Calm

 

How a walk in nature restores attention (Medical X Press)

"New research from University of Utah psychology researchers is helping prove what American authors John Muir and Henry David Thoreau tried to teach more than 150 years ago: Time spent in nature is good for the heart and soul."

I don't need research to prove what I already know, but I imagine people need to find some way of developing their careers.

Talking to an arborist for the City, doing a sketch of a tree on my street, so that they have a record before they prune it. He said my street was good because there were no power lines to plan around. He says they're going to prune and uproot stumps in the next several months. He said they shouldn't take more than 1/3 of a plant in pruning, that's just a rule of thumb.

He reports the tree in the courtyard are London plane. It is a hybrid of Platanus orientalis (oriental plane) and Platanus occidentalis (American sycamore). According to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation the symbol of that organization is a cross between the leaf of the London plane and a maple leaf. It is prominently featured on signs and buildings in public parks across the city. The tree is on the NYC Parks Department's list of restricted use species for street tree planting, because it constitutes more than 10% of all street trees.

They grow so fast, they swallow up insects trying to invade them. I asked about Lantern flies. He says they attack fruit trees. He recommended buying up wine because the prices are going to go up. I told him I don't drink any more.

Creek to lake

 

39 degrees F

"As a child looks forward to the coming of the summer, so could we contemplate with quiet joy the circle of the seasons returning without fail eternally." (HDT's journal)

Global warming is confusing because I can't really guess the temperature, and I'd for sure wouldn't notice a 2 degree difference, but it would be disastrous. I'm wondering how much this like is going to raise when the waters start rising. I'm not sure if it's going to happen much in my lifetime. That's another issue, humans are kind of selfish, not really concerned about what happens after them. A hot day or a cold day isn't global warming, and change and extinction is always happening. I guess the question is what can we to to avoid some man made changes that might harm humanity. I want my children to live in a fairly stable and kind world. In AA we are tought to think through the consequences of picking up that first drink. I think humans are addicted to selfishness and self absorption against their own interests, and we need to think about the future constructively. 

Valley of tears

23 degrees Fahrenheit

 

 

Leaving Martindale by Kathleen Raine

SHALL I be true
As these hills bind me
As these skies find me,
As waters weather me,
As leaves crown me?
My kiss keep faith
With death and birth, 

My joy with pain, 

My heaven with earth?

I love you as the air
Enfolds the earth,
As darkness holds a star,
As waters, life.
You are the smiling heart, 

The sunlit noon
Of one who soon must sleep
Her death alone.

Shall I be true?

Love binds in vain
Whom death must loose -
The flesh, the pain
That knows you now
Soon will not know
That love must pass,
That times must go.

Reading backwards in her Guardian obituary (born June 14 1908; died July 6 2003): "After her greatest love - for the naturalist Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring Of Bright Water - proved disastrous, she renounced personal emotions, and judged her own part in these dramas with ruthless severity. Threads of sorrow, regret and loneliness run through her four volumes of autobiography, as well as through her poetry. Among the unpublished poems she chose for her last collection of poems (in 2000) were the lines: "Being what I am/ What could I do but wrong?""

Also,

"...her spirit was more at home in the eastern traditions and the world view of Plato, Plotinus and the 18th-century English Platonist Thomas Taylor, on all of whom she produced scholarly studies. She drew Jungian psychology into her poetic vision of the divinity manifest in nature and the cosmos, and the "perennial wisdom" and spiritual symbols common to all religions, peoples and times.

These enthusiasms did not make her popular in her own culture, whose scorn she robustly reciprocated. She minded that Roy Fuller was preferred to herself as Edmund Blunden's successor for the Oxford poetry chair in 1968. In 1991, she declined the Royal Society of Literature's companionship of literature when she realised it had already been given to Anthony Burgess and Iris Murdoch, whom she dismissed as journalists."

Plus,

"William Blake was her master, and she shared his belief that "one power alone makes a poet - imagination, the divine vision". As WB Yeats, her other great exemplar, put it, "poetry and religion are the same thing". To this vision she committed not only her poetry and erudition, but her whole life. She stood as a witness to spiritual values in a society that rejected them."

