| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
I first read Walden when l was seventeen. the summer before starting college. at the urging of a high school teacher who sensed that my adolescent mind. brimming with questions, would bene?t from grappling with a truly radical thinker. Much of the book baf?ed me. The tone shifted unpredictably from conversational to prophetic, from jokey to stem, from earthy to mystical. I was bewildered by some of the lengthy sentences, which zigvagged among ideas and images. and l was stumped by the cryptic short ones. which seemed to compress whole paragraphs of meaning into a few words. Not yet having made any big decisions about how to lead my life, I couldn't ?gure out what was troubling this Henry David Thoreau. So what if his neighbors
thought he should use his Harvard degree to land a job and a wife, and then proceed to have kids, buy a
house. get rich. and distribute aims to the poor? Couldn't he just ignore the scolds and go his own way? Not yet having lost a loved one to accident. illness. or old age, I only dimly understood his brood- ing about that amoral process we call nature. So what if armies of red ants and black ants slaugh- tered one another, herons gobbled tadpoles, a dead horse stank up the woods, or a thousand seeds per- ished for each one that took root? What did all that mayhem and waste have to do with us, the owners of souls aiming at heaven ?
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