Henry David Thoreau and the Necessity of Conviction

[Applause] regard the title I chose for this henry david thoreau a whole human life that was my original subtitle for the book and my editor wisely suggested that we keep it as simple as possible in line with Thoreau himself the subject so it just became Thoreau a life but the sense of a whole human life as oddly enough not the way that we've learned and been taught to think about sorrow and yet was the way that I very much wanted us all to learn to think of him the phrase comes from a quotation from Walden what youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are there is not one of my readers not one of my audience members who has yet lived a whole human life the sense of this and Thoros typical witticism for him that life as we know it is a kind of narrative at least we try to create of it a narrative and a quest Thoreau himself his favorite form was the excursion going out to somewhere and returning so of that excursion form Walden was of course out to Walden Pond and returned to the town it was not a long journey in space but of course in time and in thought it was his longest but the excursion form typifies the quest form of all of his writings so that living that whole human life meant going out to Maine the Maine woods three different trips to Maine four different trips to Cape Cod these become the armatures for his other books his first book a week on the Concord and Merrimack going up the river and returning and why do this in many ways what he realized one of his innovative insights was in order to better see home and where it is that we live here and now and the ways that that home embeds both a deep past and even a kind of future towards which or which Thoreau hopes to anticipate saying that I do have an impulse here we are in Chicago to give you an a sense of the home that he returned to he lived in a time and a place conquered in the mid nineteenth century that we don't have foot photographs of the landscapes that he knew exactly as he knew them but this is a few not so many decades afterward and gives a sense of the kind of agricultural land that the landscape that he inhabited largely farmland he was born on a farm but also a land of great diversity of spaces so agricultural land various kinds of crop lands interspersed with other kinds of ecological areas rivers marshes Lakes hilltops valley flats and all of this carved by glaciers that had receded about 12,000 years before his birth so when I imagined the book that I wanted to write one of the first things I knew about this book was that I would have to start with the melting of the glaciers in order to talk about how this land was formed because Thoreau himself is formed by the land and Thoreau himself started to think in terms of some of the glacial origins of the land he knew Louis Agassiz who was the theorist of glaciation so some of that geological thinking is built-in to Thoreau from the start conquered itself to a classic New England village this is taken in July at the height of the Thoreau Bicentennial a few months ago and so standing on the green you look down a Main Street the mill dam and what you see is first of all a lot of traffic this is a very heavy tourist area and cars are zipping past so I had to wait for a few trucks to move out of the way so very different landscape than the one that sorrow knew and yet not so very different here it is Center for for tourism and commerce Thoreau knew it as a center of Commerce and also of course the town that's congratulated itself on being the site of the Revolutionary War the start of the Revolutionary War the conquered Lexington fight fought at the old north bridge putting these two photographs together reminds us how many things in our changed landscape were still the same so that I oriented my shot if you look at these this array of chimneys it's a little washed out so a little harder to see in this light but the same buildings in in this photograph these are the buildings that Thoreau knew he went into every one of them did business with merchants and every one of these buildings the great muddy streets the little tiny saplings you can barely see them here his father helped plant those trees Thoreau writes about the kind of growing statuesque trees that they start turning into and his sa autumnal tints so again he's totally embedded in the town and one thing that we tend to forget because we don't we think of him as a writer we forget he made his living as a surveyor so much of the town as we know it today was literally laid out by Henry David Thoreau the house lots even some of the streets some of the way that spaces are being used so to walk around this town is literally to walk around a kind of map of Thoreau's own what his own experience in the world I don't want to assume that all of you know this sort of basic parameters of Thoreau's life and thought so here's the real nail version so as he been saying his whole life in Concord Massachusetts his literary agent horace greeley as the one who famously said go west young man advise that Thoreau resisted instead of going west he thought about it but instead of going west he deliberately chose to turn around and return home and stay home in Concord when he did that when he returned home to stay he found that ruff Waldo Emerson had moved just down the street and Thoreau discovered in that they had both a mentor who was immensely helpful to him but also a competitor and rival with whom he had two contests so imagine at one point I talked about the two of them from two on the rock right competing for a priority