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    Thoreau on Nature: Sage Words on Finding Harmony with the Natural World
    Thoreau on Nature: Sage Words on Finding Harmony with the Natural World
    Thoreau on Nature: Sage Words on Finding Harmony with the Natural World
    Ebook48 pages39 minutes

    Thoreau on Nature: Sage Words on Finding Harmony with the Natural World

    By Henry David Thoreau and Nick Lyons

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    About this ebook

    How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health!” Henry David Thoreau

    Since his death in 1862, Henry David Thoreau has left an indelible mark on the American mind. A vocal champion of simple living and social equality, he is revered for his tempered prose, gentle words, and wise observations. His most well-known work, Walden, is still read around the world, cherished for both its beautiful writing style and its timeless musings on life, simple living, and nature.

    Collected in Thoreau on Nature: Sage Words on Finding Harmony with the Natural World are some of Thoreau’s most impactful musingsdrawn from the many writings he completed over his lifetime. His work touched on every aspect of living a harmonious life, from respecting your neighbors, whether human or animal, to the joys of a simplified life, free of clutter and distractions. Thoreau on Nature will undoubtedly be an essential resource for anyone seeking to find peace and balance in life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateNov 24, 2015
    ISBN9781634504782
    Thoreau on Nature: Sage Words on Finding Harmony with the Natural World
    Author

    Henry David Thoreau

    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American author and naturalist. A leading figure of Transcendentalism, he is best remembered for Walden, an account of the two years he spent living in a cabin on the north shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, and for Civil Disobedience, an essay that greatly influenced the abolitionist movement and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

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      Book preview

      Thoreau on Nature - Henry David Thoreau

      INTRODUCTION

      A WORD FOR NATURE

      I wish to speak a word for Nature, Thoreau begins his fine essay Walking—and adds, for absolute freedom and wildness. He did so, with passion and vision, in his important books, his essays and talks, and in the thousands of pages of journal entries that posthumously yielded a trove of brilliant unpublished prose.

      Thoreau’s ideas about our relationship with the natural world, written more than one hundred and fifty years ago, have never been more valuable to our lives than they are today. He never advises that we build a cabin in the woods and live alone, as he did for a time. But every word he wrote reminds us to make our lives and our understanding much closer to the natural world and to protect our environment whenever possible.

      He is remembered today for his firm commitment to civil disobedience as a response to governments that his conscience told him were immoral in some central respect, and for his uncompromising stands against slavery, against Northern lassitude and compliance with the Fugitive Slave Law, and in defense of John Brown. But mostly we remember his lifelong devotion—as one of its seminal advocates and most memorable spokesmen—to the natural world. In his two books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and his classic Walden and essays like Walking, he lived by his fierce belief that in wildness is the preservation of the world, a phrase that now stands as one of our most iconic conservation maxims.

      Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817, and died in Concord in 1862 at the age of forty-four of tuberculosis. Franklin Sanborn described him as a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose, bluish grey eyes, brown hair, and a ruddy weather beaten face, which reminds me of some shrewd and honest animal’s—some retired philosophical woodchuck or magnanimous fox. . . . He walks with a brisk, rustic air, and never seems tired. He trusted that his corner of the state contained all he needed to know and he explored it minutely, traveling only intermittently and for brief periods to Staten Island to tutor relatives of Emerson, to Eagleswood, New Jersey, where he met Walt Whitman, whom he admired greatly, and to Canada and Maine. Two or three hours’ walking, he said, will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. Early on, he was fortunate to meet his Concord neighbor: Ralph Waldo Emerson, fourteen years his senior, whose family Thoreau would live with as a caretaker for a time.

      Much of Thoreau’s vision had its roots in the Emersonian concept of self reliance and Transcendentalism, and his cabin at Walden Pond was actually built on land owned by Emerson. The two men remained friends until Thoreau’s death—though they quarreled at times—and Emerson’s eulogy and eventual essay on Thoreau is the best contemporary view we have of the man.

      Like Wordsworth, who also influenced his thinking, Thoreau believed from an early age that getting and spending we lay waste our powers, and that consequently, Nothing we see in Nature that is ours. He deplored the despoilers of nature—those who destroyed land, forests, or fauna for profit, like the gold-miners who left the world cut up with foul pits, but also those who diminished their own

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