/www.life123.com/arts-culture/american-authors/thoreau/blossoming-into-a-writer-like-thoreau.shtml

I am in a sort of rapture, half-way through a very deliberate re-reading of Moby-Dick. The range of these Concordians is staggering, and the depth, and the sentences!

You are always right, Phil Gura, to nudge me, even with a hammer, about the social commitment of these guys. And then Jim Carroll came along in Practicing Catholic and introduced me to another of the neglected Emersonians, Isaac Hecker, who transcended to the point of converting to Catholicism and founding the Paulist order of priests…

So thanks again for a lift. Onward, ever onward, as Waldo liked to say.

I am a little surprised that Chris’s comments, as well as those of several commentators, have focused on Thoreau when the book is so rich in other characters and situations, showing us the complexity of Concord in Thoreau’s time. Think, for example of the opening chapter of CAPE COD, when Thoreau describes the drowning of all the Irish immigrants, coming for the promise of the New World. Concord was filled with such people, as well as with, for example, African Americans, as Elise Lemire as recently shown in her fine BLACK WALDEN. Many of Thoreau’s neighbors were those who welcomed the railroad, cotton mill and American enterprise, not those who were flocking to Brook Farm or New Harmony. John’s book informs us so well of the demographic in which Thoreau lived and labored.

Also, I think that we must give more credence to the honesty of Emerson’s assessment at Thoreau’s death. He wanted his young friend to engineer for all America, as he put it, but Thoreau was content to lead a huckleberry party. The problems America faced then (and those we face now) demanded more than just idiosyncratic personal gesture; they required the commitment of a Brownson, Ripley, or Parker, moving toward social justice. That is why, for all Thoreau’s value in awakening us to the “right” issues, we should consider how precisely we can best act in the world. Slavery would not have ended without the great organization of the abolition movement. Often, we have to move from the individual act of conscience to a unity of purpose in numbers. Some of the Transcendentalists knew that.

Thanks, as always, for a wonderful forum.

Solarenergie

http://www.radioopensource.org/pico-iyer-the-transcendentalist-dalai-lama/

Pico Iyer’s beautiful book on his friend the Dalai Lama is chock full of quotations from our guys, Whitman, Thoreau and Emerson. But you’d doubtless noticed, Potter, that Emerson and the Dalai Lama have never been seen together.

Thoreau the Buddhist

When I was working on a clay project years ago I took “Walden”,the unabridged audio tapes, from the library and went right through, drawn in. The narrator was perfect so I found myself relaxing, sinking into Thoreau’s world.. So for me this book would be worth reading or hearing again even if I don’t live to read all the great books oxidizing on my shelves…. which is certain.

The audio is available online for free. The reader sounds good and may be the very same:

http://librivox.org/walden-by-henry-david-thoreau/

I’ll put here one of Thoreau’s perhaps best most enduring phrases from Walden:

“in Wildness is the preservation of the World”

words we need to keep repeating.

The fuller quote:

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends it’s fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind….

I connect Thoreau to Matsuo Basho who wrote “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” (and other Travel Sketches ….Penguin, Yuasa trans.) Coincidentally here fire enters the picture in Basho’s life. His Zen meditations on nature in the form of travel writings and haiku poems began shortly after Basho’s hut burned down in 1682 when he began his wanderings across Japan.

Not so oddly to me then I find Rick Fields wrote a book “How the Swans Came to the Lake” a history of Buddhism in the west. In Field’s essay ”Thoreau the Buddhist” he says that Thoreau “forecast an American Buddhism by the nature of his contemplation, in the same way that a certain quality of transparent predawn forecasts a clear morning He lost himself in nature as the Chinese painters did, by becoming one with nature.”

Thoreau the Buddhist”

Can four words together be more layered then this? If we reflect Thoreau thought on Emerson, it can refer to Emerson’s mind – and the self he was driven to attain – but also to the inevitability of his earthly demise.

And Emerson’s home did burn, “Since burn it must.” Emerson’s doctrine was metamorphosis.

“The Greek sculpture is all melted away as if had been statues of snow, here and there a solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snow left in the cold delles or mountain clefts in June or July. It is so with all things. Permanence is but a word of degrees, everything is medial.”

– Emerson

“When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before.”

-Thoreau