Category: Thoreau

Books

~ George Crawford ~ 2 Comments

Books:

 DSC_0006“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

Build Your Foundation

~ George Crawford ~ 2 Comments

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

Hendrik_Gerritsz
Hendrik Gerritsz Pot – “Flora’s Wagon of Fools” circa 1637.

Build your dream, justify it later…

No, Thoreau Was Not a Hypocrite

~ George Crawford ~ Leave a comment

A good read and observations about some shallow and poorly thought-out attacks on the philosopher of “taking it easy”.

thoreau1I think, like many reactionary arguments, many have missed the point.

Amien Essif's avatarThe Gazine

Walden_Thoreau2

Your average English major of the past decade has decided to dismiss the body of Henry David Thoreau’s work with one scandalous factoid: Thoreau’s mother did his laundry. For some reason, even the well-read think that this is a relevant fact, as if his dependence on friends and family cancelled out his transcendental conclusions.

But you don’t have to be a die-hard Thoreauvian to see the problem with this mama’s-boy attack. Though my dog-eared Walden perpetually floats to the top of my bedside stack, it is not out of blind respect for the Father of Chill that I defend the guy. My only claim to allegiance is that I read his book.

One Richard Smith of the Thoreau Society has my back:

Richard Smith, a die-hard Thoreauvian. Richard Smith, a die-hard Thoreauvian.

It should be obvious to anyone who’s read Walden that Thoreau was not a hermit.  Just the chapter called “Visitors” is…

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Another from Thoreau

~ George Crawford ~ Leave a comment

Part of a beautiful essay by Henry David Thoreau

Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

Read the rest of Walking here.

Excerpt from “Walking”

~ George Crawford ~ Leave a comment

Part of a beautiful essay by Henry David Thoreau

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough—that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

Read the rest of Walking here.

Simplify

~ George Crawford ~ 1 Comment

More great thoughts from Henry David Thoreau on simplifying.

“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.”

— Henry David Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, March 27th, 1848

 

Walking (Henry David Thoreau)

~ George Crawford ~ Leave a comment

I WISH to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I am re-reading much from the literature of my youth.  I was heavily influenced by the transcendentalists and nature writers (Emerson, Thoreau, Muir).

Read the rest of Walking here.