 

Calm water today. Inspired by Mary Oliver, I've gone down to the lake. 

I cultivate metta, karuna, mudita and upeka. 

There's a turtle in the water, and I can't tell if it's dead, stuck, relaxing, or hibernating. And because I don't know, I don't try to save it, though I do have the urge to save it.

I have a soul searching time. 

I saw one person, don't usually see anyone that time of day. 

 

After a storm

 

My ex gave me some boots, so the rain didn’t prevent me from going to the lake.

Who was Thoreau?

I've finished the magnificent Walls biography of Henry David thoreau.

Thoreau was a naturalist, surveyor, philosopher, poet, lecturer, graphite producer, pencil maker, writer, educator, friend and lifelong bachelor, transcendentalist, Harvard graduate, river sailor, and fire starter—literally and figuratively, politically and personally. 

He was daft and judgmental towards native Americans, and curious and perceptive about them, appreciating them, seemed to easily alternate between the two stances of judgement and curiosity. 

Some gays claim him, detect a sense of a secret self in his writings. He was wary of Whitman but was disappointed when the women put the kibosh on inviting him to stay in Concord. He asked a woman to marry him, but she declined. An older woman asked him to marry and he declined. We don’t know if his attention to young boys was purely motivated by his desire to share knowledge and educate. He seems to have been a real character of Concord. His proposal of marriage to a woman makes him nominally hetrosexual. Looking at no known sexual activity makes him asexual. Like many people in history, we just don't know, and have to tolerate not knowing. I'm not sure what the obsession is beyond Foucault's pointing out that at some point in history sexuality became a part of who and what you are. Not really anyone's business in a way.

He was a decided homebody who traveled down to Philadelphia and up to Quebec, and wrote books about Massachusetts, Maine and Cape Cod. He wrote about his trip to Canada. He worked hard to become a writer. He could also dance and sing. He loved walking, and could tell you what week it was based on the wildflowers. He lived in Staten Island for a year but could get his literary career off in New York. At the end of his life he went out west to Minnesota.  

His first book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers took him 3 years to pay off because it was essentially self published if it didn't sell enough copies, and it didn't sell enough copies. It was a book about a trip he took with his brother who died soon after the trip, and it never mentioned his brother. Many of his books were posthumously published. "The Succession of Forest Trees" is supposedly his most read essay and work in his life, reprinted in newspapers across the country.

He was disgusted by meat and killing but ate and enjoyed it anyway. He wrote about his disgust of the fur trade. 

He was disappointed in slavery and was a stop on the Underground Railroad. He wrote about it once in his journal, but it's suspected that he did more than what he wrote.

He organized to support Irish laborers families with knitting coats for children. He gave a worker $50 to get his wife and family to America. He bought wood from Irish laborers to build his hut on Walden Pond. His trip to Cape Cod took a somber note when an Irish hunger ship crashed and he was presented with the recent wreckage and pillagers. 

He utterly rejected Puritanism. He disliked government, the Mexican war, supporting slavery even in the north, but worked well with people, except stupid editors who altered the meaning of his texts. He inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King with his civil disobedience. He could also imagine city planners who made sure the environment wasn't destroyed by greedy single minded people who ignored other's concerns. Did he think up the idea of public parks in towns and cities as Walls suggests? I have a hard time believing it, European cities had parks already. Boston Commons was established in 1634. There's a park in Budapest called Varosliget that was established in the 13th century that lays claim to the oldest park in Europe. Walls was suggesting the seed of the idea in America may have been influenced by Thoreau, not that he thought up the idea of municipal parks. 

"In Queens, the oldest parks are Daniel Carter Beard Memorial Square (known as Flushing Park until 1942), which was acquired by the town of Flushing in 1875" (NYC). I go walking every week in Flushing Meadows Park, by Willow Lake. 

