Happy Bicentennial to Henry David Thoreau-In Thoreau's footsteps: my journey to Walden for the
bicentennial of the original de-clutterer
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‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” Henry David Thoreau declares early in the pages of Walden. But these words, some of his most quoted, are only half true. In the summer of 1845, Thoreau – who would have turned a healthy 200 this week – had a lot more on his mind. The book he was writing was not Walden but the almost unknown A Week on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers, an account of a river journey he took with his older brother, John. That brother was suddenly and newly dead of lockjaw, so a bereft Thoreau was left with only his memories in a little cabin, toiling at his even littler desk. He may have gone to the woods to live deliberately, but he also went to remember.
Love, loss and labour do not guarantee literary success. A Week on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers was published in 1849 and met the worst of literary fates: not ridicule, but indifference. It sold only a few hundred copies and the publisher returned the rest to Thoreau, who had self-financed the venture. It was not a good moment: “I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself,” the author acidly notes in his journal in October 1853. But sitting among the dusty piles of unsold books, Thoreau began to compile a second. Walden was the work of a writer on the rebound – and this time it enjoyed modest success.
In the century and a half since it was published in 1854, Walden – and by its grace Thoreau – have become bright stars in the constellation of American classics. A young visionary, holed up in a cabin on land owned by a wealthy friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, details his dissatisfaction with the world around him and the encroaching Industrial Revolution. Against a world that gushed over competitive progress, Thoreau preaches a radical freedom as an antidote to “lives of quiet desperation” and crass consumer zeal. He exhorts men – women are almost entirely omitted – to give up everything that keeps them imprisoned in the “factitious cares and coarse labours of life”.
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Nice read - Thanks for the reminder Trebek
= new reply since forum marked as read
What a lovely photo at link 