so returning home actually put him in a very interesting situation Emerson bought land on Walden Pond and famously that's or Thoreau built and lived in this house from 1845 to 47 as he lived there he was writing we'll get back to that in a few minutes he also walked into town one summer day in 1846 while he lived at the pond and famously went to jail for not having paid his poll tax and that resulted in a lecture where he explained his vagrant behavior to his townsman the lecture that became the essay resistance to civil government after Thoreau's death it was republished under the more famous title civil disobedience so the lecture was published as an essay in 18-49 so we have both the Thoreau of nature and Walden Pond and the Thoreau of civil disobedience and political activism originating in the same space at the same moment starting in 18-49 he turned increasingly to studies in the Natural Sciences this is something that I've always been drawn to home Bolton Darwin as the two that he was most attracted to so we have a massive unfinished book manuscripts version of seeds and wild fruits that that he was a pioneer in the science of what we would come to know as ecology although Thoreau himself didn't have the words it hadn't been invented yet he's publishing Walden in the midst of this even as Walden was rolling off the presses in Boston Thoreau in Framingham but at a abolitionist rally before an audience of somewhere over 2,000 people delivered slavery in Massachusetts where words that burn one of the newspaper headlines characterized it we're a thorough admonished his audience that they too were complicit in slavery in America slavery in Massachusetts and urged secession both secession for the state of Massachusetts but also secession for each citizen in the name of justice so words that burn even as Wallen are coming out all through his life he kept a journal of over two thousand two million so write words which some say and I guess I put myself in this category is a masterpiece in its own right but of course the masterpiece that you all know that has made his name is Walden so here's the famous title page and the only representation that we have that is authenticated of that famous house on Walden Pond and by the way he always called it a house never a cabin or a hut or the good Lord not a shanty it was a house he worked hard to create it the only representation we have is this drawing by his sister Sophia who was an artist and many say of Sophia that she was basically Henry in skirts I wish we knew her I wish we knew her better but unfortunately one of the things Sophia who outlived all the rest of the members of her family one of the things that as the last surviving member she felt she had to do even though it tore her apart and she did it through her tears was to burn the family papers so Sophia up there out there somewhere you made my job easier in some ways I'd still be writing if those papers existed but at the same time you made it much more difficult and I wish I could know you because I would like to have known Henry in skirts anyway so this is her famous contribution to it and here it is if you go to Walden Pond now you'll find it reconstructed right next to the parking lot with a marvelous statue which again it's a little washed out you can't see it but of Henry sort of half stride hunched over something in his hand and the hand itself in the statue is empty but people put things in it so it's always fun to go and see what people have placed in his hands for him to look at the house site itself is down by the pond no house there but instead this set of granite markers the house site as excavated in the 1940s by an archaeologist Roland Robbins so that marks the house site next to it is the famous cairn of stones shortly after Thoreau's death a convention developed what you would do to pay respects and do honor to Thoreau's memory was bring a stoned with you and following an old ancient Greek tradition lay the stones down and the accumulated stones became this this huge immense sprawling cairn and again a study in itself many of these stones have legends words written on them to Henry and the sign this is an older photograph you can see the sign has quite a bit of explanation what's there today as a shorter version with the famous statement of purpose 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 and not when I came to die discover that had not lived so I want to dwell for a moment on this statement of purpose the first thing I would like to say about it is this notion I went to the woods yes there were trees around Walden at this time but Walden the woods around Walden had been clear-cut and were in the process of being clear cut during Thoreau's lifetime so the woods more like a few trees as he knew them as he was writing but he remembered the forest from his childhood it was not wilderness we tend to think of it as wilderness but in fact it was right on the edge of town so here is an 1852 map of Concord and Walden Pond here is based on the Thoreau's own survey this is a map of the concord township so here's one of the boundaries Thoreau lived in town there's the town itself at the time he was at Walden he lived in a house right there by the railroad station and you can see it's a very short walk it's it's barely a mile to go from his home to the site at Walden Pond and he generally would walk by the railroad tracks and cut over but sometimes he would come up his house was here right next to the road he would walk into town this way there was also a road from the little side path to this little projection this was a favorite fishing hole so he had a lot of company this was not wilderness it was basically the town's back yard it's where the kids would go to swim and fish it's it's where families would go for picnics it was it was a recreational site so to come back to the sign and the honor that it does to his statement of purpose about living deliberately what he's doing in staging this deliberate life in this area so close to town within sight of the main road within sight you know right next to the fete town's favorite fishing hole is literally staging how to live deliberately in view of people so not only is it just a kind of trivial fact that no it wasn't really wilderness it's an essential fact that he's there on a stage visible I've written that I don't think it was his original intent that it be quite so public but the circumstances Emerson bought the land that was the first chance that Thoreau had to conduct this experiment on Emerson's land the land happened to be on the edge of town and so forth the circumstances that made Thoreau as long dreamed of experiment possible also put him in the public eye and what amazes me in working through the process that he shows is how quickly he realized this was happening and as I've written how quickly he pivoted to take advantage of it so this is the Thoreau who again chooses a mode of life as an experiment two months two years two months and two days in length before he returns to town and in choosing a form of retreat it's a retreat that is in conversation with all the people who come by and of course what he would have talked about with them is this sense of what it meant to live deliberately so a little excursion into my favorite Thoreau pun I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately also it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of action he writes earlier in in other words it appears that we have deliberately chosen but we have not we have not chosen we sort of fall into the way we live without thinking that we have a choice deliberation is the act of choosing to live deliberately is to realize that we have choices let us spend one day as deliberately as nature he also writes in repeating this word leaning hard leaning into this word deliberately let books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written so that the writing of Walden which took place over nine years we should give nine years of our life to reading it right for true Thoreau viens so why a pun the word deliver arey to consider away from Libra balance he also borrows from Latin Lieber free as in Liberty and from the Latin for Libra of books libraries so that to live deliberately means to live with the freedom to read the world in its fullness and to weigh its meanings to to again recover the sense of having choices now when I emphasize this to have the freedom one of the roast Friends was Frederick Douglas who published his narrative of his life as a fugitive slave as an escaped slave in 1845 the youth the almost the same month that Thoreau went to Walden Pond Thoreau is acutely aware of slavery as the condition of American economy and in insisting on freedom he's insisting that all of us again speaking to his audience at the time all of us are enslaved in a very real way to this larger economic system that doesn't say what Thoreau kept referring to for millions of our fellow citizens an economic system that had to be stopped so there's always a political edge to Thoreau another feature here it goes Thoreau lived in that little nook by the cove right across the water was the railroad this is why Emerson bought the property the railroad came through in 1844 Emerson was taking a walk to the pond when he found that land developers were already bidding on this piece of land Emerson alarmed quickly put his own bid in and bought the land on the spot walked home the proud owner of 11 acres went back the next day bought a few more acres so the railroad prompted the entire venture at Walden Pond so here's the railroad today it's it's a great way it's a commuter railroad it's how you get into Boston and back I've ridden it many times and of course it comes roaring past with no consideration for who you are you better get off the tracks which is exactly the point that Thoreau is interested in so standing on the railroad tracks I'm looking directly across to to the site of Thoreau home on Walden Pond the farthest Shore right in the smack dab middle of this shot and here is a classic photograph one of my favorites by the great photographer Herbert Gleason taken from the shoreline just in front of Thoreau's home his house looking across the frozen pond at the nineteenth-century railroad arrowing its way to Boston and Thoros deliberate thinking about the railroad takes up much of his chapter on sounds in Walden I which ends I cross it like a cart path in the woods I will not have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing part of this point there is not a rejection of the railroad per se because he himself wrote it and was fascinated by what it represented by what it enabled including what it enabled him to do he was also horrified by the forms of destruction that it wrought upon the land and to the life ways of the farmers that he cared about at the same time he called it our atropos right our fate this is where I connect with you know anthropos - - sorry I proposed to anthropos the Anthropocene the railroad is in many ways a physical manifestation of what becomes in our day known as the dawn of the Anthropocene and so Thoreau and thinking about the railroad is thinking very largely about the universe