HENRY D. THOREAU, ANARCHISM & CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Henry David Thoureau

Today, The Grandma has been relaxing at home. The situation against the COVID19 is not good and she prefers to reduce her movements, go out street only if it is necessary and spend time at home reading and watching interesting things.

She has chosen Henry David Thoureau, the American essayist, poet, and philosopher who was born on a day like today in 1817.

Thoureau is one of The Grandma's favourite authors. She likes his poetry and his essays and she shares his ideas about anarchism, libertinism and civil disobedience. In fact, we can consider Thoureau a great referent for The Grandma. She remembers when she visited the Thoureau's cabin in the woods in Walden.

The Grandma believes that the best way to pay homage to Henry D. Thoureau is talking about his life, his works and his beliefs.

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817-May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, originally published as Resistance to Civil Government, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism.

More information: The Thoreau Society

His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.

He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown.

Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Henry David Thoureau

Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist. Though Civil Disobedience seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government -I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government- the direction of this improvement contrarily points toward anarchism: 'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, into the modest New England family of John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar.

His paternal grandfather had been born on the UK crown dependency island of Jersey. His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvard's 1766 student Butter Rebellion, the first recorded student protest in the American colonies.

The traditional professions open to college graduates -law, the church, business, medicine-did not interest Thoreau, so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught at a school in Canton, Massachusetts.

After he graduated in 1837, he joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but he resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. He and his brother John then opened the Concord Academy, a grammar school in Concord, in 1838.

More information: Thoreau Online

They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving. He died in Henry's arms.

Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend. Emerson, who was 14 years his senior, took a paternal and at times patron-like interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne, who was a boy at the time.

More information: The Walden Woods Project

Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dial, and lobbied the editor, Margaret Fuller, to publish those writings. Thoreau's first essay published in The Dial was Aulus Persius Flaccus, an essay on the Roman playwright, in July 1840. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson's suggestion. The first journal entry, on October 22, 1837, reads, 'What are you doing now?' he asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry to-day.

Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed Transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott.

The Grandma visited the Thoreau's cabin, Walden

They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts, as Emerson wrote in Nature (1836).

Thoreau felt a need to concentrate and work more on his writing. In March 1845, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.

Two months later, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a small house he had built on land owned by Emerson in a second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was in a pretty pasture and woodlot of 57,000 m2 that Emerson had bought, 2.4 km from his family home.

On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. The next day Thoreau was freed when someone, likely to have been his aunt, paid the tax, against his wishes.

The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February 1848, he delivered lectures on The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government, explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum.

More information: Mental Floss

Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay titled Resistance to Civil Government, also known as Civil Disobedience. It was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers in May 1849

Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley's principle in the political poem The Mask of Anarchy (1819), which begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.

At Walden Pond, Thoreau completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother John, describing their trip to the White Mountains in 1839.

Henry David Thoureau

Thoreau did not find a publisher for the book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense; fewer than 300 were sold. He self-published the book on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson's publisher, Munroe, who did little to publicize the book.

In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and narratives of travel and expedition. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal.

He admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to anticipate the seasons of nature, in his word.

He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed observations on the natural history of the town, covering an area of 67 km2, in his journal, a two-million-word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source of his late writings on natural history, such as Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild Apples, an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous wild apple species.

With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism as academic disciplines, several new readings of Thoreau began to emerge, showing him to have been both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots.

More information: Poetry Foundation

For instance, The Succession of Forest Trees, shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through the dispersal of seeds by winds or animals.

In this lecture, first presented to a cattle show in Concord, and considered his greatest contribution to ecology, Thoreau explained why one species of tree can grow in a place where a different tree did previously. He observed that squirrels often carry nuts far from the tree from which they fell to create stashes. These seeds are likely to germinate and grow should the squirrel die or abandon the stash. He credited the squirrel for performing a great service... in the economy of the universe.

More information: Finantial Times

Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards.

In 1860, following a late-night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined, with brief periods of remission, and he eventually became bedridden.

Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden.

More information: Gutenberg

If the machine of government is of such a nature

that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another,

then, I say, break the law.

Henry David Thoreau