He was friends with all the fascinating transcendentalists, and other naturalists, businessmen and scholars. He cared for Emerson’s family when Emerson went to England, traveled and hiked with poet Ellery Channing. He went to Fire Island to see if he could recover Margaret Full’s body. Caroline Healey Dall stayed a few extra days with the Thoreau's after her lecture in Concord. He met Whitman once, and loved his Leaves of Grass. He wanted to invite Whitman to stay in Concord but the women dislike him and vetoed an invitation. He met John Brown and introduced him to Emerson. He met Frederick Douglass, and possibly Harriet Tubman. 

He read Indian ancient texts but probably didn’t know the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism.

He accidentally started a wildfire that destroyed hundreds of acres but tried to get the town to fight it, some were indifferent. When Wentworth started a fire he warned against it and a bit of a wildfire started on Mount Washington, Tuckerman’s Ravine, in New Hampshire killing ancient forest.

His mother was pregnant with him in 1816 when there was no summer, and many moved west. He was against the Mexican War, slavery and the fugitive slave laws. He lived through the 1857 panic, in part triggered by the Dred Scott decision. He saw the beginning of the Civil War but not the end of it.

He got to read Darwin's Origin of the Species, with his friends aloud. In the context of the times, the book supported the ideas of abolition of slavery. He saw the arguments verified in his experience as a hiking naturalist. It gave him new ideas about how to study nature, and he both stayed on a mountain for a long time, and culled his journals for patters across the seasons. He thought about seeds and tree succession. 

Thoreau defended John Brown and saw his actions as noble. His way of seeing perhaps influenced Boston and the north regarding his actions, created a noble narrative. He wrote 3 essays about John Brown. John Brown's daughter Annie through Thoreau was a little like John Brown. His two daughters were adopted by Concord Transcendentalists and they went to school in Concord. Thoreau helps smuggle a co-conspirator, a Mr. X, out of the USA to safety in Canada. People ignored the summons regarding John Brown's conspiracy. The schoolmaster Sanborn was seized by marshals, and the town rescued him before they could get out of town. He showed up on court the next day and the warrant was canceled. It was reissued, but he wasn't caught before the secession of South Carolina and the start of the Civil War.

He seems to have had tuberculosis since age 18, and yet lived to age 44, only living 3 years longer than his father who had a longer life. His one expressed regret that comes down to us is that he wished he wasn't so offish. “ When his orthodox Aunt Louisa asked, "Henry, have you made your peace with God?" he answered pleasantly, "I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt."”(p.495 Walls)

Thoreau and Muir, and his end

Thoreau was in Madison Wisconsin June 23rd 1861, traveling back from Minnesota to Concord Massachusetts. John Muir was 23 and just got out for the semester and was walking back to Portage. He had just finished his first semester of college. His parents had him working on the farm up till then. I read a biography of Muir and when I think about Thoreau, I think about Muir, who was a great naturalist too. The idea that while they didn't meet, they were close to each other perhaps, maybe in the same city, maybe not too far apart. 

The end of life is of course sad. I feel like Thoreau was coming into his own and dying at the age of 44 was too young. What could he have done with another 20 years, even at a diminished capacity. Unfortunately his traveling companion Horace Mann, the famous one's son, would die at age 26. Maybe I'm getting older, but when you read biographies, they seem to be quite punctuated by death. I know my grandparents deaths were quite shocking to me, uncles and friends now. I remember in my 20s reading the obituary pages of the Times and not knowing the people who died.

This year we lost a lot of celebrities. This year we lost Tommy Smothers, a Dixie Chick, the original drummer for AC/DC, Norman Lear, Shane MacGowan, the saxophonist for the Psychedelic Furs, Matthew Perry, Suzanne Somers, Louise Gluck, Jimmy Buffett, Bob Barker, the school teacher on Little House on the Prairie, the guy who wrote the ballad "Hey Paula", Robbie Robertson, The keyboardist for the Kinks, Paul Reubens, Sinéad O'Connor, Tony Bennett. the rhythm guitarist for Journey, Robert De Niro's grandson, Alan Arkin, the woman in Slackers who claimed to have a pubic hair from Madonna, Glenda Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, Pat Robertson, Tina Turner, Martin Amis, the bassist for the Smiths, Jim Brown, Jerry Springer, Harry Belafonte, Bob Newhart's wife, Tevye actor, Shirley from Laverne and Shirley, David Crosby, Gina Lollobrigida, Lisa Marie Presley, Raquel Welch, Astrud Gilberto, and last but not least Wayne Shorter, and many more faces and names I recognized (source). Tim Wakefield, a pitcher who helped break the Sox's curse, was my age. A lot of people were on TV shows I never watched, or otherwise never heard of them. I'm sure I missed someone too. NY Times collection.