that is dawning and declaring that there are other ways you can cross over the tracks and move off in other directions even while you're living in a world that's dominated by these new forms of technology so here's the another look come on reconstruction of the famous house a little closer look imagine yourself coming to check out the house taking a stroll from town if you came by and you found the chair sitting out in front that was Thoros signal like hey come on by take a load off and let's talk and that chair was often out for people to come and sit they would come inside and of course we don't have a photograph of the interior but here are some of the original pieces of furniture the famous simplify simplify line from Walden right yes very stark very simple so his desk little green writing desk this is an old photograph from showing the sort of attic way in which for generations this furniture all now on display at the Concord Museum beautifully preserved sort of a shrine right it was just heaped up in an attic for several generations anyway the famous desk I don't think this chair is original I need to double check that but this one certainly is the Rope wood rockers on it Heath and of course he recycled this was a Chinese sofa-bed part of a sofa that Thoreau recycled into his own bed and he used this as his bed for the rest of his life so famously in Walden he writes that he had three chairs in this simplified life at Walden Pond one for solitude two for friendship and three for society so the one that would be sitting out front would invite people in often there were more than three and we have accounts from some of the neighbor kids that the bed is where they would all sit and they remembered that it was just high enough to get there that their feet didn't quite touch the floor when they sat on it the kind of point that a biographer loves going to the pond writing was his goal there we have this photograph from the Morgan which holds the almost all of Thoreau's journal volumes here are your three of them he was a pencil maker designed the number the American pencil the famous number two American pencil was an invention that the French had invented it but it was a trade secret so Thoreau had to reinvent it and that's the technology on which the family fortune was based of the Thoreau family fortune he went there to write a book a week on the Concord and Merrimack which was the memorial to his brother John whom he loved dearly his older brother the two had grown up together were the closest of friends John accident cut his finger contracted lockjaw tetanus and died in Henry's arms a deep trauma that Henry never never recovered from always in a kind of grief for the lost brother so he went to the pond to write a book in honor of John he started keeping a journal while he was at the pond of not the past but the experiences around him and here is the first page now aren't you glad you don't have to read his handwriting this is the first page of the famous Walden journal again courtesy of the Morgan Library and so you got the date way up top Saturday July 5th 1845 yesterday I came here to live Dateline Walden this is the journal that becomes the foundation for Walden so he goes to write one book and while he's writing that book he begins to draft what becomes the second book Walden and here you have a bit of the first thoughts first meditations yesterday I came here to live my home makes me think of some mountain house I've seen which seemed to have a fresher auroral atmosphere about them as I fancied the halls of Olympus so he remembers going back to a saw Miller's house the previous summer high up in the mountains and there were chinks in the side and the air came through and it was glorious and he wants a house just like that and now he's got it high placed Airy and perfumed fit to entertain a traveling God so there's the ambition and the first the first moment the first hours that he's there and this is the sight more or less well this is an October view so not quite this this contemporary now into November but you can get a sense of the landscape of the pond as we see it today and some sense of what it might have looked like to Thoreau well I mentioned that he was a surveyor so of course he surveyed the pond this is really revolt and as a book starts to come together so he literally this is a pencil draft completed in 1846 of the survey I won't go into all the details of how it's done that would take a other half-hour he's not a professional surveyor yet but this is the kind of exercise that shows his skill and his interest and I would say that this is a very interesting work of art in its own right it's extravagant it's not needed by anybody but what he does with it and the way he starts to move his thoughts around this image is is at the core of Walden so again at the Concord Museum you get so the materiality of this process slides showing some of the drafting instruments we've got some of the surveying instruments we still have his original compass Y Survey the pond Y get the dimensions of the pond and why try to plumb its depth in a literal way I was one of the books I read speaking of belief Charles Taylor the Canadian philosopher and historian of religion Charles Taylor writes of this era Thoros lifetime our present sense of things fails to touch bottom anywhere as a kind of existential crisis that emerges during Thoreau's lifetime Thoreau has a response let us not play at Kitley benders there is a solid bottom everywhere kentley Bender's was the game that he played as a child the boys would run across the ice or skate across the ice