Citizen Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

Description

This set of timeless essays from the quintessential American shares his valuable philosophies on nature, solitude, slavery, religion, politics, fulfilling work, civil responsibilities, and more. WALDEN, Thoreau’s beloved and well-known reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, looks at how the outside world can benefit from renouncing a materialistic way of life. “If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” —Thoreau “If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.” —Thoreau His other essays deal with the social problems of his time: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE applies principles of individualism to civil life, culminating in a call for a life that answers to a power outside of and unaffected by the state. LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE offers his program for a righteous livelihood through ten “commandments.” SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS is based on a speech he gave at an antislavery rally after the reenslavement of fugitive slave Anthony Burns and relates that freedom could not exist while slavery remained. PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JAMES BROWN portrays his kinship to Brown’s abolitionist efforts and anger toward the injustice Brown received. “Thoreau was a great writer, philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practise in himself. . . . He went to gaol for the sake of his principles and suffering humanity. His essay has, therefore, been sanctified by suffering. Moreover, it is written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.” —Mohandas Gandhi “. . . when, in the mid-1950s, the United States Information Service included as a standard book in all their libraries around the world a textbook . . . which reprinted Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience,’ the late Senator Joseph McCarthy succeeded in having that book removed from the shelves—specifically because of the Thoreau essay.” —Walter Harding, in The Variorum Civil Disobedience "I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest." — Martin Luther King, Jr., Autobiography
Foreword by Richard F. Fleck
Walden
Civil Disobedience
Life Without Principle
Slavery in Massachusetts
A Plea for Captain John Brown

Sujets

• 19th Century
• Histoire
• Civil and political rights
• American Civil War
• United States
• History
• Guerre de Sécession
• Henry David Thoreau

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781941821374
• Langue: English

Extrait

CITIZEN THOREAU
CITIZEN THOREAU
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
W ALDEN C IVIL D ISOBEDIENCE L IFE WITHOUT P RINCIPLE S LAVERY IN M ASSACHUSETTS A P LEA FOR C APTAIN J OHN B ROWN
Foreword By
RICHARD FRANCIS FLECK
Foreword 2014 Richard Francis Fleck Front cover photo, top: iStock.com/zrfphoto ; front cover photo, bottom: iStock.com/Pingwin
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862. [Essays. Selections] Citizen Thoreau : Walden, Civil disobedience, Life without principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A plea for Captain John Brown / Henry David Thoreau ; foreword by Richard Francis Fleck.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-941821-20-6 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-941821-39-8 (hardbound)
ISBN 978-1-941821-37-4 (e-book)
I. Title.
PS3042.C58 2014
814 .3-dc23
2014024761
Published by WestWinds Press An imprint of

