Thoreau or Emerson?

Either way you have to read Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. It inspired the likes of Ghandi and MLK

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>>9716151

>>9716171
Gandhi*
please no roast

People always shit on thoreau for being a weirdo who supposedly relied on people giving him food out of pity but I don't really care, his philosophy and his nature writing is interesting. I guess they force students to read him in America so maybe that's why people dislike him

>>9716151
Whitman

>>9716193
>eople always shit on thoreau for being a weirdo who supposedly relied on people giving him food out of pity but I don't really care

They shit on him for being a hypocrite and an exaggerator. For him living in the "wilderness" meant living in a cabin a friend had brought for him just on the outskirts of town whilst his family would regularly bring him food baskets and launder his clothes.

Some guy actually died after he tried to do a Theoreau in actual wilderness.

> he set out along an old mining road known as the Stampede Trail, with minimal supplies, hoping to live simply off the land. Almost four months later, McCandless' decomposing body, weighing only 30 kilograms (66 lb), was found by hunters in a converted bus used as a backcountry shelter along the Stampede Trail, on the eastern bank of the Sushana River. His cause of death was officially ruled to be starvation,[2][3] although the exact cause remains the subject of some debate.[4][5][6][7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless

Emerson, obviously.

>>9717084
You're actually wrong. Emerson owned the land that Thoreau lived on, but he built the cabin himself. And yes, he regularly had visitors. Thoreau was never arguing that one should move out into the actual wilderness and avoid society. He only argued that one should live deliberately and not be held down by what he disagrees with. Thoreau wanted to prove that he could build his own house for very little and live for very little, and live a good life, while most people slaved in a job to pay some ridiculous rent on a more comfortable house in the city. Hating Thoreau because he wasn't in the wilderness is also ridiculous. You should love the man for his genius as a writer. Walden is genuinely a masterpiece. There are so many sublime passages and ingenious word play that most people miss entirely.

>>9717238
So you think people dislike him solely because they were forced to read in in high school, even though people don't shit on people like Shakespeare and Orwell who are also forced down their throats

>>9717274
>>9717238

>You're actually wrong.

True I was mistaken about the cabin.

>. Thoreau was never arguing that one should move out into the actual wilderness and avoid society. He only argued that one should live deliberately and not be held down by what he disagrees with.

Its more about being so gung ho about self reliance whilst actually being quite dependent on others - kind of like a NEET libertarian

I like them both. Emerson has been accused of popularizing the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority, though,

>>9716151
Emerson by a mile.

>>9716151
both obviously. emerson inspired thoreau a lot. read his essays, then read thoreau

>>9717238
great post

i should reread walden, apparently it was tarkovsky's favorite book

>>9717238
yes, its ridiculous to see some retards on this board saying that he is a farse because he "went to buy stuff on the city or had visitors"

>>9717238
Agreed. Thoreau wasn't trying to be a rugged survivalist. He was trying to get back to the basics and recapture a romantic sense of wildness and wonder that's lost in the hustle and bustle of modern society. Even the way Thoreau took walks, always in a random and novel direction, indicated how much he cared about his sensory experience. Also, Walden was always more rural than wild, but visiting the site in the midst of Boston's modern-day sprawl might give you the wrong impression about how secluded it was from the city back in Thoreau's time.

>>9717984
>Walden was always more rural than wild
This is actually a problem--it wasn't wild enough. I don't see why this is so hard for Thoreaufags to understand.

>>9718253
It was wild enough to be disconnected from the trappings of modern city life and the chains that it places on human experience and expression.

>>9717302
> Emerson has been accused of popularizing the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority, though,

And he was right to do so.