Category: Emerson, Thoreau, and Friends
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Thoreau Not Into Multi-Tasking
When Henry David Thoreau, the story goes, was on his death-bed, a parson asked him whether he had any intimations of the world to come. "One world at a time" was Henry David's reply.
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The Emersonian Travel Passage in Seneca
In a previous complaint about the travails of travel, I quoted a line from Emerson's "Self-Reliance": "Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places." I claimed that the thought was Seneca's before it was Emerson's. In the meantime the passage has been located in my hardcopy of the Loeb Classical Library, no. 75…
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A Thoreauvian Justification for My Mode of Scribbling
Henry David Thoreau, Journals, 4 September 1851: It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes, that so you may find the right and inspiring one. Be greedy of occasions to express your thought. Improve the opportunity to draw analogies. There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth.
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Seize and Squeeze
Seize the day and squeeze it for all the juice it's worth. Repeat tomorrow. And no day without a little Emerson: . . . we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as…
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Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread
"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson magnificently and truly. And this from a man who lived in New England where there is no sky to speak of. What would he have written had he been able to bathe his thoughts in the lambent light of the desert Southwest?
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Seize and Squeeze
Seize the day and squeeze it for all the juice it's worth. Repeat tomorrow. And no day without a little Emerson: . . . we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as…
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Most Common Thoreau Misquotation?
It rankles this curmudgeon when the following beautiful line of Henry David Thoreau is butchered: In wildness is the preservation of the world. Again and again, people who cannot read what is on the page substitute 'wilderness' for 'wildness.' People see what they want to see, or expect to see. Here is an example of…