Posted on 05/06/2012 8:36:45 AM PDT by Borges
The point is that you implied that an individual should not be disrespected for their personal choice.
However, Thoreau was a public figure and influential so according to your standard one should therefore be allowed to view him negatively (which I do).
OK, tell me what it was that he was learning from living at Walden Pond, that the average mid 1800's farmer, hunter, or settler wasn't fully aware of.
Perhaps I am being too rough on the man, when it the legend that escapes me.
Thoreau took the consequences of his choices (which were not injurious to anyone). There is no reason to view him negatively unless you’re projecting on him how his followers have acted after his death. It’s the Nietzsche effect...an honorable man who’s had the misfortune of dim followers.
Thoreau’s contribution was a contemplative and (funny) brand of nature writing. He wasn’t trying to ‘teach’ anyone anything.
I have not read every word of Walden Pond, but yes, 25 years ago at the Evergreen State College, we read Walden Pond and you are the first person that I have ever heard suggest that modern environmentalism has little or no connection to Thoreau. Thoreau is the absolte poster boy of environmentalism.
Frankly, I've got no reason to view him positively.
You can’t control what people say about your after your death. Mary Wollstonecraft is the poster girl of the Feminist movement. Do you think she would find anything in common with the likes of Andrea Dworkin? For a long time they thought Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi...
You might be surprised.
A lot of our conception of pioneers comes from our reading romantic naturalism into people who could be quite grim and prosaic.
We take it for granted that people who were just trying to survive had all of the aesthetic emotions that we have thanks to Thoreau and writers like him.
How about the fact that he was a great writer?
While many modern environmentalists paint Thoreau as an anti-government libertarian free spirit, it must be pointed out that the American government of his day was very limited in its powers. It also openly espoused individual liberty and Manifest Destiny. In other words, to be a rebel against the limited constitutional powers of the American government suggests that Thoreau was not the libertarian or free individualist that many often make him out to be. He was protesting/rebelling against a limited government based on liberty and Judeo-Christian values.
Slavery?
I don’t believe him to have been a great writer. That’s your view.
English Professors view him as such. It’s not a view it’s a matter of scholarship. He’s part of the American Literary Canon.
I repeat...I do not believe him to have been a great writer. Sorry, I don't ascribe to all the beliefs of "English professors".
And, since that is my opinion as an individual (your standard expressed earlier) you will have to respect my view.
Who are you going to believe - Thoreau's own book, or what a bunch of college students and environmentalists remember about tough old H.D. Heck, he's almost Jim Bridger's first cousin in their eyes.
By the way, have you ever been to Author's Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord?
Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Broson Alcott, and Harriet Lothrop (who wrote under the nom de plume Margaret Sidney) are all buried in their family plots in an area about the size of my dining room and den combined. Thoreau's headstone either has "H.D" or "H.D.T" on it, that's all.
What flaws do you see in him as a writer? His prose is a model of clarity and wit and he did this in a manner quite different from the European notions of such.
Thoreau was the King of the Backyard Campers; he walked a mile or two to the local lakeshore and recorded his observations there, when he wasn’t walking into town to get a little R&R from the “wilderness.”
As such, he’s been the model for and best friend of anti-social Nature dilettantes for more than a hundred years.
One is left to wonder, however, whether he might not have had the same piercing insights sitting on the back porch.
“It’s the Nietzsche effect...an honorable man who’s had the misfortune of dim followers.”
Yeah, I’ve had a downturn in fortune since some in-laws moved in.
It's often that way, no?
I would say it’s the norm more often than not. I don’t even think Marx would approve of Stalin and Pol Pot.
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