and the person who fell through the ice lost right skating on thin ice a more extensive version of the same thing again the other kind of parallel statement of intent living deliberately let us settle ourselves and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion and Prejudice and tradition and delusion and appearance that alluvion which covers the globe through Paris in London through New York and Boston and Concord and Chicago through church and states through poetry and philosophy and religion till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place which we can call reality and say this is and no mistake so I love the sense of artistry and what we can call reality right this is this insistence well so he finished the survey and published it in Malden this is the final version as we have it and here's the crossing of breadth and length and at least so it seems what we've got is the place right here of maximum depth 102 feet and Thoreau will tell us that where the breadth and depth and length cross is the deepest part and it's not on the map and this is a trick it's a brilliant one the line that should be on the map come on is this one and this puts the crossing right where it should be within the limits of what power point but allow me to draw and so here's here's the point the crossing point and Thoreau typically it's not just about the survey it's about the lesson and this is a typical piece of Thoreau VIII and extravagance it is the heart and man it is the Sun and the system draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular daily experiences and volumes of life into his coves and inlets and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character right so you have an insistence that each person will reveal the height depth and breadth of their character to you as you study them as you sink through there are decisions in life and the sum total of all the decisions that all of us make reveal the ethical character of the society that we build together so this becomes the key to Walden and really the key to the kind of life that Thoreau tried to demonstrate there and this figure again going back this figure becomes quite literally Thoreau's Cosmo gram I am still seeking the person who can explain to me the coincidence between Thoreau's image and this Bakongo culture Cosimo Graham which apparently is a well-known image where again you've got the four corners of the four quadrants of space the four quadrants of time the day the year the cyclicity echoed and Thoros famous survey of the pond even to the direction of travel as as you travel around the Kozma gram you can take this journey on Walden Pond itself here's a view of the path been a lot of erosion so they put fences up to keep people off the banks and at this moment we're at about the northwest quadrant so you can repeat this journey yourself and that again is part of Thoreau's point you can enact this in your own life well much more to say but winding up now back to the famous title page the roast statement of intent it shows up as the motto on his title page just underneath his sister's drawing and I had enlarged it here so you can read it 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 make a fuss brag he wanted to say I brag not for me but for Humanity right but that sense that he would be the watch you're watching for the dawn and crowing when he saw the light coming to alert us to wake us up to the dawn and that is the controlling image of Walden the Huntington provided me with this image of the very last page of the final manuscript of Walden and so here is that last page and again I don't expect you to read it but what I loved when I saw this this is not how it appears in print are the last words the Sun is but a morning star or I capitalized the Sun is but a morning star capital with flourishes Thoreau's excitement and and what this sort of tender devotion by which it comes to those last words so if you're curious here's the whole thing the light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us only that day dawns to which we are awake there is more day to dawn the Sun is but a morning star hopeful words for a generation today a difficult time whenever I'm in Concord I always go to Henry's grave it's very simple it just says Henry it's part of the family the the rest of the family members are all nearby and one of the things I try to do I haven't collected the photographs in any consistent way but I am curious to see who's left objects again objects of devotion objects of remembrance on this particular day what have we got some stones coins a candy on top a little permant some pinecones some rocks here's a pen moldering away there are shells flowers pints sprig of pine often there are pencils sometimes it bristles with pencils people bring things and leave them often there are notes and the sense the the person he was is is beneath the ground here but sort of somebody pointed out the tree that's growing up you could see the roots covered by the objects around his grave that this tree that's growing up this huge pine looming over him has to be full of him Henry's DNA or whatever chemical breakdown of his bodily substance so that sense that people honor this memory with a kind of resurrection as the memory becomes a life today in in the objects and in the lives of Jaques that people bring to honor who he was because of the way that he is still alive to so many of us today so that we returned to the grave not to bury him but to revivify him and thank him this final shot of Walden Pond is one that I took almost at the side of the road that