Reading Day 5
A Brief Biography of Henry David ThoreauOK #academic, #historicalbiography, #transcendentalism, #individualism, #fascism
Introduction Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 as the third of four children of a pencil manufacturer in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1833, he went off to Harvard, where he was a good student, but he was indifferent to the rank system and preferred to use the school library for his own purposes. After graduation, he worked as a schoolteacher in his old grammar school in Concord, but found that he was no disciplinarian and resigned after two shaky weeks. Then he helped run a school until his co-director (older brother) died of tetanus. That was the end of Thoreauâs experiments in pedagogy, except perhaps on the page. During his Harvard years he was exposed to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who later became his chief mentor and friend as he settled in Concord during Thoreauâs sophomore year at Harvard. Emerson introduced the younger man to transcendentalism, a belief that conceded that there were two ways of knowing, through the senses and through intuition, but asserted that intuition transcended tuition. Similarly, the movement acknowledged that matter and spirit both existed. It claimed, however, that the reality of spirit transcended the reality of matter. Transcendentalism strove for reform yet insisted that reform begin with the individual, not the group or organization. Later on Emerson lent him a piece of land at his pond-side property where Thoreau went to live by himself on July 4, 1845. Then 27 years old Thoreau began to chop down tall pines with which to build the
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