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Understanding 9/11tv Thoreaus Walden Pond CSPAN August 19, 2017 7:20pm-7:32pm EDT
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comfort is so multifaceted and depending on one's interest, you could easily just bypass an author's home because you can read the book but there is something about this particular book and this particular house that is unique in the sense that as far as i know, it is the only piece of literature that not only has maintained its importance to 70 people, it has never been out of print, widely translated, well over 50 translations. every beloved by people of all cultures. and it was written and set in a house that is now open to the public. when people walk through this house they often say to me this is like walking through the book. someone once said if you could really go to hogwarts if you read harry potter. hogwarts is not a real place and this is. >> our encore presentation of some of the stops along the
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c-span cities to from this past year continues. as we take you to concord massachusetts. [inaudible conversations] [birds chirping] >>. [birds chirping] >> it is interesting that very often readers of walden, when
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you first come to the pond are a little puzzled may be a little disappointed because when you read walden, you really are expecting to be just amazed at the landscape. and the fact that henry david thoreau could be every day, just staggered by a landscape as humble as this, that takes a little getting used to. it was just a little pond. now it is an icon of american literary history. >> henry david thoreau first came out here is a little boy. he remembered that excursion long after but he came here with his family, actually together sand for his father's sandpaper manufacturing enterprise. and he came here to live.
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it was actually on the 4th of july in 1845 that he came to live and then was out here for two years after that. and his friend ralph emerson had not long before bought the property where we are standing right now. as a woodlock basically, the soil around walden wasn't good for much except growing trees. 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 sort of a writers studio for himself. it was something he had been thinking about for several years. and the specific project that he had in mind was a book in
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memoriam 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 by boat up to new hampshire and that is loosely the thread that runs through a week on the concord and merrimack which is the book that he wrote here. while he was here, it is sort of easy to imagine that he was all alone and if you read the book you would think that he is like halfway up the slopes of a mountain or something that he was at the end of the world somewhere. but he is not. he is connected to the town, it is only a little over one mile away. especially if you take the railroad there you are in town and in no time.
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then he had lots and lots of visitors while he was out here. so it is not that he was isolated but he had plenty of the solitude that he wanted as a thinker and a writer. doubt that he built he tells us in the first chapter was 10 by 15 feet which is fairly substantial space. it is about the size of most craftsmen workshops in that period. you can get a lot done in that space and it was sufficient for henry david thoreau. not immediately but he soon planted a field of beans and he tried to get by in part on them. for the rest of his living, it
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was supplies that he would get from town, rice and things like that. he came to walden with ideas about what wildness is. after wilderness but wildness. that is what interested him. the part of the exercise in coming to walden was to remove himself from culture. it sounds sort of drastic but you do catch artists at that every now and again. - is a good example he went to tahiti and part of the reason was to put all of europe behind him. and this is something that emerson suggested in a number of places but he thought it was important for americans to put that behind them. one good way to do it was come out and live by yourself in a house with no neighbors.
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at that point. historically, there have been other people living out here but for the most part they were gone when henry david thoreau without hip it after he came to walden the idea of the book walden started to occur to him. if you look in his journal from that. , there are passages clipped from it that worked into some of the early drafts and villages that he gave on the subject. right in the beginning of walden, the book, he says that it was curiosity on part of his neighbors 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 at lectures and kind of grew from there.of course he changed you know it was not just a narrative of my experience that focused
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subtitle life in the woods and he had the publisher get rid of that subtitle eventually. it really was not just a narrative of living on the woods it is obviously more complicated book than that. it was walden, the experience which was just two years but walden the book was a much longer process. it wasn't published until 1854. actually went through seven different drafts. in the interim, he took up a new methodology of observation around the age of 51 or 52. set up a new way of observing the world and a lot of that is reflected in the final draft of walden. it takes a little, and take some exercise. intellectual exercise to pick apart the threads and figure out what it is that he is up to while he's actually out here. walden was more successful in
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fact the deal that he made with the publisher for a week which was the book he came to walden to write was, if it did not sell that henry david thoreau would pay for the publication. answer hand of being responsible for the publication and - but walden sold better than that. it only went through one addition during his lifetime but it did sell much better than a week. one of the things careful to point out in the text of "walden" is that he doesn't really mean for anybody to imitate his experiment. we talked about it as an experiment. rather, i think he wanted his readers to first have the sort of odd response to the
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remarkable fact of man and nature is the way he put it. if readers take that away it was good enough for him. they thought about the relationship between what they do to get a living and what their life consists of than i think he would have counted that as success. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2. television for serious readers. this is our primetime mama. 7:30 p.m. eastern breitbart senior editor at large joel pollock reports of the 2015 presidential election. then at 8:15 pm american university law professor angela j davis explores a us criminal justice systems impact on african-american men. on booktv's "after words" at 10:00 p.m. for breitbart editor - offers his thoughts on the
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limits of free speech. at 11:00 p.m. journalist david - recalls the total solar eclipse of 1878. and at 11:45 pm last month annual libertarian conference freedom best, james o'keefe founder and president of parted veritas on his thoughts on the media. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. now, joel pollak on the 2016 presidential election. >> breitbart news is senior editor at large, joel pollak. take us back to august and how you felt about the election. >> i was not optimistic about trump is for any republican chances against hillary clinton. but my editor predicted differently. he predicted that donald trump would not only win the nomination but go on to win the presidency.
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