By the 1850s people are beginning to see wilderness as beautiful and as making the U.S. special
Next step is new ideas about how wilderness is good for us (and be careful to distinguish different versions of that idea)
Thoreau transformed our ideas about wilderness
His ideas grew out of two roots: Unitarianism and Trancendentalism
Unitarianism:
- a further development of
the ideas of Deism
- ongoing tension in the US
between rationalism/the enlightenment and religious
enthusiasm/romaticism/other ideas that value emotion over reason
- in the 18th and early 19th century evangelical religious revivals swept much of the United States--called the First and Second Great Awakening
- the evangelicals put a big
emphasis on
conversion, having an emotional experience of dedicating themselves to
God
- but at the same time others
were interested
in making religion more rational and emphasizing that each individual
must take responsibility for his or her own beliefs
- they wanted to make
religion more
rational, but some beliefs are hard to make rational
- they threw out the idea
that God could be somehow both one and
three--instead of believing in the trinity they concluded that Jesus
wasn't fully God, was more of a prophet
- they also threw out the
idea of original sin (that people are born inherently evil) and
emphasized instead the spark of the divine in
each individual
- Unitarians believe strictly in one God, believe Jesus was a prophet rather than literally God
- by 1833 most Congregationalist (Puritan) churches in Massachusetts had become Unitarian
- the church Thoreau's family
went to split
when he was a boy--his mother wanted to go to the Trinitarian
Congregationalist Church but they wouldn't accept her
- Unitarianism is a religious denomination that later merged with Universalism--there is a Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship in Clemson
- The Congregationalist
denomination merged with others to form the United Church of
Christ--they have a new church
in Clemson
First Parish (Unitarian), Concord, Massachusetts
- Trancendentalists found Unitarianism too rational--they were influenced by romanticism
- they don't see themselves
as a religion, but want to understand relationship between the physical
and spiritual worlds
- believed that there is a
separate spiritual world that is more important than the world of
everyday life--that is more universal than each different religion or
denomination's concept of God
- but we can't see it
- but they also believed that the natural world parallels the spiritual world (because God created it that way) and therefore God's creation gives us a map of the spiritual world
- by intuition and imagination human beings can glimpse the spiritual world, even though we can't perceive it with our five senses
- believed that the wilderness is where we are closest to the spiritual world and that human beings are essentially good
- we make ourselves better
people by paying attention to wilderness and to what is deepest inside
us
- born 1817, grows up in
Concord, Mass.
- attends Harvard College
1833-1837 (about 20 miles from Concord), studied a little science, a
lot of Latin and Greek literature
- Thoreau tries being a schoolteacher and works for the family pencil manufacting business
- 1843 Thoreau's brother dies of lockjaw (tetanus)
- 1845 Thoreau moves to a
one-room cabin he builds himself on Walden Pond, about a mile from
Concord, where he lives for two years, exploring how simply can he live
- 1846 Thoreau spends a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax as a protest against slavery
- 1848 studies surveying and
begins to support himself as a writer primarily by working as a surveyor
- 1849 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
is published
- 1854 Walden is published
- dies in 1862 of consumption
(tuberculosis)
Thoreau criticized the direction in which civilization was going, particularly commercialization:
- "To have done anything just for
money is to have been truly idle."
- "Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. " Walden
- "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." Walden
- "If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."
- "Our inventions are wont to
be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They
are but improved means to an unimproved end."
- "Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth! "
- "What does education often
do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."
- "How does it become a man
to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he
cannot without disgrace be associated with it. "
- "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. " Walden
- "Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps." From the essay "Walking"
- "Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought." Walden
- the wilderness he knew best was the woods around a the village of Concord--he spent more than two years living alone in a one-room cabin at Walden Pond but he could easily walk into town for Sunday dinner
- when he went further from civilization he was a bit overwhelmed (read Maine Woods to see this point)
Thoreau ended up wanting a balance between wilderness and civilization
- we should live partly in
nature and partly in civilization
- we need a balance of the animal inside us and our higher, more refined nature
- draw inspiration from the wilderness and turn it into poetry or philosophy by refining it and giving it structure
- the danger is that we will
conquer the wilderness more and more until there isn't any left (or we
don't experience it)
- the tension between wilderness and civilization is where creativity comes from
- the idea that children need to experience nature
- do we live that way?
