Thoreau's Morning Work: Memory and Perception in a Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the "Journal," and Walden

by H. Daniel Peck

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, the only works Thoreau conceived and brought to conclusion as books, bear a distinctively important relation to each other and to his Journal, the document whose 24 year composition encompasses their development. In this
book The author shows how these three works engage one another dialectically and how all of them participate in a larger project of the imagination. Morning Work a phrase from Walden, is the name the author gives to this larger project. By it he means the work done by memory and perception as they act to shape Thoreau's emerging vision of a harmonious universe. He argues that the changing balance of memory and perception in the three works defines the unique literary character of each of them. He offers a major re-evaluation of Walden, which he sees neither as the epitome of Thoreau's career (the traditional view), nor as an anomaly (the recent, revisionary view). Rather, he sees Walden as a pivotal work, reflecting the issues of loss and remembrance that earlier had found prominent expression in A Week and prefiguring the late Journal's vision of natural order. Focusing on the two-million word Journal, the author provides a critical analysis that defines the essential forces and the imaginative coherence in its vast discursiveness. The consideration of memory and perception in Thoreau also leads him to the issue of the writer's modernity, and he explores the ways in which Thoreau anticipates 20th century thought, especially in the works of such objectivist philosophers as William James and Alfred North Whitehead.

Genres: Literary Criticism

209 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 1990

Reviews

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often wonder if Thoreau was conscious of his own cognitive processes as they are discussed by his critics. Was he aware of the categorical perceptions and memory techniques Peck says he used when writing about nature and other things? Peck is an effective literary analyst, but how much does he or anyone really know about Thoreau's thinking?

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic read -- and you don't even have to have read all of Thoreau to enjoy it. I've only read Walden and a little bit of the Journal, and I found it incredibly interesting.