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Old 02-20-2008, 04:01 PM   #1
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Read "Walden" by Thoreau to understand

In keeping with the American Transcendentalist views of Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in part here:

"Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim. "


Here are some excerpts from "Walden", by Henry David Thoreau:

"God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages, and we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us. "

"What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip (labium, from labor (?)) laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther. "

"Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf."
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Last edited by drone007; 02-20-2008 at 04:07 PM..
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Old 05-16-2010, 03:55 AM   #2
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Re: Read "Walden" by Thoreau to understand

It's amazing to think that Thoreau's books are banned from many public libraries today! The American Existentialist... Banned. I think there is some kind of irony in that...

In any case, I like thoreau very much, but I am not very familiar with Emerson's stuff... Any suggestions?
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