and went to work in his father’s small pencil-making factory, where he invented a new type of pencil that became popular with professional draftsmen, and spent his spare time writing and walking the woods and fields of Concord. The short-lived Transcendentalist magazine
The Dial
published some of his poems and a few of his natural history essays, which caught the attention of other intellectuals.
Like Rousseau nearly a century before in the Parisian salons,Thoreau began fashioning himself as a kind of natural man among the Concord literati. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, a new resident of the growing literary community at Concord, described Thoreau as “a wild, irregular, Indian-like sort of character 28 [who writes] very well indeed.”
Thoreau had tasted truly wild country—far wilder than Concord—during brief excursions to New Hampshire and looking for teaching jobs in southern Maine, where he met an old Indian who engrossed him with stories of the ways of the North Woods. As he was casting around for a purpose in his twenties, you sense that Thoreau’s inherent unconventionality and his love of nature were reinforced by the praise of older intellectuals like Emerson and Hawthorne—
here’s an Indian sort of character who can write very well indeed
—until he wholeheartedly embraced the role, his identity of nature-philosopher-wildman. He then began his pursuit of wilderness in earnest, first in the woods at Walden Pond and then in northern Maine.
Thoreau, for several years, had been talking about going off to live by himself—both to write a book about his and his late brother’s weeklong boating expedition on the Concord and Merrimack rivers that they’d taken back in 1839, and to come “face to face” with his own person. In the fall of 1844, Emerson purchased forty acres of woodlot on Walden Pond, to preserve it from being felled by loggers or as possible homesites for his extended family. Thoreau’s friend Ellery Channing urged him to build a cabin at Walden and find the solitude and writing life he’d been talking about for so long. The following spring, 1845, at age twenty-seven, and still struggling to really start “living” his life, Thoreau borrowed an axe from Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father and a fellow Concord Transcendentalist, or, depending on the story, from Emerson, walked the two miles out to Walden Pond, and began to chop down pine trees for his cabin.
On Independence Day that summer of 1845, he hauled his belongings out of his parents’ Concord house, loaded them into a wheelbarrow, and carted them out to the cabin he had built on the shore of Walden Pond. Henry David Thoreau then settled in to write, read, observe nature, and tend his bean field.
At last his life would begin—deliberately, or so he hoped. He sought many things: the essence of wildness that he believed lies within us all, a life stripped down to its barest essentials, and something hecalled “Indian wisdom.” It was this latter wisdom in particular that, a year after moving into his cabin at Walden, he set off to find on a monthlong excursion to the Maine Woods.
I N MANY WAYS Thoreau hungered for the life young Charles Biencourt and Charles de La Tour lived in Acadia two hundred years before. A Scottish Presbyterian visiting Acadia in 1629 pungently captured the lifestyle of La Tour, who “live[s] in the country a savage kind of life traveling, trucking, and marrying with the savages.” 29
Insofar as someone born in Europe could learn to think like a Micmac, La Tour and Biencourt embodied Thoreau’s “Indian wisdom.” When the French venture in Acadia collapsed, they stayed, taking up the life of the Micmac.
The colony at Port-Royal had struggled for support from France for several years, starting about 1610. Its original leader, de Monts, quit the whole enterprise after King Henri IV pulled de Monts’s monopoly on the fur trade to give others a chance at it, too. In de Monts’s absence,
The Dial
published some of his poems and a few of his natural history essays, which caught the attention of other intellectuals.
Like Rousseau nearly a century before in the Parisian salons,Thoreau began fashioning himself as a kind of natural man among the Concord literati. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, a new resident of the growing literary community at Concord, described Thoreau as “a wild, irregular, Indian-like sort of character 28 [who writes] very well indeed.”
Thoreau had tasted truly wild country—far wilder than Concord—during brief excursions to New Hampshire and looking for teaching jobs in southern Maine, where he met an old Indian who engrossed him with stories of the ways of the North Woods. As he was casting around for a purpose in his twenties, you sense that Thoreau’s inherent unconventionality and his love of nature were reinforced by the praise of older intellectuals like Emerson and Hawthorne—
here’s an Indian sort of character who can write very well indeed
—until he wholeheartedly embraced the role, his identity of nature-philosopher-wildman. He then began his pursuit of wilderness in earnest, first in the woods at Walden Pond and then in northern Maine.
Thoreau, for several years, had been talking about going off to live by himself—both to write a book about his and his late brother’s weeklong boating expedition on the Concord and Merrimack rivers that they’d taken back in 1839, and to come “face to face” with his own person. In the fall of 1844, Emerson purchased forty acres of woodlot on Walden Pond, to preserve it from being felled by loggers or as possible homesites for his extended family. Thoreau’s friend Ellery Channing urged him to build a cabin at Walden and find the solitude and writing life he’d been talking about for so long. The following spring, 1845, at age twenty-seven, and still struggling to really start “living” his life, Thoreau borrowed an axe from Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father and a fellow Concord Transcendentalist, or, depending on the story, from Emerson, walked the two miles out to Walden Pond, and began to chop down pine trees for his cabin.
On Independence Day that summer of 1845, he hauled his belongings out of his parents’ Concord house, loaded them into a wheelbarrow, and carted them out to the cabin he had built on the shore of Walden Pond. Henry David Thoreau then settled in to write, read, observe nature, and tend his bean field.
At last his life would begin—deliberately, or so he hoped. He sought many things: the essence of wildness that he believed lies within us all, a life stripped down to its barest essentials, and something hecalled “Indian wisdom.” It was this latter wisdom in particular that, a year after moving into his cabin at Walden, he set off to find on a monthlong excursion to the Maine Woods.
I N MANY WAYS Thoreau hungered for the life young Charles Biencourt and Charles de La Tour lived in Acadia two hundred years before. A Scottish Presbyterian visiting Acadia in 1629 pungently captured the lifestyle of La Tour, who “live[s] in the country a savage kind of life traveling, trucking, and marrying with the savages.” 29
Insofar as someone born in Europe could learn to think like a Micmac, La Tour and Biencourt embodied Thoreau’s “Indian wisdom.” When the French venture in Acadia collapsed, they stayed, taking up the life of the Micmac.
The colony at Port-Royal had struggled for support from France for several years, starting about 1610. Its original leader, de Monts, quit the whole enterprise after King Henri IV pulled de Monts’s monopoly on the fur trade to give others a chance at it, too. In de Monts’s absence,
Similar Books
