that humans were the measure of all things. The other forms of life with which we share the planet matter just as much, and not simply for the benefit they can do us. He was perhaps the first biocentrist.

DWill

DWill wrote:I should have page and line references handy, as Tom does.

Will, my references are handy only because I have numbered every paragraph in the Gutenberg Walden and keep it on my desktop as a webpage. My references are to chapter and paragraph. On my computer, chapter 12, paragraph 3, looks like this:

12.3 Poet. See those clouds; how they hang! That's the greatest thing I have seen to-day. There's nothing like it in old paintings, nothing like it in foreign lands -- unless when we were off the coast of Spain. That's a true Mediterranean sky. I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten to-day, that I might go a-fishing. That's the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned. Come, let's along.

Any sentence in this paragraph will be referenced by 12.3. For example:

That's a true Mediterranean sky" (12.3).

In my experience this system is a great convenience, and I would like for it to be accepted as a common standard. By having the whole of Walden in a single webpage the text can be searched by . It's like having a perfect index. And I am never disoriented. When I look at a paragraph, I know which chapter and which paragraph. Page numbers are of little use unless everyone has the same text.

I will sent this version of Walden as an email attachment to anyone who wants it.

Tom

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Tom said

Will, that is a very good point. People commonly do not realize the burden of toil and debt that has been the history of farming in America.
Tom[/quote]

I agree. I worked as a governess in the late '70s on an outback property (ranch). I loved the way of life, no TV, no phone, very little radio, plenty of magnificant country and room to live. However I recognised quite quickly that the price paid for this wonderful lifestyle was huge debt, anxiety and unending hard work. I suspect T could see this as the downside to farming.

I connected with this book on a lot of levels, but I loved Ts anti consumerism. I read the book at a time when I was starting to get hooked into the home improvement craze over running my country and this book grounded me. My thanks to who ever suggested it to the book club.

Jeanette

After 9/11, our leaders told us that we needed to go out and spend money so that the terrorists would not think they'd won. More recently, we all received economic stimulus checks, money that the government borrowed to give to us so we would go out and buy things to stimulate the economy. It seems our most patriotic duty is is to keep the machine of consumerism well greased.

DW

Jeanette wrote: I agree. I worked as a governess in the late '70s on an outback property (ranch). I loved the way of life, no TV, no phone, very little radio, plenty of magnificant country and room to live. However I recognised quite quickly that the price paid for this wonderful lifestyle was huge debt, anxiety and unending hard work. I suspect T could see this as the downside to farming.

"Unable to compete internationally on the cotton market, cotton farmers in central India, the second-biggest cotton producer after China, have spent a decade falling deeper into debt. According to government estimates, more than 160,000 farmers have killed themselves because of those debts."

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/c ... page_2.htm
WTO: Why India and China Said No to U.S.

huge debt, anxiety and unending hard work. I suspect T could see this as the downside to farming.

It's big downside. all right, but what's the alternative? What reasonable alternative does T really suggest? Would sympathy with the farmers' plight be in order, maybe? As much as I admire T, to me there is that suspicion that he comes up a little short in compassion, in appreciation of the daily struggle that others undergo. They can't just chuck it all, as T might have thought they could.

DWill

DWill wrote:It's big downside. all right, but what's the alternative? What reasonable alternative does T really suggest? Would sympathy with the farmers' plight be in order, maybe? As much as I admire T, to me there is that suspicion that he comes up a little short in compassion, in appreciation of the daily struggle that others undergo. They can't just chuck it all, as T might have thought they could.

Will, as I understand Walden, Thoreau's solution to "lives of quiet desperation", which is as true for laid off workers as for struggling farmers, is greater self-reliance, creativity, and flexibility. Do for yourself first, then do for others. Charity begins at home. Better a small cottage you build yourself than a furnished appartment you may be turned out of.

It doesn't come through as sympathy in Walden, but Thoreau took his share of hard knocks. He was dying of TB. The second year at Walden his crops were destroyed by an exceptionally late frost. He supported himself by carpentry and farm labor, and then was kicked by a horse. As I understand the event, he had periods of weakness from this blow to the spleen (I think) for the rest of his life. He wanted to make it as a writer but failed economically, especially as contrasted with Emerson who wrote what sold. He sustained himself by surveying, and I think he might have had a share in the graphite powder business. I don't think he ever made much by lecturing. He survived and created by rolling with the blows, not good fortune.

Tom

Good points, Tom. Still, is he or is he not a bit of a misanthrope, is the question that runs through my mind. If he is, is there something wrong with that?--another question.

With your knowledge of his life, you might have info on something that has intrigued me, and also relates to the misanthropy question. Emerson had a brother named Buckley who was intellectually disabled. He lived in some kind of special facility which I don't believe was an institution such as we have today. Maybe it was more like a farm. Anyway, I read that Thoreau mentions in his journals going to visit Buckley, apparently a considerable walk that would not have phased HDT at all. Do you know anything about Buckley and HDT's relationship with him? I feel that HDT would have had strong feelings about the essential humanity of Buckley, similar perhaps to his feelings regarding the slaves whom he assisted. Not looking like much of a misanthrope from this angle! The key for HDT might be essential humanity vs. the obscuring additions that civilization could engender.

DWill

P.S. A hint from you that Emerson was a sellout?

DWill wrote:Emerson had a brother named Buckley who was intellectually disabled. He lived in some kind of special facility which I don't believe was an institution such as we have today. Maybe it was more like a farm. Anyway, I read that Thoreau mentions in his journals going to visit Buckley, apparently a considerable walk that would not have phased HDT at all. Do you know anything about Buckley and HDT's relationship with him? I feel that HDT would have had strong feelings about the essential humanity of Buckley, similar perhaps to his feelings regarding the slaves whom he assisted.

Will, about Buckley, I posted to Waldenlist:

>"Half-witted men from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but
I endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had, and make
their confessions to me; in such cases making wit the theme of our
conversation; and so was compensated. Indeed, I found some of them to
be wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen of
the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned. With
respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between
the half and the whole. One day, in particular, an inoffensive,
simple-minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen used as
fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep
cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to
live as I did. He told me, with the utmost simplicity and truth,
quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is called
humility, that he was "deficient in intellect." These were his words.
The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as much for
him as for another. "I have always been so," said he, "from my
childhood; I never had much mind; I was not like other children; I am
weak in the head. It was the Lord's will, I suppose." And there he
was to prove the truth of his words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to
me. I have rarely met a fellowman on such promising ground -- it was
so simple and sincere and so true all that he said. And, true enough,
in proportion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did
not know at first but it was the result of a wise policy. It seemed
that from such a basis of truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed
pauper had laid, our intercourse might go forward to something better
than the intercourse of sages"(6.15).

"Emerson had a brother named Buckley who was intellectually
disabled." Could one of Thoreau's simple-minded visitors have been
Buckley?IIRC correctly, Emerson's brother didn't live with him.

Robert Bulkely Emerson had since 1828 been taken care of at McLean's
Asylum in Charlestown, taken there by his physician and Waldo in a
carriage. The only contact I know of that Thoreau had with him, was that
when he died, it was left to Thoreau to arrange his funeral service.<

If you remember, would you say where in the Journal Thoreau mentions his visit to Buckley?

Tom