Thoreau
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My Thoreau
Reading Henry David Thoreau’s Journal is one of my regular practices. The NYRB condensation of the massive work is my go-to edition: I’ve written about it previously. I find something of value on every page. And, as a whole, this blog, in case you haven’t noticed, has pretensions towards emulating Thoreau’s observations of the world,…
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Review: The Journal
The Journal: 1837-1861 By Henry David Thoreau Edited by Damion Searls Preface by John R. Stilgoe New York Review Books. 677 pp. $22.95 “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.” So it began, October 22, 1837. Twenty-year-old David Henry Thoreau, who would never…
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Learning from Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau didn’t particularly like cities, including New York, all that much. “The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population,”he wrote while visiting in 1843. Thoreau was a country mouse at heart, not a city rat. He was neither the first nor the last to believe that there was a…
Backyard and Beyond 