Thoreau died on May 6, 1862. This photo was taken August 21 1861. It was his last trip "away from home" to take the photo, but he would ride in a carriage to Walden Pond in September. His last comment in his journal was that he could tell the direction of the storm by how it cleared the mud off pebbles. 

He was chipper on his deathbed, I think another sign of his greatness. He refused opiates, and Channing was with him a lot at the end. His last words might have been, "Now comes good sailing."

I had insomnia and finished the book at 4:55am on January 8th 2024. 

Emerson's eulogy of Thoreau.

Yikes

“Thoreau had watched his world slip deeper and deeper into the "hell" he had denounced in "Slavery in Massachusetts." On May 19, 1856, his friend Senator Charles Sumner delivered to the Senate a scathing speech condemning Southern aid to proslavery insurgents who were forcibly taking control of the government of Kansas. Two days later, a proslavery militia of several hundred men attacked the free-state town of Lawrence, Kansas, founded two years before by New England immigrants. The raiders sacked, looted, and burned the town, killing most of its male population, as many as two hundred men and boys. The next day, while Sumner sat alone writing at his desk on the Senate floor, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked him with a heavy cane, beating him on the head with its gold tip until Sumner, covered in blood, collapsed unconscious. Brooks kept beating Sumner's bleeding body while his South Carolina colleague, Representative Laurence Keitt, held off horrified spectators with a pistol. Finally the cane broke. Brooks threw it down and walked away. For this act he was levied a $300 fine and given neither jail time nor reprimand.” (P.445 Walls)

Caroline Healey Dall

I dislike coming to the end of the biography of Thoreau, I feel like I'm just getting to know him. His father dies in the summer of 1859, and then Caroline Healey Dall comes to give a lecture, and stays over with the Thoreaus. 

She has a diary, essays and sketches (another), and other documents, including a history of Transcendentalism you can read in it's 38 pages. She's only 5 years younger than Thoreau. Before that she wrote Margaret and Her Friends: Ten Conversations with Margaret Fuller (Gutenberg).

She grew up in Boston, got married and lived in Toronto. Her son was a naturalist, she spent her later years living with his family in DC. Her husband moved to Calcutta to preach. Doesn't say what happened to her other child or what eventually happened to her husband. I guess he died in India. 

I'd like to read: Woman Thinking: Feminism and Transcendentalism in Nineteenth-Century America by Wayne, Tiffany K, and Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-century Woman, Caroline Healey Dall.

She attended Fuller's conversations.

Reading Thoreau and Thoreau biography thoughts today.

I listed the major works of Thoreau and I'm going to try and read through them. It's possible I'll quit, I have to admit that. But I already crossed on thing off the list, and I'm working on another. Looking for similar people who did the same thing, I came across a fellow who had to put post it notes over his eyes because his wife though they were creepy. I think it's weird that women find things creepy when they're not and you have to cater towards their feelings because we live in a age where women's feelings were over run for so long that it's verboten to continue to do it. It doesn't matter that she's wrong, she has the feeling. Therefore if you are her husband reading the book, you put post it notes over the eyes so she doesn't feel creepy.

Reading Aulus Persius Flaccus (1940) 

Aulus Persius Flaccus is a roman poet and satirist. (More on him)

I come across this: "Ipse semipaganus Ad sacra Vatum carmen affero nostrum,"

Which translates to: I half pagan bring my verses to the shrine of the poets.

Here's a fun quote: "Scarcely can you distinguish one harmonious sound, amid this unmusical bickering with the follies of men."