passes the road that was there in Thoreau stay and so a nice it's not a sunrise it's a sunset shot to honor the fact that we today are actually on rather more the sunset side of Walden which means that the Sun as the morning star is a metaphor and a metaphor that we need to take onboard and consider and of course when I am teaching Walden as I do every chance I get not the easiest book to teach but still I enjoy the challenge is asking each of the students I have in my class at the end yes and where is your Walden and so that is the question I'll leave you with yes and where is your wall today and I will stop there thank you we have time for a brief Q&A if you raise your hand we can bring a microphone to you they're all ever read from any books at the Harvard library about the Congo cosmic RAM and he duplicated it that would be an interesting line of research to pursue he hung out at Harvard library and checked out volumes and volumes of books one suggestion I had from somebody was that we know from Walden the various houses that were decaying in the neighborhood of his own house at Walden that they were many of them were lived in by slaves and later on freed slaves and that some people have found artifacts and objects and that there could have been objects drawings in other words he was not very far removed from Africans who lived in the same site he knew a number of former slaves and slave people in Concord this is part of I mean oral transmission object transmission literary transmission it's possible like I say the coincidence haunts me and I'm yeah the first and only time I went to Walden Pond was in 1962 just before my college graduation and for a group of us went and it felt like a mythical journey we had to take before we left Boston and I was very disappointed at that time because there was a lot of litter around it was dirty it was being neglected you know and we were pretty upset and I wondered if since then that's over 50 years if there's been some kind of organization that cleans it up or says their asses that maintains it and what shape it's in now yeah it's been it's now a state park so it's well maintained as a state park there's a staff that is there every day they have their headquarters up the hill it's also a swimming beach and a very popular one people come out on the railroad so it's a very well used public park it has you you probably saw the little the bathing is must have been something there where people's change clothes and restrooms and all that maybe I'm not sure when it was built but in any case yes so you've got a dedicated staff there's a Friends of Walden Pond organization that which I've given money they invite donations and they use this to support staff operations to maintain the pond do things like clear out invasive species stabilize the erosion on the banks because people will cut through write and edit erodes so they have to put up fences so it's a very well used space now but I've actually mentioned that I've never seen a piece of litter there I literally have not ever seen a piece of litter which I never noticed before but yeah so I think I'm not sure when but somewhere after your visit there was a real renaissance of interest part of it would be some of the land that was in private hands surrounding the pond developers were planning to build condominiums in the eighties that would have overlooked so you would have stood at the pond there would have been condos shadowing it and that created a group of concord people protested and tried to get national attention to purchase the land and hold them in public trust and they were they were having no success until a CNN report broadcast nationwide caught the attention of Don Henley of the Eagles and Don Henley said Thoreau meant a lot to me when I was a kid you know I'm pursued my path Thoreau you know a different drummer and said I've got a I've got to find out what this is and I've got to stop the condos so Don Henley became the primary founder of the Walden Woods project which still thrives today they run educational programs but the main thing is that they have purchased as much land as they could afford all around Walden Pond so it's not just the pond now it's a huge area of green space surrounding that that's now protected and in public trust and it's full of trails and and educational displays so I hope you go back someday I think you'd be don't go in July that's very crowded but you know go during may be a little bit off season and I think you'll have a much better experience there's also a new visitor center a very beautiful building that just opened this year a very sort of rustic and open and lovely patio and lots of lots of sort of tree branches and like I say rustic so that's there - thank you yeah why did the sister feel obligated to burn the family books okay you know this sense of privacy it feels I mean I'm a historian Ryan I want to preserve everything but I I think part of the reason it caught me when I I found it in a letter that she wrote she saved one letter by John Thoreau out of the flames and sent it on to the woman that both Henry and John had proposed to Helen Sewell Osgood they're both elderly ladies now and so she's saying you know I saved this one letter I knew it would remind you of our youth so I'm burning these papers through my tears well when my mother knew that she was passing I'm gonna pass soon we had this conversation about the family papers and my family and there was a real question in my mother's mind what I should do with them that is she sort of wanted me to destroy them because there was a sense that these are private