# data[].attributes.headline
How is this event connected to the semester theme of architecture and landscape?

# data[].attributes.subject
How is this event connected to the semester theme of architecture and landscape?

# data[].attributes.body
It's probably connected by how we're going to be building structures in different landscapes and Walden teaches us to better use of our surroundings and to take in everything, and to be able to make amazing designs.

# data[].attributes.body
He was trying to acquire a better understanding of nature, where he wished to live deliberately.

# data[].attributes.body
He used the Walden Pond as an escape. The purpose was to acquire a better appreciation of nature.

# data[].attributes.body
His most important and notable pieces are Walden, and Civil Disobedience.

# data[].attributes.body
He would focus on the problems of living in the world as a human being.

# data[].attributes.body
David Thoreau was an American essayist, a poet, and a practical philosopher. He's renowned for having lived the doctrines transcendentalism. He's an important contributor to the American literary and philosophical movement.

# data[].attributes.body
Called the Hudson River School Movement ^^^ Founded by Thomas Cole. It is basically the visual version of transcendentalism (which is typically literature).

# data[].attributes.body
In 1845, he received permission from Emerson to use a piece of land that Emerson owned on the shore of Walden Pond. He bought building supplies and a chicken coop (for the boards), and built himself a small house there, moving in on the Fourth of July. He had two main purposes in moving to the pond: to write his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, as a tribute to his late brother John; and to conduct an economic experiment to see if it were possible to live by working one day and devoting the other six to more Transcendental concerns, thus reversing the Yankee habit of working six days and resting one. His nature study and the writing of Walden would develop later during his stay at the pond. He began writing Walden in 1846 as a lecture in response to the questions of townspeople who were curious about what he was doing out at the pond, but his notes soon grew into his second book.

Thoreau's Life | The Thoreau Society | Outreach. Education. Advocacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
The Thoreau Society | Outreach. Education. Advocacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thoreau's Life
by Richard J. Schneider
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was born and lived nearly all his life in Concord, Massachusetts, a small town about twenty miles west of Boston. He received his education at the public school in Concord and at the private Concord Academy. Proving to be a better scholar than his more fun-loving and popular elder brother John, he was sent to Harvard. He did well there and, despite having to drop out for several months for financial and health reasons, was graduated in the top half of his class in 1837.

Thoreau's graduation came at an inauspicious time. In 1837, America was experiencing an economic depression and jobs were not plentiful. Furthermore, Thoreau found himself temperamentally unsuited for three of the four usual professions open to Harvard graduates: the ministry, the law, and medicine. The fourth, teaching, was one he felt comfortable with, since both of his elder siblings, Helen and John, were already teachers. He was hired as the teacher of the Concord public school, but resigned after only two weeks because of a dispute with his superintendent over how to discipline the children. For a while he and John considered seeking their fortunes in Kentucky, but at last he fell back onto working in his father's pencil factory.

Thoreau's family participated in the "quiet desperation" of commerce and industry through the pencil factory owned and managed by his father. Thoreau family pencils, produced behind the family house on Main Street, were generally recognized as America's best pencils, largely because of Henry's research into German pencil-making techniques.

In 1838, he decided to start his own school in Concord, eventually asking John to help him. The two brothers worked well together and vacationed together during holidays. In September 1839, they spent a memorable week together on a boating trip up the Concord and Merrimack rivers to Mount Washington in New Hampshire. About the same time both brothers became romantically interested in Ellen Sewall, a frequent visitor to Concord from Cape Cod. In the fall of the next year, both brothers - first John and then Henry - proposed marriage to her. But because of her father's objections to the Thoreaus' liberal religious views, Ellen rejected both proposals.

When John endured a lengthy illness in 1841, the school became too much for Henry to handle alone, so he closed it. He returned to work in the pencil factory but was soon invited to work as a live-in handyman in the home of his mentor, neighbor, and friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson was by then already one of the most famous American philosophers and men of letters. Since Thoreau's graduation from Harvard, he had become a protégé of his famous neighbor and an informal student of Emerson's Transcendental ideas. Transcendentalism was an American version of Romantic Idealism, a dualistic Neoplatonic view of the world divided into the material and the spiritual. For Emerson, "Mind is the only reality, of which all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena." For the Transcendentalist, the secret of successful living was to hold oneself above material concerns as much as possible and focus on the spiritual. Thoreau must have imbibed Transcendentalism through almost every pore during his two years living with Emerson, though he would modify it to suit his own temperament by granting nature more reality than Emerson did.