Thoreau is listing poets: "...Homer, and Shakspeare [sic], and Milton, and Marvel, and Wordsworth."

Who is Marvel? Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)? 

I love it how the importance of spelling wasn't that great in Shakespeare's time and even up to Thoreau's time spelling wasn't of the utmost importance. 

People were so judgemental in the past: "measured faultfinders at best"

Itarticeps crimints means "It's time for the criminals".

I like how Thoreau tries to undercut the sanctimonious voice. I think. "...while no evil is so huge, but you grudge to bestow on it a moment of hate." 

He prefers love over hate. I don't actually know who Perseus is, he's an early hero in mythology. He's got a lot of statues where he's holding a head he cut off. There's even a complicated genealogy. 

"Hand cuivis promptum est, murmurque humilesque. Tollere susurros de templis ; et aperto vivere voto."

Translation: A hand is ready for every one, and a murmur is humble

Remove the whispers from the temples; and with an open desire to live.

I feel exhausted, I'm nowhere close to finishing this.

"Est aliquid quo tendis, et in quod dirigis arcum An passim sequeris corvos, testave, lutove, Securus quo per ferat, atque ex tempore vivis?"

Translates: Is there something at which you aim, and at which you direct the bow? Do you follow the ravens here and there, or the shell or the clay, Easy to carry through, and you live from time?

And then I'm finally done after reading a section of something. It reads like a school assignment. I think it was his first published work in The Dial in 1840.

There are lots of things I don't write about in the biography. But I find it interesting he spent a month in New Jersey surveying, east of Perth Amboy on Raritan Bay for Marcus and Rebecca Spring. He was expected to attend a dance. He read the lecture Moosehunting and Walking. Thoreau chaffs at working. Alcott came down to see if he wanted to live at this commune, and then took Thoreau to Greeley's farm in Westchester. Greeley had invited Thoreau to live there for a year or two. They went to Brooklyn to attend a Henry Ward Beecher sermon. The crowd was "weeping, laughing and devout". Alcott was impressed, Thoreau thought it was pegan. They visited Walt Whitman. He wasn't there but his mother fed them some cakes. 

“The year before, when Whitman published Leaves of Grass, he had mailed a copy straight to Emerson, who, seeing yet again a brilliant new poet to mentor, had written him one of his thrilling trademark letters of support. The buoyed Whitman seized on the letter's most quotable line and, to Emerson's horror, blazoned it right across the spine of his next edition: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." In one stroke Whitman had given birth to the modern cover blurb, quite without Emerson's permission.” (p. 394 Walls)

They meet and Whitman says he's America, and Thoreau pours water on him and says he's not really into American politics. They bring up the quoting on his book by Emerson and Whitman brushes it off. They part without really a connection. A great naturalist and a great poet don't necessarily connect. But Whitman gave him a copy of Leaves of Grass second edition, and Thoreau went home and read it. He liked it, and carried it around Concord. It was a bit scandalous of a book and the ladies didn't want them to invite Whitman to Concord. They didn't want a fag who couldn't politely hide it better. 

There's a wonderful movie, Separate Tables (1958), where the prudery of old women doesn't win out. It's on one of the Cohen brothers favorite movies list.

Thoreau seems to have loosened up with reading Whitman, and enjoyed himself and passionately embraced his likes.

One was singing Tom Bowling, of which I found this version. A version and lyrics:

1

Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling, the darling of our crew;

No more he’ll hear the tempest howling for death has broached him to.

His form was of the manliest beauty, his heart was kind and soft,

Faithful below he did his duty, but now he’s gone aloft, but now he’s gone aloft.

2

Tom never from his word departed, his virtues were so rare,

His friends were many and true-hearted, his Poll was kind and fair,

Ah, then he’d sing so blithe and jolly, a-many’s the time and oft,

But mirth has changed to melancholy, now Tom has gone aloft, now Tom has gone aloft.

3

Yet shall poor Tom find pleasant weather when he who all commands,

Shall give to call life’s crew together, the word to pipe all hands;

Thus Death, who kings and tars dispatches, in vain Tom’s life has doffed,

For though his body’s under hatches his soul is gone aloft, his soul is gone aloft.