papers and you don't you know what she would say why do they concern anybody else this is just family stuff and I said but mom this documents three generations of people who you know move successively westward and and this is an archives it's it's part of history and so I remember that debate the upshot of it was that I inherited it all and it's sitting in boxes but but still there's that sense of a generation that is saying this is private this is personal and what you do is if you're in the last it goes with you you take it with you you do not send it out so she sorted out what she judged were the public papers about her brother her beloved famous brother so the journals and so forth many of the letters were preserved and she sought to that very carefully but anything that she judged was private was consigned to the flames yeah Wow lots of hands yeah you detailed the walking routes he would take back and forth between Malden and Concord I'm wondering if you have a sense of the frequency with which he went back and forth during his time there well it would have been pretty frequent I don't think it would have been every day because there surely were days when he just hung out at the pond and went walking in other directions than town stayed with us rioting days of bad weather winter days but it would have been several times a week normally he had work to do in town and it's a sight of Walled he sort of brushes it off and what says oh yes there were these days I walked in there were other arrangements but if you look at for instance Emerson's account books you see the job so Thoreau was commissioned to do for he was a handyman and a laborer a day laborer so he literally would go in and do labor jobs he does right involved in that you could do this kind of work for six weeks in a year and make enough money if you live simply enough to live for the entire year so that six weeks you figure out how many days and sort of dispersed them and you have roughly the number of days a year that he would walk in plus he walked in for Sunday dinner so the arrangement was that family would come visit him at Walden on Saturdays and then on Sundays he'd walk home and have family dinner and the family home was a boarding house so family dinner was big they were all extended family plus all the boarders so it was a big deal and you sense that kind of festive reconnection with family as part of the ritual of the week so and then he'd walk back after dark and take up his solitude again I'm taken by the first translation of the Odyssey by a woman yes I read about that and I'm wondering have other women written the Rose biography you know what you bring to his biography that maybe we haven't seen or heard about before as a woman okay so Annie marble who didn't know him personally but sort of new members of the family and friends wrote a biography of Thoreau around the turn of the last century so I remember the year around around 1900 but otherwise no no modern ones and I was really conscious that you know as a woman write writing as a woman for example in the previous comprehensive biography by Walter Harding says really negative things about the fam the the women in Thoreau's family Authority have done a family of women his his father was shy and retiring and you get the sense that he was sort of out in the out in the back you know doing his his thing his he was a craftsman and he was the one who ran the pencil shop and so forth that you know Sarah always refers to as his home as mother's house my mother's house and so the mother the aunts on both sides of the Thoreau and his mother side the Dunbar's there were several ants living with them there were other women friends mostly women who lived with them and of course his two sisters so you've got a a group of there and my goodness they were wonderful they were strong they were sassy they were smart they were educated they were teachers they were activists they were leaders they they were part of the well the house was a house on the Underground Railroad but they were also part of the abolitionist movement I mean you don't just sort of fall into the Ovilus movement I mean you had to get out there and really work to and take risks as a woman to be out in public with this kind of activism so my goodness you know Sofia known as an artist and well I could go on and on but you get the picture so that was one thing one of the other surprises to me was I'd also heard you know that Margaret Fuller has sort of dis there Owen Thoreau dissed her back hey you know reading their letters to each other know Margaret Fuller was absolutely critically important to Thoreau and she knew it and Thoreau knew it and Thoreau honored her and she was very kind to him in a very big sisterly way so she's sort of it's like she she gave Thoreau some of the mentorship that he was so frustrated that he didn't get from Emerson so that's another so the women and Thoreau is life actually are critically important and very exciting and this was something that had just been sort of either ignored or like I say negatively stereotyped in ways that really I found kind of shocking so that's one there's there's there's others but you sort of get the picture you know there was a whole picture changes right yeah [Applause]

Channel: Chicago Humanities Festival

Views: 8,120

Rating: 4.8878503 out of 5

Keywords: chicago humanities festival, chf, humanities, chicago, festival, Poetry, Henry David Thoreau, Laura Dassow Walls, English, Literature, Trascendentalism

Id: JLmuTTCmkXo

Length: 52min 0sec (3120 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 29 2017