From Emerson to Thoreau

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From Emerson to Thoreau
American Literature I 15/11/2004 Cecilia H.C.
Liu Info. Provided by Dr. Murphy
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Thoreaus Walden (1854)

• Thoreaus Walden is a book about nature in the
  woods at Concord and a book on how to live.
• 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 (915, B1855).

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Thoreaus Walden (1854) (2)

• Thoreau tried to become aware of how he was
  connected to Nature, and put Emersons ideas into
  practice. As he says in Walden, in cities and
  towns people live lives of quiet desperation.
• Thoreau saw many people living unhappy lives in
  society, and chose to live as a full-time hermit
  at Walden Pond for two years.
• In Walden, he chose the written words to
  celebrate what he saw and experienced, to accept
  himself and to lead his readers to marvel at the
  wonders of Nature.

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(1)Build your own world

• Emerson and Thoreau share a good many
  characteristics in expressing the idea of
  building peoples own world.
• Emerson, the more philosophical one, gives people
  principles on life with pure ideas in minds,
  while Thoreau is the one that is more practical
  and believe that to experience the idea of world
  building, one has to do it with his own hands.
• Example and Quotes

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(1)Build your own world

• Thoreau If you have built castles in the air,
  your work need not be lost . . . Now put the
  foundations under them (962, B1977).
• Thoreau I went to the woods because I wished to
  live deliberately, to front only the essential
  facts of life. . . (915, 1855).
• The necessaries of life for man in this climate
  may, . . . be distributed under the several
  heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel (873,
  B1813).
• I found, that by working about six weeks in a
  year, I could meet all the expenses of living
  (904, B1844).

• Every spirit builds itself a house and beyond
  its house, a world and beyond its world, a
  heaven. Know, then, that the world exists for
  you. . . . Build, therefore your own world. As
  fast as you can conform your life to the pure
  idea in your mind, that will unfold its great
  proportions (524, B1134).

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(2)Originality

• Both Emerson and Thoreau believes that we should
  enjoy an original relation to the world.
• The difference is that, the way and tone these
  two authors put it is different, with the former
  more like a text, but the latter more colloquial.
  
• In writing, Emerson anticipates the scientific
  hypothesis of Darwin. Thoreau, was more at-home
  in the outdoors than Emerson and could write
  playfully and humorously about our affinity to
  cats and other brute animals. In a way, Thoreau
  was renewing the basic religious experience of
  awe and wonder before Nature. Examples and
  Quotes

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(2)Originality

• Thoreau Old deeds for old people, and new
  deeds for new. . . . Practically, the old have
  no very important advice to give the young. . . .
  One generation abandons the enterprises of
  another like stranded vessels (871, B1812).

• Emerson Our age is retrospective. It builds
  the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes
  biographies, histories, and criticism. The
  foregoing generations beheld God and nature face
  to face we, through their eyes. Why should not
  we also enjoy an original relation to the
  universe? (496, B1106).

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Martin Johnson Heade, The Stranded Boat, 1863
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Fitz Hugh Lane, Braces Rock, Eastern Point,
Gloucester, 1864 (?)
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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(3)Blindness and Vision

• Emerson The ruin or the blank, that we see when
  we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis
  of vision is not coincident with the axis of
  things. . . (523, B1133).
• Emerson But when the fact is seen under the
  light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and
  shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the
  wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry (524,
  B1134)

• Thoreau Look at a meeting-house, or a
  court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a
  dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is
  before a true gaze, and they would all got to
  pieces in your account of them (918, B1858).
• Thoreau If you stand right fronting and face
  to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer
  on both its surfaces. . . (919, B1859).

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(4)The Eye

• In terms of the eye, Emersons ideas tends to be
  philosophical, and develops the abstract term of
  transparent eye-ball, believing that as the
  world circulates around him, he gets to see
  everything.
• On the other hand, Thoreau uses a more
  down-to-earth approach by the objects we could
  see with our eye in nature, and not the terms
  philosophically.
• Examples and Quotes

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(4)The Eye

• Emerson I become a transparent eye-ball. I am
  nothing. I see all. The currents of the
  Universal Being circulate through me I am part
  or particle of God (499, B1109).

• Thoreau A lake is the landscapes most
  beautiful feature. It is earths eye looking
  into which the beholder measures the depth of his
  own nature (941, B1905).

