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Understanding 9/11tv Thoreaus Walden Pond CSPAN August 23, 2017 3:12am-3:25am EDT
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all life is precious. all human beings are important regardless of their accident of birth. then we will be a better society in the long run. >> designated a national historic landmark in 1962, this is considered the birthplace of the conservation movement. for two years, henry david thorough lived on inspiring his book walden. up next, museum curator david would describes his reasons for living at the pond and his experience there.
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[inaudible] >> it's interesting that very often readers of walden, when they first come to the pond are little puzzled, maybe a little disappointed, because when you read walden, you really are expecting to be just amazed at the landscape and the fact that he could be every day just staggered by a landscape as humble as this, that takes a little getting
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used too. so it was just a little pond. now it's an icon of american literary history. henry david thorough first came out here is a little boy. he remembered that excursion long after, but he came here with his family to gather sand for his father's sandpaper manufacturing enterprise, and he came here to live. it was actually on july 4, 1845 that he came to live and was out here for two years after that. at his friend, not long before had bought the property we are standing on now as a woodlot, basically. the soil isn't good for much
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except growing trees. he asked emerson if he could put up a structure here and stay here for a while and they said sure. his principal purpose was to find a sort of writer studio for himself. it was something he had been thinking about for several years and the specific project he had in mind with a book in memoriam to his brother john who had died in 1841. the book is about a trip that he took in john 1839. they were both very young. they took a trip by vote up to new hampshire. that is loosely the thread that runs through a week on merrimack which is the book that he wrote right here.
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while he was here, it's sort of easy to imagine that he was all alone, and if you read the book, you would think he's like halfway up the slopes, he was off at the end of the world somewhere, but he's not. he's connected to the town. it's only a little over a mile away, especially if you take the railroad cut and you're in town in no time and he had lots of visitors while he was out here. so it's not that he was isolated, but he had plenty of the solitude he wanted as a thinker and a writer. the house he built, he tells us in the first chapter of walden was ten by 16 feet. that is a fairly substantial space. it's about the size of most craftsmen workshops in that time.
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you can get a lot done in ten by 15 feet and it was sufficient. not immediately, but he soon planted a field of beans and tried to get by in part on them, but for the rest of his living it was supplies he would get from town, rice and things like that. he came with a set of ideas about what wildness is. not the wilderness, but wildness. that's what interested him. part of the exercise in coming to walden was to remove himself from culture.
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that seems sort of drastic, but you do catch artists at it every now and again. this is a good example, he went to tahiti, and part of the reason he went there was to put all of europe behind him, and this is something that emerson suggested in a number of places, 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 had been other people living out here, but for the most part they were gone when pharaoh was out here. not long after they came to walden, the idea of the book walden started to occur to him. if you look at his journal from that. , there are passages, clips that were worked into some of the early drafts and the
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lectures that he gave on the subject. right in the beginning of walden the book, he says it was curiosity on the part of his neighbors. they wanted to know if he was lonely, if he was afraid and so on. he started answering those questions at lectures. it kind of grew from there. of course it was not just a narrative of my experience of the subtitle life in the woods and so they had the publisher get rid of the subtitle eventually. it really wasn't just a narrative of what it's like to live out in the woods. it's obviously a more complicated book than that. there was walden the experience which was just two years, but walden the book was a much longer part trent project. it wasn't published until 1854
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and went through several different drafts. in the interim they took up a new methodology of observation. he took up a new way observing the world, and a lot of that is reflected in the final draft of walden. it takes a little, it takes some intellectual exercise to pick apart those threads and figure out what it is hello he's up to while he's actually out here. walden was more successful than a week on the concorde in merrimack. the deal he made with his publisher for a week, which was the book he came to write was that if it didn't sell, he would pay for the publication. he ended up being responsible for the publication. walden sold better than that. it only went through one addition during his lifetime,
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but it did so much better. one of the things i was careful to point out in the text of walden is that he doesn't really mean for anybody to imitate his experiment. he talks about it as an experiment. rather, i think he wanted his readers to first have this sort of odd response to the remarkable fact of man and nature. if readers take that away, that was good enough to 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've counte
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