During his stay with Emerson, Thoreau developed ambitions of becoming a writer and got help from Emerson in getting some poems and essays published in the Transcendental journal, The Dial. But life in his parents' home held problems for the budding writer. Work in the pencil factory was tedious and tiring, and, since his mother took in boarders, there was little quiet or privacy in the house. Remembering a summer visit to the retreat cabin of college friend Charles Stearns Wheeler, Thoreau developed a plan to build such a house for himself where he could find privacy to write.

In 1845, he received permission from Emerson to use a piece of land that Emerson owned on the shore of Walden Pond. He bought building supplies and a chicken coop (for the boards), and built himself a small house there, moving in on the Fourth of July. He had two main purposes in moving to the pond: to write his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, as a tribute to his late brother John; and to conduct an economic experiment to see if it were possible to live by working one day and devoting the other six to more Transcendental concerns, thus reversing the Yankee habit of working six days and resting one. His nature study and the writing of Walden would develop later during his stay at the pond. He began writing Walden in 1846 as a lecture in response to the questions of townspeople who were curious about what he was doing out at the pond, but his notes soon grew into his second book.

Thoreau stayed in the house at Walden Pond for two years, from July 1845 to September 1847. Walden condenses the experiences of those two years into one year for artistic unity. During these two years he also spent one night in jail, an incident which occurred in the summer of 1846 and which became the subject of his essay "Resistance to Civil Government" (later known as "Civil Disobedience"). That same year he also took a trip to Maine to see and climb Mount Katahdin, a place with a much wilder nature than he could find around Concord.

In the years after leaving Walden Pond, Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854). A Week sold poorly, leading Thoreau to hold off publication of Walden, so that he could revise it extensively to avoid the problems, such as looseness of structure and a preaching tone unalleviated by humor, that had put readers off in the first book. Walden was a modest success: it brought Thoreau good reviews, satisfactory sales, and a small following of fans.

Thoreau returned to the Emerson home and lived there for two years, while Emerson was on a lecture tour in Europe. For much of his remaining years, he rented a room in his parents' home. He made his living by working in the pencil factory, by doing surveying, by lecturing occasionally, and by publishing essays in newspapers and journals. His income, however, was always very modest, and his main concerns were his daily afternoon walks in the Concord woods, the keeping of a private journal of his nature observations and ideas, and the writing and revision of essays for publication.

Thoreau was an ardent and outspoken abolitionist, serving as a conductor on the underground railroad to help escaped slaves make their way to Canada. He wrote strongly-worded attacks on the Fugitive Slave Law ("Slavery in Massachusetts") and on the execution of John Brown.

His trips to the Maine woods and to Cape Cod provided material for travel essays published first in journals; these were eventually collected into posthumous books. Other excursions took him to Canada and, near the end of his life, to Minnesota.

In May 1862, Thoreau died of the tuberculosis with which he had been periodically plagued since his college years. He left behind large unfinished projects, including a comprehensive record of natural phenomena around Concord, extensive notes on American Indians, and many volumes of his daily journal jottings. At his funeral, his friend Emerson said, "The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. ... His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Thoreau's Life | The Thoreau Society | Outreach. Education. Advocacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was born and lived nearly all his life in Concord, Massachusetts, a small town about twenty miles west of Boston. He received his education at the public school in Concord and at the private Concord Academy. Proving to be a better scholar than his more fun-loving and popular elder brother John, he was sent to Harvard.

# data[].attributes.headline
Key Transcendentalist Figure: Henry David Thoreau

# data[].attributes.subject
Key Transcendentalist Figure: Henry David Thoreau

# data[].attributes.body
Thoreau was a key figure of transcendentalism, an early 19th-century American philosophy movement. The romantic movement in Europe and Unitarianism inspired the movement. Its purpose was to focus on respecting nature and spirituality (not organized religion); this was a counterculture against growing materialism and intellectualism. The philosophy promoted progressive ideas, like abolition and woman's right to vote; they also pushed the idea of American individualism. Thoreau was a writer and wrote about his experience of retreating into the woods. He fled into the woods to focus on his spirituality and nature (practice transcendentalist ideals as a social experiment).