Another version on Spotify. I can't seem to find an unvarnished one.

There's a 25 page document on Joe Polis, Thoreau's guide on a trip in Maine.

First Native American book by a Native American which Thoreau read. 

Reading Thoreau project

Aulus Persius Flaccus (1840) (Online) (another version) X

The Service (1840) (I find this one in the book of essays.)

A Walk to Wachusett (1842)

Paradise (to be) Regained (1843)

The Landlord (1843)

Sir Walter Raleigh (1844)

Herald of Freedom (1844)

Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum (1845)

Reform and the Reformers (1846–48)

Thomas Carlyle and His Works (1847)

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience, or On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849)

An Excursion to Canada (1853)

Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)

Walden (1854)

A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859) (Online) (Wikipedia)

Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown (1859)

The Last Days of John Brown (1860)

The Succession of Forest Trees (1860) (Online)

Walking (1862)

Autumnal Tints (1862) (Last published work while alive) (online Atlantic doesn't hold the copyright so I don't think it should be behind a paywall)

Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree (1862)

Died May 6th 1862

The Fall of the Leaf (1863)

Excursions (1863)

Life Without Principle (1863)

Night and Moonlight (1863)

The Highland Light (1864)

The Maine Woods (1864) (T couldn't figure out an ending, but edited to the end)

Cape Cod (1865)

Letters to Various Persons (1865)

A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866)

Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881)

Summer (1884)

Winter (1888)

Autumn (1892)

Miscellanies (1894)

Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau (1894)

Poems of Nature (1895)

Some Unpublished Letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau (1898)

The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau (1905)

Journal of Henry David Thoreau (1906)

The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1958)

I Was Made Erect and Lone (Online, two) X (Analyzed by Steven Ward)

The Bluebird Carries the Sky on His Back (Stanyan, 1970)

The Dispersion of Seeds published as Faith in a Seed (Island Press, 1993)

The Indian Notebooks (1847–1861) selections by Richard F. Fleck

Wild Fruits

X=Read

This was from Wikipedia. I'm going to finish the Walls biography and read more books about Thoreau, but I'm going to also try and read his original works to the best of my ability.

I thought about trying to determine how many pages each thing was, and then spreading it over a year, but I know I'm not good at sticking to schedules, I'm better at going at my own pace.

Some of these things will be harder to find than others. For instance the first one isn't in my essays electronic book. So I included the link where I found it.

Other things to consume, to be considered:

Walden: The Ballad of Thoreau--Michael Johnathon's theatrical play. YouTube

Today's notes from reading Thoreau biography

The Farmers Club in 1850's Concord, thought retention of people through education was the way to keep people from leaving for the city or out west. Thoreau wasn't part of the club, but they asked him where to get wildflowers when they wanted to decorate the town and how to rehabilitate forests who were damaged. I was reading in the Times that American cities are losing people these days and I think the city needs to do some to keep people in the city. They have planted a lot of trees, which delights me. 

They noticed that pine forest changed to Oak, squirrels burying acorns had an oak tree just waiting for a pine tree to fall down. The subject now is called plant succession, another subject Thoreau was a pioneer of. 

Speaking of environmentalism, I think there is a lifestyle paradox. If you really like nature, you spread out into the sprawling suburbs instead of living in the city, which might be the most environmental thing you could do, using public transport, and living in buildings instead of heating a house that just bleeds heat. So if you love nature, come live in NYC!

It does bring up the point that some subjects aren't in books, and you have to go it alone. People without education will always point this out, but people who read books know it too. 

The amazing knowledge that Thoreau had was that he could even say what day of the month it was by which flowers were blooming.

In 1954 he had this photo taken for 16 cents, according to Walls. I think now I might have gotten that wrong, I was misreading Walls. The national portrait gallery puts it at 1956 and for 50 cents, perhaps the case that came with it:

Maybe it was 1856 because what comes next is the capturing of the pigs, which is August 8th 185.

