Thoreau's Walden

>>9553632
I've always wanted to go see Walden pond. I need a cabin.

sounds like the type of bland imagery a walden fan would appreciate

go do lsd in the forest or something, anything has to be better than thoreau

>tfw OP doesn't realize he's having a comfy mystical experience while reading the transcendentalists and "nearing himself to nature" (Rilke)

You should read Emerson next

>>9553632
>listening to the audiobook
>I've ever read in my life

>he has so deeply bought the audiobook meme that he doesn't even detect the contradiction anymore

>>9553676

Came here to post this. Paper is the patrician choice.

>Thoreau lived in his cabin on Walden Pond in Massachusetts for two years and two months, starting in 1845. He escaped the world, reducing existence to its basic elements, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” he wrote in Walden.

>“I love to be alone,” Thoreau added. “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” This seems to precisely mirror Knight’s sentiments. And yet Knight despised Thoreau.

>“Thoreau,” said Knight, “was a dilettante.” The great Transcendentalist was also, according to Knight, a fraud. During his retreat, Thoreau socialized frequently in the town of Concord. His mother did his laundry. One dinner party at his place numbered 20 guests.

>Thoreau’s biggest sin may have been publishing Walden—packaging his thoughts into a commodity, brazenly seeking fame and fortune. Knight’s disdain was bottomless. “Thoreau had no deep insight into nature,” said Knight.

>Score: an absolute 0.

>>9553676
>>9553709
But my dog can't read, it's a shared experience.

>>9553655
It's pleasant. Go in the late summer, mid September in the morning when there's almost no one there except a few bathers. You can walk around the thing in less than 20 minutes. Concord in general is pleasant. Hawthorne's digs are right next to the famous bridge. Great cemetery.

>>9553632
He's not being metaphorical when he's talking about the railroad riding upon us. He's talking about the human cost it took to build the railroad.

I don't think I've ever heard Thoreau's writing described as "sprawling and metaphorical." That would be a much better description of Emerson's writing. Thoreau's writing is much more precise and grounded in specificity rather than abstraction.

>>9553632
I'm currently reading this as well, anon, and I love the fuck out of it.

>>9553632
>Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages; for these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature. But when the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and Grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it.

Thoreau is as /lit/ as it gets.

>>9553752

>he's never brought his dog to the local pond, sat himself upon a noble stump, and read the waterlogged paperback withdrawn from his back pocket

>>9553664
bitter faggot, go die in your basement

>>9555388

>>9553752
Read aloud to your dog, man. You must take some interest in his education.

>>9553632
Read Emerson and Muir next