# data[].attributes.body
“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 I had not lived."
-Henry David Thoreau

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
"The Fountain of Vaucluse" Thomas Cole, 1841

# data[].attributes.body
this style of art was popularized by the writings of authors like Thoreau.

# data[].attributes.body
Thoreau had three chairs inside his cabin. "One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society."

Source: http://george.loper.org/interests/housing/thero/thoreau.html

# data[].attributes.body
"urging us to be true to ourselves and to live in harmony with nature"

# data[].attributes.body
"Back in Concord Thoreau rejoined his family’s business, making pencils and grinding graphite. By early 1845 he felt more restless than ever, until he decided to take up an idea of a Harvard classmate who had once built a waterside hut in which one could read and contemplate. In the spring Thoreau picked a spot by Walden Pond, a small glacial lake located 2 miles (3 km) south of Concord on land Emerson owned.

cabin at Walden Pond

Early in the spring of 1845, Thoreau, then 27 years old, began to chop down tall pines with which to build the foundations of his home on the shores of Walden Pond. From the outset the move gave him profound satisfaction. Once settled, he restricted his diet for the most part to the fruits and vegetables he found growing wild and the beans he planted. When not busy weeding his bean rows and trying to protect them from hungry groundhogs or occupied with fishing, swimming, or rowing, he spent long hours observing and recording the local flora and fauna, reading, and writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). He also made entries in his journals, which he later polished and included in Walden. Much time, too, was spent in meditation."-Henry David Thoreau | Biography, Civil Disobedience, Walden, Books, Beliefs, & Facts | Britannica

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Henry David Thoreau (born July 12, 1817, Concord, Massachusetts, U.S.-died May 6, 1862, Concord) was an American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher renowned for having lived the doctrines of Transcendentalism as recorded in his masterwork, Walden (1854), and for having been a vigorous advocate of civil liberties, as evidenced in the essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849).

Early life

Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, the third child of a feckless small businessman named John Thoreau and his bustling wife, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau. Though his family moved the following year, they returned in 1823. Even when he grew ambivalent about the village after reaching adulthood, he never grew ambivalent about its lovely setting of woodlands, streams, and meadows. In 1828 his parents sent him to Concord Academy, where he impressed his teachers and so was permitted to prepare for college. Upon graduating from the academy, he entered Harvard University in 1833. There he was a good student, but he was indifferent to the rank system and preferred to use the school library for his own purposes. Graduating in the middle ranks of the class of 1837, Thoreau searched for a teaching job and secured one at his old grammar school in Concord. He found that he was no disciplinarian and resigned after two shaky weeks, after which he worked for his father in the family pencil-making business. In June 1838 he started a small school with the help of his brother John. Despite its progressive nature, it lasted for three years, until John fell ill.

Friendship with Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson settled in Concord during Thoreau's sophomore year at Harvard, and by the autumn of 1837 they were becoming friends. Emerson sensed in Thoreau a true disciple-that is, one with so much Emersonian self-reliance that he would still be his own man. Thoreau saw in Emerson a guide, a father, and a friend.

With his magnetism Emerson attracted others to Concord. Out of their heady speculations and affirmatives came New England Transcendentalism. In retrospect, it was one of the most significant literary movements of 19th-century America, with at least two authors of world stature, Thoreau and Emerson, to its credit. Essentially, it combined romanticism with reform. It celebrated the individual rather than the masses, emotion rather than reason, nature rather than man. Transcendentalism conceded that there were two ways of knowing, through the senses and through intuition, but asserted that intuition transcended tuition. Similarly, the movement acknowledged that matter and spirit both existed. It claimed, however, that the reality of spirit transcended the reality of matter. Transcendentalism strove for reform yet insisted that reform begin with the individual, not the group or organization.

Literary career

In Emerson's company Thoreau's hope of becoming a poet looked not only proper but feasible. Late in 1837, at Emerson's suggestion, he began keeping a journal that covered thousands of pages before he scrawled the final entry two months before his death. He soon polished some of his old college essays and composed new and better ones as well. He wrote some poems-a good many, in fact-for several years. A canoe trip that he and his brother John took along the Concord and Merrimack rivers in 1839 confirmed in him the opinion that he ought not be a schoolmaster but a poet of nature.