First sketch of Thoreau

 

Thoreau had this above sketch done of him by Samuel Worcester Rowse soon after publishing Walden. At the same time he also published Slavery In Massachusetts, disgruntled a slave was taken back after he had escaped. He was suddenly famous. There were good reviews.

He got a fan letter from Adrien Roquette who would go and live among the Choctaw Indians. 

He went as far as Philadelphia, and back in New York went to the opera with Greely and saw I Puritani by Bellini. He wrote What Shall It Profit, which along with Walking were published after his death and were his two main lectures for his lecture tours. With a few cool receptions, Thoreau lamented his travels and missing being out in nature at home, he canceled his tour out west. He was not going to be a lecturer like Emerson. With a few more lectures, he concluded his lecturing tour, off the heat of Walden, for a few years. 

He was well received in Nantucket, and he connected with a fair amount of people during this time, including a biographer Franklin Benjamin Sanborn who moved to Concord to teach school, sponsored by Emerson. The school teacher took meals at the Thoreau's and lived in Channing's top floor. 

Winter was for skating on the Concord River. The frenzied winter led to a period of illness for Thoreau, perhaps a flare up of tuberculosis. He grew a neck beard, called Galway Whiskers, to keep his throat warm.

Thoreau is the perfect person to study in this age of trying to get attention.

Waning moon

 

It’s 29° and there’s a 64% waning moon. No Henry today. Tomorrow is the day the earth will be closest to the sun.

Thoreau and the Irish refugees

"The Irish, too, continued to intrigue Thoreau, as growing numbers of refugees settled in Concord. In 1850, when three generations of the Riordan family moved into a shanty near the Deep Cut, at first he was horrified by their dirt-floor poverty. But as he came to know them, he wondered if the Irish weren't realizing his ideals better than he was, living independent lives close to the land without being seduced by Yankee markers of success. He especially admired young Johnny Riordan, leaping "lively as a cricket" from snowbank to snowbank on his way to school while the worthies of Concord waddled past encased in furs. In January 1852, when he saw Johnny with no jacket and snow melting on his bare toes, Henry rushed to tell Cynthia, who set the Charitable Society to sewing. A week later Henry brought Johnny's new coat to the shanty, which he found "warmed by the simple social relations of the Irish... What if there is less fire on the hearth, if there is more in the heart." There he learned that Johnny's uncle had moved to town and took the Irish newspaper, the Flag of Our Union; and it was "musical news" to hear that Johnny, one of the school's best students, "does not love to be kept at home from school in deep snows."" (p. 328 Walls)

Replica of Walden home

He bought wood from the Irish shanties as they moved on to work on the railroad. He seemed to love all kinds, the Native Americans, the escaped slaves. He wrote about helping one escaped slave, in his journal, which would have been incriminating evidence if he journal was ever seized for a court case.

There is something large in spirit, in his insistence to walk, to remain mostly local, to oppose injustice, to wish to be free.

When he went to Cape Cod the first time there was a shipwreck, a hunger ship of starving Irish people whos boat smashed and most of them died. It was a horrible spectacle and wasn't exactly what he expected. A few years later visiting the exact same spot, everything was gone. He would soon go to Fire Island to see if he could find anything of Margaret Fuller, and he only came back with a button. Her book on Rome was lost, her future as a suffragette, and her baby and husband, all died as the bound foundered on a sandbar 300 feet from the shore.

Thoreau was outraged when an employer took the $4 prize from a laborer who won a spading contest. He raised $50 to get Michael Flannery's wife and children to America from Ireland. They got there safely and stayed with the Thoreaus until they were settled. And he wasn't rich like Emmerson who was quite generous with Thoreau. 

Henry

Henry was there in the water. I cleared the reeds so he could climb on land but he froze while I sat there.

Walking

 Walking by Henry David Thoreau. It starts...

"I WISH to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and. parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister, and the school-committee, and everyone of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,- who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of' going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, " There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, - a HolyLander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and. reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours; and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walle is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, - prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, - if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk."

(spelling corrected and updated)

Librivox audio of essay on YouTube.