The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond
Michael Sims
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 1620401975
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Henry David Thoreau is an American intellectual icon; what made him so was the decade between his graduation from Harvard and the years he spent in a cabin he built himself on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land at Walden Pond--the formative decade that turned him into one of America’s most influential writers.
In a detailed and textured narrative, Sims brings Thoreau to life--striding across the page like a radical folksinger rather than the curmudgeonly recluse who occupies our mental image of Walden Pond. In this youthful period, he wrote his first book and refined the journal entries that formed the core of his later work,Walden; joined the anti-slavery campaign and studied Native American culture; spent the night in jail that led to his celebrated essay Civil Disobedience, which would inspire the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King; developed a scientific/poetic response to nature; and aligned himself with the Transcendentalism , which questioned assumptions about God, citizenship, and the Industrial Revolution.
Sims relates intimate moments in Thoreau’s daily life--teaching Nathaniel Hawthorne to row a boat; tutoring Emerson’s nephew on Staten Island--and the deep influence of his parents and his beloved older brother, John, whose tragic early death haunted him. Chronicling Thoreau’s youthful transformation, Sims shows how his intellectual development would resonate for the rest of his life, and throughout American literature and history.
afterward, in another move as sudden and irrational as his decision to punish the students, Henry resigned his job. He told his superiors that he wouldn’t keep school any longer if he was expected to whip children. Although at the last he had indulged in a paradoxical bout of violence, Henry—always a master of rationalization—managed to tell himself that he had otherwise stood by his principles, renouncing corporal punishment. Perhaps he had also peered into the future and seen a sobering image
companionable. Other students were particularly fond of Henry. Sometimes, as he started home after the school day, one of the younger students would come up to him and take his hand and walk beside him to continue the day’s conversation. John maintained discipline in the classroom, but at recess he was out on the lawn with the students—wrestling with the older boys, turning somersaults. Solemn Henry could look out the window and see John walking across the grass on his hands, with a big grin on
afternoon in Concord in December 1842 that captured my imagination: a twenty-five-year-old Thoreau skating on the Concord River with both Emerson and Sophia’s own newlywed husband, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Emerson skated earnestly and Hawthorne grandly. Thoreau cavorted in what Sophia soon described to a friend as “dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps.” In ancient Greece a dithyramb was a wild choral hymn and dance, especially one dedicated to Bacchus. Thoreau didn’t drink alcohol, but otherwise
banks, showing every leaf, yet giving the wild beauty of the whole scene;—then there are passages in the article of cloudy and dreamy metaphysics, partly affected, and partly the natural exhalations of his intellect;—and also passages where his thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into spontaneous verse, as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in him. There is a basis of good sense and moral truth, too, throughout the article, which also is a reflection of his character; for
western bank of the Sudbury River, two miles from the village. The site had stayed romantically evocative in his memory from his young days on the river, when from his boat he could see no house, only a phalanx of red maples, but could hear a dog barking as if guarding something. As he considered the farm for a home, he decided he liked its seclusion, its tumbledown fences, and his awareness that there had been a long period between its last inhabitant and himself—the same reasons why it would