As the 1840s began, Thoreau formally took up the profession of poet. Captained by Emerson, the Transcendentalists started a magazine, The Dial. Its inaugural issue, dated July 1840, carried Thoreau's poem "Sympathy" and his essay on the Roman poet Aulus Persius Flaccus. The Dial published more of Thoreau's poems and then, in July 1842, the first of his outdoor essays, "Natural History of Massachusetts." Though disguised as a book review, it showed that a nature writer of distinction was in the making. Then followed more lyrics, and fine ones, such as "To the Maiden in the East," and another nature essay, remarkably felicitous, "A Winter Walk." The Dial ceased publication with the April 1844 issue, having published a richer variety of Thoreau's writing than any other magazine ever would.

In 1840 Thoreau fell in love with and proposed marriage to an attractive visitor to Concord named Ellen Sewall. She accepted his proposal but then immediately broke off the engagement at the insistence of her parents. He remained a bachelor for life. During two periods, 1841-43 and 1847-48, he stayed mostly at the Emersons' house. In spite of Emerson's hospitality and friendship, however, Thoreau grew restless; his condition was accentuated by grief over the death of his brother John, who died of tetanus in January 1842 after cutting his finger. Later that year Thoreau became a tutor in the Staten Island household of Emerson's brother, William, while trying to cultivate the New York literary market. Thoreau's literary activities went indifferently, however, and the effort to conquer New York failed. Confirmed in his distaste for city life and disappointed by his lack of success, he returned to Concord in late 1843.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Henry David Thoreau | Biography, Civil Disobedience, Walden, Books, Beliefs, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Henry David Thoreau, American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher renowned for having lived the doctrines of Transcendentalism as recorded in his masterwork, Walden (1854), and for having been a vigorous advocate of civil liberties, as evidenced in the essay 'Civil Disobedience' (1849).

# data[].attributes.body
Thoreau was a man who preferred to spend his time alone and developing his own thoughts. He always stood in his own position. He thought that every person was responsible for their own decisions and to create their own identity.

Transcendentalism is a philosophy that believes the two main things in life are nature and the soul. Everything is below nature and the soul can be defined by nature.

https://thoreau.library.ucsb.edu/thoreau_life.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Elizabeth Witherell, with Elizabeth Dubrulle

THOREAU'S EARLY YEARS

Henry Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, where his father, John, was a shopkeeper. John moved his family to Chelmsford and Boston, following business opportunities. In 1823 the family moved back to Concord where John established a pencil-making concern that eventually brought financial stability to the family. Thoreau's mother, Cynthia Dunbar, took in boarders for many years to help make ends meet. Thoreau's older siblings, Helen and John, Jr., were both schoolteachers; when it was decided that their brother should go to Harvard College, as had his grandfather before him, they contributed from their teaching salaries to help pay his expenses, at that time about $179 a year.

Harvard put heavy emphasis on the classics--Thoreau studied Latin and Greek grammar or composition for three of his four years. He also took courses in mathematics, English, history, and mental, natural, and intellectual philosophy. Modern languages were voluntary, and Thoreau chose to take Italian, French, German, and Spanish. He was never happy about the teaching methods used at Harvard-- Ralph Waldo Emerson is supposed to have remarked that most of the branches of learning were taught at Harvard, and Thoreau to have replied, "Yes, indeed, all the branches and none of the roots" (Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970], 51)--but he did appreciate the lifelong borrowing privileges at Harvard College Library for which his degree qualified him.

ASPIRING WRITER

He returned to Concord after his graduation in 1837 and took up the profession of teaching, first at the district school and then in a school he opened with his brother John. He had already begun to think of himself as a writer, however, and when he and John had to close their school in 1841 Thoreau accepted an offer to stay with neighboring Emerson's family and earn his keep as a handyman while he concentrated on his writing.

Thoreau knew himself to be a writer from the time he graduated from Harvard. He had begun keeping a journal in 1837 and had probably started writing poetry earlier than that; he also wrote and published essays and reviews. He soon found, however, that he would have to earn his living in some other way.

