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Walden

So I lost interest after reading about Fuller, Emerson and Douglas in the Transcendental 2021 group. I got the Jones Very biography and poems, but just didn't read them. I ended up reading Dante, and Rosewater by Tade Thompson. Went off into Dickinson instead of The Hermaphrodite. I read This is Shakespeare. And The Possibility of an Island. It's so hard for me because there is a part of me that wants to read it all. I still want to go off on the Romantics and Dickenson. But it's time for a reread of Walden. I got down to Willow Pond quite often, went down today and fantasize that I'm Thoreau.

Even though Thoreau is depicted as a bit disingenuous about being independent in the TV show Dickinson, I don't think that show is historically accurate even if it's maybe emotionally accurate on some level. 

Below is my old copy I read in college, that's I'm going to inch my way through. I hate Signet classics, but it seems I have a few.


From his journal: July 3, 1854: What a luxury to bathe now! It is gloriously hot, the first of this weather. I cannot get wet enough. I must let the water soak into me. When you come out, it is rapidly dried on you or absorbed into your body, and you want to go in again. I begin to inhabit the planet, and see how I may be naturalized at last.

I begin to inhabit the planet. I love that.


Interesting article in defense of looking at Thoreau charitably:

"Try mentioning Thoreau online, and you are likely to get several comments about his mother doing his laundry while he enjoyed his camping trip. As Laura Dassow Walls shows in her deeply researched biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, this accusation probably isn’t true. True or not, though, the story resonates with the way Thoreau (or latter-day Thoreauvianism, at least) makes some people feel, so it seems impervious to fact-checking."
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