#Thoreau

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"If you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences. Money is not required to buy one necessity for the soul." - Henry David Thoreau, 'Walden'

The title page of the first edition of Thoreau's 'Walden or Life In The Woods'. The illustration is of a small cabin among trees and was drawn by his sister Sophia.

Today in Labor History November 29, 1832: Louisa May Alcott, author, nurse, feminist and abolitionist, was born. Her writing was influenced by the transcendentalists, like Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Longfellow, whom she knew personally. While she was most famous for her book, “Little Women,” she also wrote “Work,” an autobiographical novel that exposed the exploitation of women workers. Poverty forced her to work at a young age as a teacher, seamstress, governess and domestic. During the Civil War, she worked as a nurse and developed typhoid fever. The medicine she took contained mercury, which may have contributed to the autoimmune disorders that plagued her for the rest of her life and that ultimately killed her. She is buried on Author’s Ridge, at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in Concord, near Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne.

…

Portrait of a young Louisa May Alcott, hair parted down the center, eyes looking directly at us, with the follow quote: A real gentleman is as polite a little girl as to a woman.

Henry David Thoreau on Fishing and Birding

“I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did... I speak of fishing only now, for I had long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.” - from Walden (1854)

I began reading Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau several days ago. Then, coincidentally, I watched a movie with family two nights ago where an actor playing a student commented on Walden being boring, having been assigned to read it in middle school. Well, I think it would be a rotten assignment for a middle school student with typical adolescent interests. But for a retired geezer like me, it is an opportunity to reflect on what is most fundamental and meaningful in life. I am enjoying it.

"I was going to sit and write or mope all day in the house, but it seems wise to cultivate animal spirits, to embark in enterprises which employ and recreate the whole body. Let the divine spirits like the huntsman with his bugle accompany the animal spirit that would fain range forest and meadow. Even the gods and goddesses, Apollo and Diana, are found in the field, though they are superior to the dog and the deer."

19 August 1853

I am in the process of moving and immediately thought of this passage from Walden after some of my effects congregated outside:

“It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass… They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in… It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house.“

Some furniture sitting outside in a driveway, including an armchair, two wooden chairs, a bookshelf, some assorted end tables and shelves, and outdoor patio furniture.

“Away with the superficial and selfish phil-*anthropy* of men,—who knows what admirable virtue of fishes may be below low-water-mark, bearing up against a hard destiny, not admired by that fellow-creature who alone can appreciate it! Who hears the fishes when they cry? It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries.”

from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

It's one of my favorite passages I read a long time ago.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.’ – Henry David Thoreau

Currently, I am living as in this passage.

quoted Ensayos sobre la libertad en un planeta frágil by José Ardillo

José Ardillo: Ensayos sobre la libertad en un planeta frágil (Spanish language, 2014, Ediciones el Salmón)

Nuestro propósito es mostrar cómo también existieron, y existen, en el anarquismo divergencias importantes para …

Igual que Hesiodo, Lao-Tzu o Thoreau. Mumford es uno de los sabios que se apartan, que aconsejan el retiro y la resistencia ante las escandalosas ambiciones de las élites en el poder.

En cierto modo su libro es un llamamiento al la desobediencia. como escribe Donald L. Miller en su biografía sobre Mumford:

Mumford vuelve al retiro y a la conversión --los métodos siempre apreciados por sacerdotes y profetas. históricamente, los movimientos revolucionarios que han tenido mas éxito, argumenta, fueron aquellos iniciados por individuos y pequeños grupos que horadaban los margenes del sistema de poder <>. Dicha estrategia no busca apoderarse del centro del poder sino alejarse de el y paralizarlo. En ese sentido Thoreau, no Marx, es el revolucionario más peligroso, pues Thoreau reconoció que la desobediencia es el primer paso hacia la autonomía.

— Ensayos sobre la libertad en un planeta frágil by 

#Libros #Cita #BookWyrm #JoséArdillo #Ensayossobrelalibertadenunplanetafrágil #Mumford #Thoreau