GETTING A LIVING

For a steady income, he relied on two sources: the family pencil business and his own practice as a surveyor. The Thoreau family became involved in manufacturing pencils in the 1820s, and Thoreau used his talent as an engineer to improve the product. He invented a machine that ground the plumbago for the leads into a very fine powder and developed a combination of the finely ground plumbago and clay that resulted in a pencil that produced a smooth, regular line. He also improved the method of assembling the casing and the lead. Thoreau pencils were the first produced in America that equaled those made by the German company, Faber, whose pencils set the standard for quality. In the 1850s, when the electrotyping process of printing began to be used widely, the Thoreaus shifted from pencil-making to supplying large quantities of their finely ground plumbago to printing companies. Thoreau continued to run the company after his father's death in 1859. Characteristically, Thoreau put the business letters and invoices associated with the company to a second use as scrap paper for lists and notes, and drafts of his late unfinished natural history essays.

Thoreau taught himself to survey; he had, as Emerson noted in his eulogy, "a natural skill for mensuration," and he was very good at the work. In addition to working for the town of Concord, he surveyed house and wood lots around Concord for landowners who were having property assessed and those wanting to settle boundary disputes with their neighbors. In 1859, he was hired by a group of farmers who filed suit against the owners of the Billerica Dam, claiming that the dam raised the water level in the river and destroyed the farmers' meadow lands. To help support the claim, Thoreau collected evidence from many sources. He interviewed people with long experience of the river, took extensive measurements of the water level at various points along its course, and inspected all of the river's bridges. He recorded his findings in a large chart and transferred appropriate information to an existing survey of the river that he had traced. The dispute was a bitter one, arousing ill-feeling in the town: Thoreau reported in his February 17, 1860, journal entry that one of those he interviewed testified in court that the river was "dammed at both ends and cursed in the middle."

He also collected specimens for Louis Agassiz, who had brought the study of natural history to Harvard after Thoreau graduated, but he was not compensated for this work. He lectured several times a year at lyceums and private homes from Maine to New Jersey. These lectures were important in his process of composition--most of the ideas and themes in his essays and books were first presented to the public in lectures--but they were not lucrative.

In 1847, responding to a request from the secretary of his Harvard class, he described his various employments: "I am a Schoolmaster--a Private Tutor, a Surveyor--a Gardener, a Farmer--a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster" ( The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode [New York: New York University Press, 1958], 186). He generalized about the advantage of making just enough money to supply his limited needs in the essay "Life without Principle": "Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity" ( Reform Papers, 160).

TRANSCENDENTALISM

Thoreau and the Transcendentalist movement in New England grew up together. Thoreau was nineteen years old when Emerson publishedNature, an essay that articulates the philosophical underpinnings of the movement. Transcendentalism began as a radical religious movement, opposed to the rationalist, conservative institution that Unitarianism had become. Many of the movement's early proponents were or had been Unitarian ministers, Emerson among them.

They had found Unitarianism wanting both spiritually and emotionally, and, beginning in the late 1820s, had expressed the need for and conviction of a more personal and intuitive experience of the divine, one available to every person. "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face;" wrote Emerson in Nature, "we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"

The Transcendentalists assumed a universe divided into two essential parts, the soul and nature. Emerson defined the soul by defining nature: "all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE." A belief in the reliability of the human conscience was a fundamental Transcendentalist principle, and this belief was based upon a conviction of the immanence, or indwelling, of God in the soul of the individual. "We see God around us, because he dwells within us," wrote William Ellery Channing in 1828; "the beauty and glory of God's works are revealed to the mind by a light beaming from itself."

This conviction of immanence enabled Thoreau to write, in "Civil Disobedience," "The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right" ( Reform Papers, 65), and it supported his intense and particular interest in nature, in which the divine force is also revealed. As a reflection of God, nature expressed symbolically the spiritual world that worked beyond the physical one. Transcendentalism can be seen as the religious and intellectual expression of American democracy: all men had an equal chance of experiencing and expressing divinity directly, regardless of wealth, social status, or politics.

Initially because of Emerson's presence, Concord was a significant intellectual and cultural center in Thoreau's time. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Bronson Alcott lived there, as did William Ellery Channing the Younger. Margaret Fuller visited Emerson often, and Franklin Sanborn boarded with the Thoreau family in the 1850s. Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Horace Greeley were also members of the circle of friends.

Thoreau was respected within this circle, but he was always a prickly individualist. He cared little for group activities, whether political or religious, and even avoided organized reform movements until the moral imperative of abolition commanded his attention. In eulogizing Thoreau, Emerson said, "There was somewhat military in his nature, not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition."