P.O. Box 56118 Portland, Oregon 97238-6118 503-254-5591 www.graphicartsbooks.com
CONTENTS
Foreword
W ALDEN
C IVIL D ISOBEDIENCE
L IFE WITHOUT P RINCIPLE
S LAVERY IN M ASSACHUSETTS
A P LEA FOR C APTAIN J OHN B ROWN
FOREWORD
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but to so love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
Henry David Thoreau, Economy, Walden
H ENRY D AVID T HOREAU (1817-62) is a complete writer who focuses on human nature, human society, the natural world, both tamed near Concord, Massachusetts, and wild in the Maine woods, and on the individual s relationship to himself and the world around him. Walden, or a Life in the Woods (1854) addresses questions from his townspeople on whether or not he was an idler doing nothing productive and whether or not he was lonely living by himself only a few miles from the village center of Concord. Some modern day critics believe that his answers, especially in the opening chapter of Economy, are self-absorbed with an underdeveloped social sense.
But these critics tend to ignore certain pertinent facts. His critique of his townsmen s provincial behavior is followed with forceful and constructive solutions in the closing chapter Conclusion, as we shall see. His life as writer cannot be considered self-absorbed. Clearly his sense of social responsibility is evidenced by his call to civil resistance against government laws that enslave both free man and slave. He cannot be self-absorbed if his two years, two months, and two days (1845-47) at Walden Pond were not spent idling but writing more than many a professor on sabbatical leave: Thoreau wrote at least one volume of his Journal ; a book dedicated to the memory of his deceased brother, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers ; an early draft of Walden ; and Volume I of his Indian Notebooks for an intended long essay on the values of tribal culture in North America. Is it possible to be self-absorbed and have an intense interest in Native Americans?
Economy in part answers questions from his townspeople as to why on earth he would choose to live alone and not contribute toward the welfare of poor children. The subject of this youthful experiment was Thoreau himself. If he were to write about the agonizing complexities of mid-nineteenth century American society, it was absolutely essential to understand his own self first. As the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote if one is to analyze human culture, first il faut se savoir.
Certainly one piece of advice to Concord townsmen is to get a grip on life and to begin to comprehend who they are. Nothing can be worse than being slave drivers of their own selves by digging their own graves as soon as they are born. It is truly ironic that the local businessman should become his own slave-driver for forty years or so in order to be able to do what he really wants to do in retirement for his few remaining years.
Thoreau, like Edward Abbey of Desert Solitaire fame, asks what are the basic necessities of life? They are not making a bundle of money to buy your spouse socially impressive jewels but rather they are Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel . Simplifying one s life can, indeed, simplify the seeming complexities of the universe. If we simplify our needs, we can simplify our wants. Thoreau writes, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime if we will live simply and wisely. In the chapter Where I lived and What I lived for, he writes with forceful irony that a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. Such is his advice to the Irish immigrant John Fields in Baker Farm. He does not need to work so hard at bogging if he did not consume such luxuries as tea, coffee, butter, milk, and beef. But it is difficult for Thoreau to convince an Irishman to do without the very provisions he lacked back in famine-stricken Ireland.
In Higher Laws the writer Thoreau deftly analyzes his own instincts toward a higher life by recognizing his equally strong propensities toward a primitive, rank, and savage one and reverencing them both. While he had desires at times to devour a woodchuck raw, he knew innately that we are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers.
Though Thoreau may seem self-absorbed and humorless to some, Walden is laced with humor. A few examples can be seen in Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors, where he writes, The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, Hugh Quoil (if I have spelt his name with coil enough). In Brute Neighbors, after watching a battle between red and black ants in the woods, he observes, I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. In the closing chapter Conclusion, he writes, If you are chosen town-clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer; but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless.
As earlier mentioned, the Conclusion offers positive suggestions to those bogged down in pursuing a career with many material benefits. He is reminiscent of Walt Whitman s intense optimism in Song of Myself. Thoreau suggests, Be the Frobisher of your own streams and oceans, and again, However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. Do not go and hang yourself because you are a mere pygmy, but rather be the biggest pygmy that you can. Thoreau reflects that we should realize that money is not required to buy one necessary [thing] of the soul.
Thoreau s shorter essays included in this volume are truly concerned with the betterment of humanity during the dark times of the Mexican Wars (1846-48), the Fugitive Slave Law, and Slavery itself. One critic has stated that Thoreau s essay Civil Disobedience is essentially anarchistic in advocating the rebellion against government based on individual and subjective moral values. This critic declares that Civil Disobedience is lacking in objective correlatives. There are quite a few references to scripture and sacred texts in this essay that tend to contradict the above assertion. Thoreau writes with the following objective correlative that refutes William Paley, an eighteenth-century English utilitarian philosopher: If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This according to Paley would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it.
The federal government has indeed rested the plank of liberty from African slaves; according to Thoreau and the abolitionists, such action was an enormous wrong. But the difference between Thoreau and the abolitionists is that Thoreau refused to pay his taxes to support the Fugitive Slave Law (1847) that enforced the return of a runaway slave in Massachusetts to his owner in Georgia or Alabama or South Carolina. Taxes also supported the Mexican War, and as Thoreau notes, even if you are against war, your tax dollars are not. Therefore Yankee abolitionists should withdraw their support from the government of Massachusetts.
To continue to support war and slavery is to suffer the bleeding of conscience, something far worse than war and blood itself. To support the Fugitive Slave Law of 1847 is essentially to support slavery and slave holders even though the citizen from Massachusetts may not hold slaves of his own. Toward the close of his essay on civil disobedience, Thoreau employs a forceful objective correlative with this question: For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?
It is no small wonder that Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were keen readers and followers of Thoreau s Civil Disobedience in their own historic, peaceful protests in British India and in the United States respectively. They, in turn, strongly influenced the Northern Ireland civil disobedience movement during the troubled times of the 1960s and 1970s when Catholics suffered extreme social and economic discrimination.
Thoreau argues effectively in Life Without Principle that we, as a society, are so incessantly concerned with business profits and the satisfaction of our wants, that we are truly living a life without principle. We need a higher purpose in life th