Walden Pond

Historically Thoreau was influential

• he directly addresses the push to conquer wilderness and says we lose something if we become entirely civilized
• his explanation of why we should value wilderness
  

also Thoreau asked questions about how do we live a meaningful life that are still relevant today

By the 1850s people are beginning to see wilderness as beautiful and as making the U.S. special
A parallel step new ideas about how wilderness is good for us (and be careful to distinguish different versions of that idea)

Thoreau transformed our ideas about wilderness
His ideas grew out of two roots: Unitarianism and Transcendentalism

Unitarianism:

• a further development of the ideas of Deism
  
• ongoing tension in the US between rationalism/the enlightenment and religious enthusiasm/romanticism/other ideas that value emotion over reason
  
• in the 18th and early 19th century evangelical religious revivals swept much of the United States--called the First and Second Great Awakening
• the evangelicals put a big emphasis on conversion, having an emotional experience of dedicating themselves to God
  
• but at the same time others were interested in making religion more rational and emphasizing that each individual must take responsibility for his or her own beliefs
  
• they wanted to make religion more rational, but some beliefs are hard to make rational
  
• they threw out the idea that God could be somehow both one and three--instead of believing in the trinity they concluded that Jesus wasn't fully God, was more of a prophet
  
• they also threw out the idea of original sin (that people are born inherently evil) and emphasized instead the spark of the divine in each individual
  
• Unitarians believe strictly in one God, believe Jesus was a prophet rather than literally God
• by 1833 most Congregationalist (Puritan) churches in Massachusetts had become Unitarian
• the church Thoreau's family went to split when he was a boy--his mother wanted to go to the Trinitarian Congregationalist Church but they wouldn't accept her
  
• Unitarianism is a religious denomination that later merged with Universalism--there is a Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship in Clemson
• The Congregationalist denomination merged with others to form the United Church of Christ--they have a new church in Clemson
• Unitarian ideas--there is something good in human nature that will lead us to God
• de-emphasized salvation and therefore emphasized creation
  

  Transcendentalism is a philosophy rather than a religious denomination

• Transcendentalists found Unitarianism too rational--they were influenced by romanticism
• they don't see themselves as a religion, but want to understand relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds
  
• believed that there is a separate spiritual world that is more important than the world of everyday life--that is more universal than each different religion or denomination's concept of God
  
• but we can't see it
  
• but they also believed that (1) the natural world parallels the spiritual world (because God created it that way) and therefore God's creation gives us a map of the spiritual world
• (2) by intuition and imagination human beings can glimpse the spiritual world, even though we can't perceive it with our five senses
• believed that the wilderness is where we are closest to the spiritual world and that human beings are essentially good
• we make ourselves better people by paying attention to wilderness and to what is deepest inside us
  

Thoreau's life:

• born 1817, grows up in Concord, Mass.
  
• attends Harvard College 1833-1837 (about 20 miles from Concord), studied a little science, a lot of Latin and Greek literature
  
• Thoreau tries being a schoolteacher and works for the family pencil manufacturing business
• 1843 Thoreau's brother dies of lockjaw (tetanus)
• 1845 Thoreau moves to a one-room cabin he builds himself on Walden Pond, about a mile from Concord, where he lives for two years, exploring how simply can he live
  
• 1846 Thoreau spends a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax as a protest against slavery
• 1848 studies surveying and begins to support himself as a writer primarily by working as a surveyor
  
• 1849 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is published
  
• 1854 Walden is published
• dies in 1862 of consumption (tuberculosis)
  

Thoreau criticized the direction in which civilization was going, particularly commercialization (first textile factories 1790, big textile factories start to be built in early 1830s, railroads start to be built in large numbers in the 1830s):

• "In wildness is the preservation of the world."
  
• "To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle."
  
• "Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. " Walden
• "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." Walden
• "If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."
• "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end."
  
• "Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth! "
• "What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."
  
• "How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. "
  

Thoreau saw nature and particularly wilderness as the inspiration we need if we are to be truly alive

• "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. " Walden
  
• "Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps." From the essay "Walking"
• "Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."  Walden

Thoreau is not as much a believer in wilderness and only wilderness as some later thinkers, but he is the first influential writer about the value of wilderness

• the wilderness he knew best was the woods around a the village of Concord--he spent more than two years living alone in a one-room cabin at Walden Pond but he could easily walk into town for Sunday dinner
• when he went further from civilization he was moved but also a bit overwhelmed  (read Maine Woods to see this point)

Thoreau ended up wanting a balance between wilderness and civilization

• we should live partly in nature and partly in civilization
  
• we need a balance of the animal inside us and our higher, more refined nature
• draw inspiration from the wilderness and turn it into poetry or philosophy by refining it and giving it structure
• the danger is that we will conquer the wilderness more and more until there isn't any left (or we don't experience it)
• therefore we need to set aside natural areas so people can visit them----every town should have an area of woods
  
• the tension between wilderness and civilization is where creativity comes from

He doesn't take wilderness ideas as far as later thinkers will

• he values the natural world, not just wilderness with no trace of humans
• he sees nature as important for its benefits to human beings, not for its own sake
  

Do we believe this today?

• the idea that children need to experience nature
• do we live that way?
  

more Thoreau

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