Thoreau Handout
CRTW 201
Dr. Fike
YOU MUST HAVE WILSON'S
PROLOGUE AND THIS HANDOUT TO PARTICIPATE TODAY. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE WILSON'S
PROLOGUE, PLEASE GO GET A COPY AT THE
LIBRARY AND/OR GO TO THE NEAREST COMPUTER LAB TO PRINT THE HANDOUT. YOU MAY REJOIN THE DISCUSSION IN PROGRESS.
Can you use the quotations from Thoreau on this handout to figure out why Wilson
begins The Future of Life by
addressing him?
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the
essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and
not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Henry David
Thoreau
“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Henry David
Thoreau
“A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his head, and
cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have cut many tons of
them, littered his stables with them, and fed them to his cattle for years. Yet,
if he ever favorably attends to them, he may be overcome by their beauty.”
The following are from
http://www.walden.org/Library/Quotations/Conservation:
-
What are the natural features which make a township handsome? A river, with
its waterfalls and meadows, a lake, a hill, a cliff or individual rocks, a
forest, and ancient trees standing singly. Such things are beautiful; they
have a high use which dollars and cents never represent. If the inhabitants
of a town were wise, they would seek to preserve these things, though at a
considerable expense; for such things educate far more than any hired
teachers or preachers, or any at present recognized system of school
education. I do not think him fit to be the founder of a state or even of a
town who does not foresee the use of these things, but legislates chiefly
for oxen, as it were. [Journal, 3 January 1861]
-
Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred
or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common
possession forever, for instruction and recreation. We hear of cow-commons
and ministerial lots, but we want men-commons and lay lots,
inalienable forever. Let us keep the New World new, preserve all the
advantages of living in the country. There is meadow and pasture and
wood-lot for the town’s poor. Why not a forest and huckleberry field for the
town’s rich? All Walden Wood might have been preserved for our park forever,
with Walden in its midst, and the Easterbrooks Country, an unoccupied area
of some four square miles, might have been our huckleberry-field. [Journal,
15 October 1859]
-
As in many countries precious metals belong to the crown, so here more
precious natural objects of rare beauty should belong to the public. [Journal,
3 January 1861]
-
I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the
pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures
which he will not know! ["Wild Apples"]
-
Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share
in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum — many for a
glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as
well as the earth! [Journal, 3 January 1861]
-
By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is
free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property
chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the
farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. [Walden]
-
As some give to Harvard College or another institution, why might not
another give a forest or huckleberry-field to Concord? A town is an
institution which deserves to be remembered. We boast of our system of
education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all
schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe. To attend chiefly to the
desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is
absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our fine schoolhouse standing in
a cow-yard at last. [Journal, 15 October 1859]
-
It is a thorough process, this war with the wilderness — breaking nature,
taming the soil, feeding it on oats. The civilized man regards the pine tree
as his enemy. He will fell it and let in the light, grub it up and raise
wheat or rye there. It is no better than a fungus to him. [Journal, 2
February 1852]
-
Why should not we, who have renounced the king’s authority, have our
national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear
and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be
"civilized off the face of the earth," — our forests, not to hold the king’s
game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of
creation, — not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true
re-creation? [The Maine Woods]
-
The very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel or powder, — and
every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory
of man! As if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds
out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one. We shall be
reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment. [The Maine
Woods]
-
It would be worth the while if in each town there were a committee appointed
to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment. If we have the
largest boulder in the county, then it should not belong to an individual,
nor be made into door-steps. [Journal, 3 January 1861]
-
Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and
grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light, — to see its
perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many
broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success! But the pine
is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no
more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down
and made into manure. There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines
as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a
dead human carcass is a man. Can he who has discovered only some of the
values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of
the whale? Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have "seen
the elephant"? These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger
race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones;
for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use. Every creature is
better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands
it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. [The Maine Woods]
-
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private
property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative
freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into
so-called pleasure grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive
pleasure only, — when fences shall be multiplied, and man traps and other
engines invented to confine men to the public road; and walking over
the surface of God’s earth, shall be construed to mean trespassing on some
gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude
yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities
then before the evil days come. ["Walking"]