INDIVIDUALISM

In "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau expressed his belief in the power and, indeed, the obligation of the individual to determine right from wrong, independent of the dictates of society: "any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one" ( Reform Papers, 74). While many of his contemporaries espoused this view, few practiced it in their own lives as consistently as Thoreau. Thoreau exercised his right to dissent from the prevailing views in many ways, large and small. He worked for pay intermittently; he cultivated relationships with several of the town's outcasts; he lived alone in the woods for two years; he never married; he signed off from the First Parish Church rather than be taxed automatically to support it every year.

Thoreau encouraged others to assert their individuality, each in his or her own way. When neighbors talked of emulating his lifestyle at the pond, he was dismayed rather than flattered.

I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course. ( Walden, 71)

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. ( Walden, 326)

Thoreau also believed that independent, well-considered action arose naturally from a questing attitude of mind. He was first and foremost an explorer, of both the world around him and the world within him.

be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. ( Walden, 321)

Thoreau's celebration of solitude was a natural outgrowth of his commitment to the idea of individual action. His neighbors frequently saw him heading out for his regular afternoon walk which took him to every stream and meadow in Concord and the surrounding towns. Contemporaries attest that Thoreau was gregarious, and he left an extensive correspondence which demonstrates the depth and perseverance of his friendships. And although he had many visitors at Walden, much of the time he was alone, a condition he savored.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. ( Walden, 135)

the man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready ( Walden, 72)

MATERIALISM

Allying himself with an ancient tradition of asceticism, Thoreau considered the ownership of material possessions beyond the basic necessities of life to be an obstacle, rather than an advantage. He saw that most people measured their worth in terms of what they owned, and stood this common assumption on its head.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. ( Walden, 5)

a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. ( Walden, 82)

Thoreau proposed to determine what was basic to human survival, and then to live as simply as possible.

By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. ( Walden, 12)

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind ( Walden, 14)

my greatest skill has been to want but little. ( Walden, 69)

He grew some of his own food, including beans, potatoes, peas, and turnips. He ate wild berries and apples, and occasionally a fish that he had caught, and once killed and cooked a woodchuck that had ravaged his bean-field. He so arranged his affairs that he had to work only a little at a time for his upkeep, and he kept a broad margin to his life for reading, thinking, walking, observing, and writing.

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. ( Walden, 69)

It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. ( Walden, 71)

TECHNOLOGY AND PROGRESS

Thoreau, himself an inventor and an engineer of sorts, was fascinated by technology, and the mid-nineteenth century saw a series of inventions that would radically change the world, such as power looms, railroads, and the telegraph. But these inventions were products of a larger movement, the industrial revolution, in which Thoreau saw the potential for the destruction of nature for the ends of commerce. In Thoreau's view, technology also provoked an excitement that was counterproductive because it served as a distraction from the important questions of life.

perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. ( Walden, 21)

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. ( Walden, 52)

The railroad was made the symbol of technology, and the language Thoreau uses to describe it expressed his ambivalence.

I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes, and with the giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied! ( Walden, 116-117)

NATURE

Thoreau was a dedicated, self-taught naturalist, who disciplined himself to observe the natural phenomena around Concord systematically and to record his observations almost daily in his Journal. The Journal contains initial formulations of ideas and descriptions that appear in Thoreau's lectures, essays, and books; early versions of passages that reached final form in Walden can be found in the Journal as early as 1846. Thoreau's observations of nature enrich all of his work, even his essays on political topics. Images and comparisons based on his studies of animal behavior, of the life cycles of plants, and of the features of the changing seasons illustrate and enliven the ideas he puts forth in Walden.

All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him,--for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl,--wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance,--I never saw one walk,--and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time,--for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. ( Walden, 273-274)

The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire,--"et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata,"--as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame;--the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below. . . . So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity. ( Walden, 310-311)

Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it might have tinged my employments and life. ( Walden, 202)

The love of nature that is evident in Thoreau's descriptions in Walden is one of the most powerful aspects of the book. The environmental movement of the past thirty years has embraced Thoreau as a guiding spirit, and he is valued for his early understanding of the idea that nature is made up of interrelated parts. He is considered by many to be the father of the environmental movement.

