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Understanding 9/11tv Thoreaus Walden Pond CSPAN July 16, 2017 11:24am-11:34am EDT
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it's like walking through the book. someone once said you should go to hogwarts after you read harry potterbut hogwarts is not a real place . this was. >>. >> designated a national historic landmark in 1962, walden pond is considered the birthplace of the conservation movement. >> for two years writer henry david thoreau lived on his chores inspiring walden. next, concorde museum curator david wood describes thoreau's reasons for living at the pond and his experience there. >>. >>.
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>> 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 every day staggered by a
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landscape as humble as this. that takes a little getting used to so it was just a little pond. and now it's an icon of american literary history. henry david thoreau first came out here as a little boy and he remembered that excursionlong after but he came here with his family , actually to gather sand for his father's sandpaper manufacturing enterprise and but he came here to live. it was actually on july 4, 1845 that he came to live and then was out here for two years after that. as his friend ralph waldo emerson had not long before boughtproperty we are standing on now . as the wood one, basically.
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the soil around walden isn't good for much except growing trees and he asked emerson if he could put up a structure here and stay here for a while and emerson said sure. his principal purpose was to find a sort of writers studio for himself. it was something he'd been thinking about for several years and the specific project he had in mind was a book and memorial to his brother john who had died in 1841. the book is about a trip that he took with john in 1839, they were both very young but they took a trip i vote up to new hampshire and that's loosely the red that runs through a week on the
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concorde and merrimack which is the book that he wrote here. while he was here it's easy to imagine that thoreau was all alone and if you read the book you would think he's like halfway up the slopes of the mountain or something, that he was off at the end of the world somewhere. but he's not, he's connected to town, it's only a little over a mile away, especially if you take the railroad cut there, you are in town in no time and he had lots and lots of visitors while he was out here. so it's not that he was isolated but he had plenty of the solitude that he wanted as a thinker and a writer. >> the house he built, he held in the first chapter of walden was 10 my 15 feet. which is a fairly substantial space. about the size of most
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craftsmen's workshops in that period. you can get a lot done and by 15 feet and it was sufficient for thoreau. he not immediately but he soon planted a field of beans and tried to get by in part on them. but you know, for the rest of his living it was a supply that he would get from town, rice and things like that. thoreau came to walden a set of ideas about what wildness is, not the wilderness but wildness, that's what interested him. part of the exercise incoming walden was to remove himself from culture, that sounds
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sort of drastic but you do catch artists and every now and again, gauguin is a good example. he went to tahiti and part of the reason he went there was to put all of your e-, this is something that emerson suggested in a number of places but that he thought it was important for americans to put that behind them. one good way to do it is to come out and live by yourself in a house with no neighbors at that point. historically, there have been other people living out here but they were for the most part on when thoreau was out here. not long after thoreau came to walden, the idea of the book walden started to occur to him and if you look at his journals from that training there are passages clipped from it that just were worked
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into some of the early drafts and the lectures that he gave on the subject. right in the beginning of walden the book he says that it was curiosity on the parts of his neighbors. they wanted to know if he was lonely, if he wanted wasn't too afraid out there and so on and so he started answering those questions at lyceum lectures and it kind of grew from there but of course it changed, it was not just a narrative of my experience but the book is sometimes life in the woods and so thoreau had the publisher get rid of that subtitle eventually. it really wasn't just a narrative of what it's like to live out in the woods as probably the more complicated book than that. it was walden the experience which was a few years but
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walden the book was a much longer project, it wasn't published until 1854. it went through seven different drafts so in the interim, thoreau took up new methodologies of observation around 1851, 52. he took up a new way of observing the world and a lot of that is reflected in the final draft of walden so it takes a little, it takes some exercise and intellectual exercise to pick apart those threads and figure out what it is that he's up to while he's actually out. >> walden was more successful than a week on the concorde and merrimack, and in fact the deal thoreau made with his publisher for a week which was the book he came to walden to write was that it didn't sell, thoreau would pay for the publication so he ended up being responsible for the publication. and but walden, it sold better than that.
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>> it only went through one condition during thoreau's lifetime but it did so much better than a week. >> one of the things thoreau is careful to point out in the text is that he doesn't really mean for anybody to imitate his experiment and he talks about it as an experiment. x rather, i think he wanted his readers to first have the sort of odd response to the remarkable fact of man and nature as the way thoreau put it. if the readers take that away, that was good enough for him. if they thought about the relationship between what they do to get a living and what their life consists of, then i think he would have counted that as a success. >>
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