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Understanding 9/11tv Thoreaus Walden Pond CSPAN July 15, 2017 12:55pm-1:05pm EDT
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the public. when people walk through this house, this is like walking through the book. if you could really go to hogwarts after you read harry potter but it is not a real place and this is. >> designated a national historic landmark in 1962, walden pond is considered the birthplace of the conservation movement. for two years, writer henry david thoreau live on its shores inspiring his book walden. up next, concorde museum curator david wood describes thoreau's reasons for living at the pond and his experience there.
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[nature sounds] >> it is interesting that very often readers of walden when they first come to the pond are a little puzzled, maybe a little disappointed because when you read walden, you really are expecting to be just amazed at the landscape. the fact that thoreau could be
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every day just staggered by a landscape as humble as this, takes a little getting used to. it was just a little pond and now it is an icon of american literary history. henry david thoreau first came here as a little boy and he remembered that excursion long after so he came here with his family, actually to gather sand for his father's sandpaper manufacturing enterprise, but he came here to live. it was on july 4, 1845, that he came to live and was out here for two years. his friend, ralph waldo emerson, had not long before bought the
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property we are standing on as a woodlot, the soil around walden was not good for much except growing trees. he asked emerson if he could put up a structure here and stay here a while and emerson said sure. his principal purpose was to find a sort of writers studio for himself. it was something he had been thinking about for several years that the specific project he had in mind was a book in memoriam to his brother, john, who died in 1841. the book is about a trip he took with john in 1839, very young, but they took a trip by boat up to new hampshire and loosely the
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thread that runs through a week in the concorde and marymac which is the book that he wrote. it is easy to imagine that thoreau was all alone. he would think he was halfway up the slopes of mount cut epoxy or something, off at the end of the world somewhere but he is not. he is connected to town. only a little over a mile away especially if you take railroad up there and you are in town in no time and you had lots of visitors out here, it is not that he was isolated, but he had plenty of solitude he wanted as a thinker and a writer. the house he built, he tells us in the first chapter of walden, 10 x 15 feet, which is fairly
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substantial space, about the size of most craftsmen's workshops in that period. you can get a lot done in 10 x 15 feet and it was sufficient for thoreau. ..
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he went to tahiti and part of the reason he went there was to put europe behind him and that was something emerson suggested in a number of places, but he thought it was important for americans to put that behind them and one good way to do it is to come out and live by yourself in a house with no number-- neighbors at that point historically, there had been other people living out here, but they were the most park on when he was out here. not long after he came to walden, that idea of the book, walden started to occur to him and if you look his journals from that period, there are passages clipped from it that
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were worked into some of the early drafts and the lectures he gave on the subject. right in the beginning of "walden" the book he says it was curiosity on the parts of his neighbor. they wanted to know if he was lonely, why aren't you afraid out there and so on and so he started answering those questions and it kind of grew from there, but of course, it was not just a narrative of my experience subtitled life in the woods and he had the pus-- publisher get rid of that subtitle eventually. is really wasn't just a narrative of what it's like to live in the woods. it's obviously a more complicated book than that. it was walden the experience was
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just two years, but walden the book was not published until 1864 and in the interim he took up a new methodology of observation around 1851, 52. he took up a new way it of observing the world and a lot of that is reflected in the final draft, so it takes some exercise , intellectual exercise to pick apart those threads and figure out what it is he's up to a while actually out here. walden was more successful. in fact deals are always made with the publisher for a week which was the book that came to walden to write, which was if it didn't sell he would pay for the publication, so we ended up being responsible for the publication, but the book sold
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better than that. it only went through one addition during his lifetime, but it didn't sell much better than a week. one of the things he's careful to point out in the text of walden is that he doesn't really mean for anyone to imitate his experiment. he talks about it as an experiment. rather, i think he wanted his readers to first have the sort of response to the remarkable facts of man and nature the way thorough put it. if leaders take that away that was good enough for him. if they thought about the relationship between what they do to to get living and what
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