BEFORE AND AFTER WALDEN

Walden is Thoreau's best-known book, but other works of his written both before and after Walden have met with favorable responses. All of his writing except his poetry is expository--he wrote no fiction--and much of it is built on the framework of the journey, short or long, external or interior. A Week, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and the essays "A Winter Walk," "A Walk to Wachusett," and "A Yankee in Canada," for example, are all structured as traditional travel narratives. The speaker--and it is useful to remember that almost all of Thoreau's published essays and books were first presented as lectures--sets out from home in each case, and the reader experiences the wonders of each new place with him, sharing the meditations it inspires, and finally returning with him to Concord with a deeper understanding of both native and foreign places and of the journeying self. Other essays take the reader on different kinds of journeys--through the foliage of autumn ("Autumnal Tints"), through the cultivated and wild orchards of history ("Wild Apples"), through the life-cycle of a plot of land as one species of tree gives way to another ("The Succession of Forest Trees").

Nature is Thoreau's first great subject; the question of how we should live is his second. One series of his essays deals with issues of personal exploration and renewal. In the 1830s and 1840s a wave of reform movements of all kinds swept New England. The issues involved ranged from women's rights to temperance, from education to religion, from diet to sex. In general, Thoreau did not support reform movements; after he was invited to join the model community at Brook Farm, he wrote in his Journal, "As for these communities--I think I had rather keep batchelor's hall in hell than go to board in heaven.--" The one movement with which he finally could not resist an alliance was abolitionism. Although he wrote in Walden,

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. (7)

and was at first reluctant to speak at abolitionist rallies because he felt he was expected to follow certain formulas, he later gave several impassioned lectures in response to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and in support of the activities of John Brown. Considering his neighbors' dismissive responses to Brown at the news of his death, Thoreau wrote,

I hear another ask, Yankee-like, "What will he gain by it?" as if he expected to fill his pockets by this enterprise. Such a one has no idea of gain but in this worldly sense. If it does not lead to a "surprise" party, if he does not get a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. "But he won't gain any thing by it." Well, no, I don't suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year round; but then he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul--and such a soul!--when you do not. No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to. ("A Plea for Captain John Brown," Reform Papers, 119)

Thoreau's most famous essay is "Civil Disobedience," published in 1849 as "Resistance to Civil Government." The incident that provoked him to write it took place in July 1846, while he was living at Walden. Coming into town to have a pair of shoes repaired, he was arrested for non-payment of the poll tax assessed against every voter, and spent a night in jail. He was released the next day, after one of his relatives, probably an aunt, paid what was owed, but the event gave him the impetus to attack the government in a classic antiwar, antislavery piece that gave support to the passive resistance of Mohandas Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other twentieth-century conscientious objectors.

Some critics now consider Thoreau's Journal his most innovative and exciting work. In it he was able to show his thoughts in their natural relation to one another, not forced into a thematic arrangement, or stretched or lopped to fit the constraints of formal exposition. The natural alternation of observation and reflection provided a rhythm that suited his temperament and style. He usually walked in the mornings and, using field notes that were almost a shorthand to remind him of what he had observed, wrote in the afternoons, although he sometimes postponed the composition and wrote several days' entries at once.

Thoreau's careful observations of the cycles of growing plants, of water levels in the local rivers and ponds, of fluctuating temperatures, and of many other natural phenomena are recorded in his Journal. They became the basis for a series of lists and charts that provided precise information for several essays in Transcendental natural history that remained unfinished at his death, and that show him developing another kind of writing--more scientific than his excursions but no less poetic.

This essay was written in 1995 for an exhibit commemorating the 150th anniversary of Thoreau's move to Walden Pond and his writing of the American classic, Walden; it has been updated for inclusion here. References are to Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) and to Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).

Translations of this essay

For a version of this essay in Estonian, translated by Karolin Lohmus in 2017, go to ELU LÕPUKS KORDA HENRY DAVID THOREAU.

For a version in Ukrainian, translated by Mary Davidson in 2019, go to [Ukranian translation].

For a version in Russian, translated by Victor Rudnev in 2019, go to [Russian translation].

Added October 2017; revised April 2019

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
a week on the concord and merrimack rivers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Extensive site devoted to the writings, philosophy, life of Henry David Thoreau; created by The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, definitive edition of Thoreau's works, directed by Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Contains biography, bibliography, research and manuscript material, links to related sites (on American literature, Transcendentalism, nature writing, natural history, environment).

# data[].attributes.body
Who was Henry david thoreau: was an American philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist

why was he important: contributor to the American literary and philosophical movement known as New England transcendentalism

What did he do: he wrote Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) and “Civil Disobedience” (1849

What did he write:Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) and “Civil Disobedience” (1849)

What did Henry do at the pond: explored Walden Woods and recorded his observations on nature in his Journal.

What was Henry trying to accomplish at the pond: acquire a better appreciation of nature and find an escape from the surrounding world.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.pbs.org/video/thoreau-at-walden-pond-au0mlo/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Windows to the Wild | Thoreau At Walden Pond | Season 13 | Episode 7 | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Willem Lange visits Walden Pond where he discovers what life was really like for Thoreau.

# data[].attributes.body
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”
“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

# data[].attributes.body
This Padlet is set up to allow you to place each post anywhere on the page. Click and drag to rearrange. The posts are getting stacked far down the page. Spread them out and group them by topic!

# data[].attributes.body
Lots of video resources too!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience

# data[].attributes.body
Architects are VISUAL THINKERS and COMMUNICATORS.  Post useful images for the topics and project.
We are starting to add links...https://www.mass.gov/locations/walden-pond-state-reservation
Keep doing that!

# data[].attributes.body
Thoreau was friends with other Romanticism writers, ex. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott (Louisa May Alcott’s father)

Thoreau spent one night in jail because he refused to pay his taxes for six years in protest of the government

Thoreau was a graduate of Harvard

He managed his father’s pencil company for awhile

Source:

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/82020/11-simple-facts-about-henry-david-thoreau

# data[].attributes.body
Henry David Thoreau was an American writer and naturalist. He lived during the Romantic period, where literature and art was driven by the ideas of national pride, individuality, belief in inherent good, and reconnecting with nature. While the movement started in Europe, it spread to America where writers such as Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Thoreau and artists such as Thomas Cole and Edwin Deakon popularized the movement.

Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond was a societal statement about rejecting modern society (especially the government, which Thoreau believed to be too controlling) and returning to a simpler time when nature was valued highly in society, not material things.

links:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thoreau/

https://thoreausociety.org/life-legacy/

https://artincontext.org/romanticism-art/

https://omekalib.bard.edu/exhibits/show/hudson-valley-sublime-romantic/what-is-american-romanticism-

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/82020/11-simple-facts-about-henry-david-thoreau

# data[].attributes.headline
What was Thoreau trying to accomplish at Walden Pond and what did he do?

# data[].attributes.subject
What was Thoreau trying to accomplish at Walden Pond and what did he do?

# data[].attributes.body
For two years, Thoreau lived in a cabin off of Walden Pond. During his time there, he learned to appreciate nature, and he learned the importance of escaping the everyday life every once in a while.

# data[].attributes.body
Thoreau's family ran a business creating the best pencils.

# data[].attributes.body
He was a writer and philosopher of the Transcendentalism movement which focused on nature and human experience. He later became an activist after his time at Walden pond.

# data[].attributes.body
while at Walden's pond he wrote his first book "a week on the concord and Merrimack river"

# data[].attributes.body
He spent 2 years alone in a cabin. He maintained a self sustainable life and engaged throughly with nature. He wrote books based on the experience and how it altered his views on work and leisure.

# data[].attributes.body
Henry David Thoreau was a poet and philosopher.

# data[].attributes.headline
What was Thoreau trying to accomplish at Walden Pond?

# data[].attributes.subject
What was Thoreau trying to accomplish at Walden Pond?

# data[].attributes.body
Thoreau lived at the pond for two years, two months and two days. His idea was to conduct an experiment in simple living, to lead a life according to nature and to determine the real necessities of life.

# data[].attributes.body
Born: July 12, 1817

Death: May 6, 1862
Cause of death: Illness

# data[].attributes.body
During his lifetime Thoreau published two books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, a number of essays and poems, and a few translations.

# data[].attributes.body
Using online resources, investigate the 19th century author Henry David Thoreau.
-Who was he and why was he important?
-What did he do?
-What did he write?

Additionally, focus on Thoreau's time spent at Walden pond.
-What did he do there?
-What was he trying to accomplish?
-How is this event connected to the semester theme of architecture and landscape?