Reading Thoreau at 200

I'm verklempt at the joy of having discovered Thoreau in mid-life. Like many American students, I read Civil Disobedience and Walden in high school and then forgot all about either. Maybe I even absorbed some of the atmospheric disregard for these works. In the past few years, I read all of Dickinson (what a genius), and then all of Emerson's published writing. And, then picked up Thoreau last year. And I haven't been able to put him aside. Walden, all his essays, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, his Cape Cod and Maine travelogues, now deep into his journals and letters. Thoreau -- Henry! -- is like this amazing friend. I can hardly imagine anyone who has dismissed him has spent any serious time with him. I have marked thousands of thoughts in his writings as beautiful, profound, puzzling, delightful, or surprising. He's much funnier than most people realize. He had a genius for "the examined life". I really cannot conceive who would be so arrogant as to judge such a person negatively. His prose _is_ American English at its best. I can't really care too much about the posted article but can't resist evangelizing my beautiful friend. If you love to read, read Thoreau.

Great essay. To me many of Thoreau's points seem like excellent ideas, the difficulty is putting it into practice. Everyone is aware that your work and property is not "you", but in practice, I feel many of my peers, myself included, naturally gravitate toward this behavior. Reading Thoreau is an excellent reminder that I need to have a cautious relationship with property, lest it own me.

Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden18.html

> In truth, films move them far more; they talk about The Matrix the way my friends once discussed Hemingway or Kerouac.

It seems the author is talking about how the times have changed, since the context of the sentence talks about how "these days" (things are different from how they were). This sentence is really about the kind of friends that a person would keep, if that person were the kind of person who would become a professor of literature at Princeton.

This may be colored by my own personal experiences interacting with faculty at various universities. While I loved studying and taking classes, there was something about the institutions themselves and the culture that drove me nutty. It was something that most faculty never really understood when they gave me well-intentioned advice.

> The intricate prose of Walden is a tough read in the age of tweets, so much so that several “plain English” translations are now marketed.

This caricature of modern society is one that you'd find perfectly preserved if you sent yourself 50, 100, or 150 years back in time.

The point about Thoreau is well-taken, but putting aside Ayn Rand for a moment (did he choose her to maximize controversy?), the popularity of writers is always fickle.