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Understanding 9/11tv Thoreaus Walden Pond CSPAN July 16, 2017 5:50pm-6:01pm EDT
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we showed we are capable of driving our own lives and being in charge of our own destinies. announcer: tonight at 8:00 astern on c-span's "q and a." >> all weekend long, american history tv is joining our comcast and cable partners to showcase the history of concord, massachusetts. to learn more about the cities on our current to her, go to our website. we continue with our look at the history of concord. [nature sounds]
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>> 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 every day just staggered by a landscape as humble as this, takes a little getting used to.
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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. 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 after that. his friend, ralph waldo emerson, had not long before bought the property we are standing on as a woodlot, the soil around walden was not good for much except growing trees.
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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 had been thinking about for several years. 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, they were both very young. but they took a trip by boat up to new hampshire and loosely the thread that runs through a week on the concorde and marymac which is the book that he wrote.
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while he was here, it is easy to imagine that thoreau was all alone. if you read the book, you 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. it is only a little over a mile away, especially to take the railroad up there. you are in town in no time. he 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, was 10 x 15 feet, which is fairly substantial space, about the size of most craftsmen's workshops in that period.
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you can get a lot done in 10 x 15 feet and it was sufficient for thoreau. not immediately, but he soon planted a field of beans, and tried to get by in part on them. for the rest of his living, it was the supplies he would get from town, like rice and things like that. when he came to walden, he had a set of ideas about what wild mess is, not wilderness, but ness.
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part of the exercise in coming to walden was to remove himself from culture. that sounds sort of drastic, but a good example would be that he went to tahiti and part of the reason he went there was to put all of 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 neighbors. at that point historically, there had been other people living out here, but they were for the most part on the way out when he was 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 were worked into some of the early drafts and the lectures he
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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 publisher get rid of that subtitle eventually. it 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. it was just two years, but walden the book was not and went until 1854
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through many different drafts. in the interim he took up a new methodology of observation around 1851, and 1852. he took up a new way it of observing the world and a lot of that is reflected in the final draft of walden. so it takes some exercise, intellectual exercise to pick apart those threads and figure out what it is he's up to while actually out here. thann was more successful is first book about the subject. 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 he ended up being responsible for the walden sold but better than that. it only went through one edition
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during his lifetime, but it did 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 awed response to the remarkable facts of man and nature, as the way he put it. if leaders take that away that was good enough for him. if they thought about the relationship between what they do to make a living, and what their life consisted of, i think he would have counted that as success. >> our cities toward staff
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recently travel to concord, massachusetts. learn more about concord and our tour aton c-span.org/city tour. you are watching american history tv. all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. each week, american history tv's american artifacts visit museums and historic places. up next, we visit the franklin d roosevelt residential library and museum in hyde park, new york for a tour at their permanent exhibit. the libraryardt: was created in 1940 one. it was the first presidential library created and operated by the national archives administration. the library was established by president franklin roosevelt.
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