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Cabin porn

On this day September 6th in 1847, writer Henry David Thoreau moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family in Concord, Massachusetts, after living for two years in a shack he built himself on Walden Pond.

 

Nutcase survivalist wannabe - Thoreau's Walden.

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Thoreau graduated from Harvard and started a school with his brother. But in 1839, he decided while on a canoe trip that he wasn’t cut out for teaching. Instead, he decided to devote himself to nature and poetry. Deeply influenced by his friend Emerson’s poetry and essays, Thoreau started a journal. He began publishing essays in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial.

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At age 25, Thoreau left Concord for New York, but detested city life and returned after a year. Two years later, at age 27, he decided to live by Transcendentalist principles, spending time alone with nature and supporting himself with his own work. He built his home and lived off his garden for two years while reading and writing. In 1854, his collection of essays, Walden, or Life in the Woods, was published.

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During his time at Walden, Thoreau spent a brief time in jail for refusing to pay taxes to support the war with Mexico. He later wrote Civil Disobedience, one of his most famous essays, based on the experience. Mohandas Gandhi later was inspired by his writings. After Thoreau’s time at Walden, he wrote magazine articles and became an avid abolitionist, working to smuggle escaped slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad. He died in 1862.

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For a less measured account, go here to read the full text of Kathryn Schultz’s scathing critique of Thoreau that appeared in the New Yorker in 2015, under the title “Pond Scum.”

 

An excerpt:

 

The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world…  “Walden” is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.

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