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Fitz Hugh Lane, Owls Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine,
1862
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Thomas Cole, View of the Round-Top in the
Catskill Mountains (1827)
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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(5)Landscape and Horizon

• Emerson There is a property in the horizon
  which no man has but he whose eye can integrate
  all the parts, that is, the poet. . . . In the
  tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant
  line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as
  beautiful as his own nature (498, B1108-09).

• Thoreau With respect to landscapes,--
• I am monarch of all I survey,
• My right there is none to dispute.
• I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having
  enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while
  the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few
  wild apples only (911, B1851).
• Example 2

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(5)Landscape and Horizon

• Thoreau Though the view from my door was still
  more contracted, I did not feel crowded or
  confined in the least. There was pasture enough
  for my imagination. The low shrub-oak plateau to
  which the opposite shore arose, stretched away
  toward the prairies of the West and the steppes
  of Tartary. . . . There are none happy in the
  world but beings who enjoy freely a vast
  horizonsaid Damodara. . . (913, B1853).

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(6)Stars

• Thoreau The stars are the apexes of what
  wonderful triangles! What distant and different
  beings in the various mansions of the universe
  are contemplating the same one at the same
  moment! (872, B1812)
• Example 2

• Emerson But if a man would be alone, let him
  look at the stars. The rays that come from those
  heavenly worlds, will separate between him and
  vulgar things. . . . The stars awaken a certain
  reverence, because though always present, they
  are always inaccessible. . . (497-98, 1107-08).

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(6)Stars

• Thoreau I discovered that my house actually
  had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new
  and unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were
  worth the while to settle in those parts near to
  the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or
  Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal
  remoteness from the life which I had left behind,
  dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my
  nearest neighbor. . . (914, B1854) .

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(7)The Alikeness of Nature

• Emerson Every particular in nature, a leaf, a
  drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to
  the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the
  whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and
  faithfully renders the likeness of the world
  (511, B1121).

• Thoreau The phenomena of the year take place
  every day in a pond on a small scale (1964, Ch.
  17).
• What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The
  ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed.
  The fingers and tows flow to their extent from
  the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the
  human body would expand and flow out to under a
  more genial heaven? (950, B1968).

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(7)The Alikeness of Nature (2)

• Emerson The river, as it flows, resembles the
  air that flows over it the air resembles the
  light which traverses it with more subtile
  currents the light resembles the heat which
  rides with it through Space (512, B1121).

• Thoreau On land the grass and trees wave, but
  the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see
  where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks
  or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can
  look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps,
  look down thus on the surface of air at length,
  and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over
  it (943, B1907).

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(8)Perceptions of Language

• Emerson
• Words are signs of natural facts.
• Particular natural facts are symbols of
  particular spiritual facts.
• Nature is the symbol of spirit. (504, B1114)

• Thoreau I fear chiefly lest my expression may
  not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far
  enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily
  experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of
  which I have been convinced. . . . The volatile
  truth of our words should continually betray the
  inadequacy of the residual statement (962,
  B1977).

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Comparison of Thoreau and Emersons Nature
(9)Language Usage

• Thoreau uses puns, giving the words and phrases a
  double meaning.
• When he uses these words, in the text, he
  italicized them to catch the readers attention.
• Examples
• As if you could kill time without injuring
  eternity (870, B1810).
• To cooperate, in the highest as well as the
  lowest sense, means to get our living together
  (905, B1845).
• the shore is shorn (939, B1903).
• Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its
  lobes and veins? (953, B1968)

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Thoreaus Method On Reorienting Our
PerspectiveTo Wander

• I . . . require of every writer, first or last,
  a simple and sincere account of his own life. .
  . for if he has lived sincerely, it must have
  been in a distant land to me (868, B1808).
• Olympus is but the outside of the earth every
  where (912, B1852).
• It is well to have some water in your
  neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the
  earth (913, B1853).
• Morning is when I am awake and there is dawn in
  me (915, B1855).

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Thoreaus Method On Reorienting Our
PerspectiveTo Wander (2)

• We do not ride on the railroad it rides upon
  us (916, B1856).
• The universe is wider than our views of it
  (959, B1974).
• Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly
  lights (964, B1979).
• As I stand over the insect crawling amid the
  pine needles on the forest floor. . . (966,
  B1981).