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The Daily Henry David Thoreau: A Year of Quotes from the Man Who Lived in Season
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of each.”
Modernity rules our lives by clock and calendar, dividing the stream of time into units and coordinating every passing moment with the universal globe. Henry David Thoreau subverted both clock and calendar, using them not to regulate time’s passing but to open up and explore its presence. This little volume thus embodies, in small compass, Thoreau’s own ambition to “live in season”—to turn with the living sundial of the world, and, by attuning ourselves to nature, to heal our modern sense of discontinuity with our surroundings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson noted with awe that from flowers alone, Thoreau could tell the calendar date within two days; children remembered long into adulthood how Thoreau showed them white waterlilies awakening not by the face of a clock but at the first touch of the sun. As Thoreau wrote in Walden, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.”
Drawn from the full range of Thoreau’s journals and published writings, and arranged according to season, The Daily Henry David Thoreau allows us to discover the endless variation and surprise to be found in the repetitions of mundane cycles. Thoreau saw in the kernel of each day an earth enchanted, one he honed into sentences tuned with an artist’s eye and a musician’s ear. Thoreau’s world lives on in his writing so that we, too, may discover, even in a fallen world, a beauty worth defending.
Modernity rules our lives by clock and calendar, dividing the stream of time into units and coordinating every passing moment with the universal globe. Henry David Thoreau subverted both clock and calendar, using them not to regulate time’s passing but to open up and explore its presence. This little volume thus embodies, in small compass, Thoreau’s own ambition to “live in season”—to turn with the living sundial of the world, and, by attuning ourselves to nature, to heal our modern sense of discontinuity with our surroundings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson noted with awe that from flowers alone, Thoreau could tell the calendar date within two days; children remembered long into adulthood how Thoreau showed them white waterlilies awakening not by the face of a clock but at the first touch of the sun. As Thoreau wrote in Walden, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.”
Drawn from the full range of Thoreau’s journals and published writings, and arranged according to season, The Daily Henry David Thoreau allows us to discover the endless variation and surprise to be found in the repetitions of mundane cycles. Thoreau saw in the kernel of each day an earth enchanted, one he honed into sentences tuned with an artist’s eye and a musician’s ear. Thoreau’s world lives on in his writing so that we, too, may discover, even in a fallen world, a beauty worth defending.
- GenresNonfictionPoetryNature
224 pages, Paperback
Published April 8, 2020
23 people are currently reading
92 people want to read
About the author
Henry David Thoreau
2,391 books6,721 followersHenry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.
In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of Emerson, Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by Emerson, resulted in the classic, Walden: Life in the Woods (1854). During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins "from their own superstitions to new ones." In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, "because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced." (Cited by James A. Haught in 2000 Years of Disbelief.) When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: "One world at a time."
Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862.
More: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tho...
http://thoreau.eserver.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Da...
http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu....
http://www.biography.com/people/henry...
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.
In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of Emerson, Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by Emerson, resulted in the classic, Walden: Life in the Woods (1854). During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins "from their own superstitions to new ones." In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, "because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced." (Cited by James A. Haught in 2000 Years of Disbelief.) When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: "One world at a time."
Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862.
More: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tho...
http://thoreau.eserver.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Da...
http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu....
http://www.biography.com/people/henry...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 24, 2022
Excellent passages of Thoreau chosen by his biographer, Laura Dassow Walls. I will keep reading throughout the seasons. Thoreau is a good companion in which to mark time quietly and contemplatively. The world these days is rushed, careless, and hellbent. Better to sit back with Thoreau.
December 26, 2021
The first time I remember encountering Henry David Thoreau’s work is when I visited Walden Pond. What I discovered there mesmerized me. In the years since, I’ve come to regard him in high esteem. His writings are elegant, fitting of his time and ours. Maybe more fitting of ours:
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.”
This book of daily quotes introduces Thoreau’s many thoughts and interests in a compact, easy to digest format. He was a naturalist, inventor, activist, businessman, among many other titles. He walked a lot. Observed more. And wrote about everything. This little volume succinctly captures all of that.
Laura Dassow Walls edited the book. Her biography of Thoreaut is not to be missed. I love the variety of passages she chose and the way she connected days of his life to the calendar. This feature is obvious in a daily quote book, but still touching as many of the passages related to impactful moments of Thoreau’s life.
I appreciated that only a few of his most famous passages made it into the book. There are only so many times you can read about going “confidently in the direction of your dreams.” (Though that one appears.) Yes, we should all do that, but there are actually far more impactful words which are not as quoted. Walls identifies those and presents them to us.
Of course, there are many passages that are not impactful or even a little moving. These are includes, I suspect, to convey a complete sense of Thoreau.
I do wish there was a little history or a little commentary for each quote. Just reading the quote felt lacking. Regardless, I love Henry David Thoreau and will return to this book daily for a long time.
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.”
This book of daily quotes introduces Thoreau’s many thoughts and interests in a compact, easy to digest format. He was a naturalist, inventor, activist, businessman, among many other titles. He walked a lot. Observed more. And wrote about everything. This little volume succinctly captures all of that.
Laura Dassow Walls edited the book. Her biography of Thoreaut is not to be missed. I love the variety of passages she chose and the way she connected days of his life to the calendar. This feature is obvious in a daily quote book, but still touching as many of the passages related to impactful moments of Thoreau’s life.
I appreciated that only a few of his most famous passages made it into the book. There are only so many times you can read about going “confidently in the direction of your dreams.” (Though that one appears.) Yes, we should all do that, but there are actually far more impactful words which are not as quoted. Walls identifies those and presents them to us.
Of course, there are many passages that are not impactful or even a little moving. These are includes, I suspect, to convey a complete sense of Thoreau.
I do wish there was a little history or a little commentary for each quote. Just reading the quote felt lacking. Regardless, I love Henry David Thoreau and will return to this book daily for a long time.
January 3, 2023
Spent 2021 with this book, reading the excerpts by date as part of my morning writing, reading and reflecting routine. I will be rereading daily, again in 2022 and continuing to learn from and appreciate Thoreau's wisdom and love of nature.
December 31, 2021
This work is an excellent introduction to Henry David Thoreau. I have read several of Thoreau’s books there were included in this quotes book, yet there were others that I have not, and plan on reading sometime soon. Highly recommended…SLT
March 29, 2022
Great stuff
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews