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00:00:00Major funding for Henry David Thoreau was provided by the Better Angels Society, Jeff Skoll, the Mansueto Foundation, Tyson Foods,
00:00:12and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
00:00:15Funding was also provided by the Tyson Family Foundation, the Neil and Anna Rasmussen Foundation, and by the Better Angels
00:00:23Society members, the Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment and Mark A. Tracy.
00:00:30Additional funding was provided by Roxanne Quimby Foundation, Jim and Mona Milan through the HeartSpace Fund, and Elizabeth Kenney.
00:00:49It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for
00:00:57that one.
00:01:00Henry David Thoreau.
00:01:03If one says that he went to Walden to find the secret of life, and if one says he did,
00:01:11the point was to take it back out into the world.
00:01:15To move to town and see, well, can I bring this with me?
00:01:20Can I meet new challenges and a new environment?
00:01:25So the experiments continue.
00:01:34When Henry David Thoreau left Walden Pond, he was 30 years old.
00:01:40For two years, he had lived simply and deliberately, broadening his own transcendent view of life based on the revelation
00:01:49that all things, rocks, plants, animals, and people, are interconnected.
00:01:56His writing there provided the foundations for his two most famous works, Walden, about what he had learned from his
00:02:04two years at the pond, and civil disobedience, about why he spent a night in jail to protest a government
00:02:12that still allowed slavery to exist.
00:02:16It's so unlikely that Henry David Thoreau would suddenly be making his own declaration of independence and bill of rights
00:02:24in this little town next to a pond.
00:02:28There was no search engines there.
00:02:30There was no easy way for accessing the wisdom of the world, but such was his curiosity that he found
00:02:36it.
00:02:37Now, Henry would live other lives as a surveyor, scientist, explorer, and abolitionist, all of which gave him new insights
00:02:48into nature, society, and himself.
00:02:52He would make a discovery about the evolution of species that had eluded even Charles Darwin.
00:02:59He would write an essay that explored the connections between the wildness of nature and a human's desire to be
00:03:07free.
00:03:08He would take a second and third expedition to Maine, where he experienced the Penobscot tribe's intimate relationship with the
00:03:16land, which was even deeper than he imagined possible.
00:03:22And he would support new strategies to try to abolish slavery, even at the risk of compromising his own convictions.
00:03:31The thing he models for us the best is a life committed to ongoing investigation.
00:03:38He talks about always wanting to get two views of the same truth, because the truth will change when you
00:03:42get another view of it.
00:03:44I fear chiefly, lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits
00:03:53of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced, as if
00:04:02nature can support but one order of understandings.
00:04:07The universe is wider than our views of it.
00:04:23After he left Walden Pond, Henry spent 10 months living at the home of his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo
00:04:31Emerson, while the famous Transcendentalist was traveling abroad.
00:04:37He soon became part of the family.
00:04:39He referred to Emerson's wife, Lydian, as a dear sister.
00:04:44Their three-year-old son, Edward, asked Henry to be his father.
00:04:49The children talk about the things he made for them, a dollhouse, toys.
00:04:55And in one case, he made little mittens for the cats, because Lydian Emerson complained that their feet were cold.
00:05:04Thoreau had quite a social, sociable side in the right company.
00:05:12Every year he threw a melon party, which the neighbors all looked forward to.
00:05:17So there's a liveliness and a cheerfulness and a connectedness to people.
00:05:26By February of 1849, Thoreau completed his final draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, about the
00:05:35trip he took with his late brother John.
00:05:38In it, Thoreau transformed their adventure into a mythic voyage by interweaving their experiences with deep references to history, classical
00:05:48Eastern literature, and religion.
00:05:51It was a travelogue of the experience and the landscape at that time.
00:05:57But it was a new thing, filled with philosophy, with Thoreau's poetry, with his thinking and speculating about history and
00:06:09meaning.
00:06:10A Boston publisher agreed to print 1,000 copies of the book, but only if Henry agreed to buy back
00:06:17any that didn't sell.
00:06:21On May 30th, his book was released.
00:06:24The Boston Evening Transcript praised its finely descriptive prose.
00:06:30But some critics were disturbed by Thoreau's suggestion that there was as much wisdom in Eastern religions as in Christianity.
00:06:39His treatment of this subject, the New York Tribune declared, seems revolting to good sense and good taste.
00:06:48Thoreau is saying, yeah, I'm willing to maybe offend you a little here because I want you to see what
00:06:55I'm saying.
00:06:56That there are other paths and maybe some of them are equally interesting or superior to our own.
00:07:02Even members of his own family were upset.
00:07:05There were parts of it that sounded to me very much like blasphemy.
00:07:11Sophia told me Helen made the same remark.
00:07:15And coming from her, Henry was much surprised.
00:07:20Maria Thoreau.
00:07:22Some people saw it as the first work of great American literature, reflecting American landscapes and American experience.
00:07:30But it wasn't received that way.
00:07:33Henry would eventually have to buy back 706 of the 1,000 books printed, which cost him $300, an entire
00:07:43year's income for the average American.
00:07:46He carried all of them up to his attic room in the Thoreau family home, later joking that he now
00:07:52had a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which he wrote himself.
00:08:00It would take him four years to repay his debt.
00:08:21It would take him four years to repay his debt.
00:08:28Thoreau was always aware of the brevity of human life, partly because of the disease that he likely knew he
00:08:38bore.
00:08:38So Thoreau's deep commitment to getting out and exploring must have been tied to his understanding that those lungs were
00:08:49only going to hold out for so long.
00:08:53Wishing to get a better view than I had yet of the ocean, which we are told covers more than
00:08:59two thirds of the globe, but of which a man who lives a few miles inland may never see any
00:09:06trace.
00:09:06I made a visit to Cape Cod in October 1849.
00:09:13After traveling to Orleans on the elbow of the Cape, Henry and his frequent traveling companion Ellery Channing walked 25
00:09:21miles along the Atlantic coast to Provincetown.
00:09:29All the morning, we had heard the sea roar on the eastern shore.
00:09:34It was a very inspiriting sound to walk by.
00:09:40Instead of having a dog to growl before your door, to have an Atlantic ocean to growl for a whole
00:09:49cape.
00:09:56They observed an ecological system entirely different from the landscape of Concord.
00:10:02Henry took copious notes of what he saw, reveling in the endless cycles of life and death.
00:10:10The seashore is a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world.
00:10:17It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it, strewn with whatever the sea casts up.
00:10:27A vast morgue, rotting and bleaching in the sun and waves.
00:10:32And each tide turns them in their beds and tucks fresh sand under them.
00:10:39There is naked nature, inhumanly sincere.
00:10:44Wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.
00:10:57He heard stories of storms and shipwrecks from locals, spent time with an oysterman,
00:11:03and a night in a lighthouse where its bright lamp kept Henry awake.
00:11:09How many sleepless eyes from far out on the ocean, he wondered, were directed toward my couch?
00:11:17He would travel to the Cape four times in all.
00:11:22Thoreau wrote two lectures about his excursions, which were published in Putnam's magazine.
00:11:28Toward the end of his life, he would work closely with his sister Sophia
00:11:33to expand them into a book that she arranged to have published after his death.
00:11:41The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort
00:11:45for those New Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside.
00:11:50If the visitor thinks more of the wine than the brine,
00:11:54as I suspect some do at Newport,
00:11:57I trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here.
00:12:03A storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it.
00:12:07A lighthouse or a fisherman's hut, the true hotel.
00:12:12A man may stand there and put all America behind him.
00:12:23He lost his older sister Helen, his father was periodically ill.
00:12:28So Henry's responsibilities for the family economy increased.
00:12:34At the time, there was a growing need for surveyors.
00:12:39Henry had been practicing the craft for years.
00:12:42After assembling a set of surveying tools and passing out flyers, he got to work.
00:12:49He loved measurement.
00:12:52Surveying allowed him to make measurements and earn money.
00:12:56With the most important piece, he could do this outdoors.
00:12:59As knowledgeable as he was about the natural world, there are some contradictions in his ideas.
00:13:06The forest land he surveyed was often clear-cut for raw materials,
00:13:11to set boundaries for new farmland or to build mills and factories,
00:13:16which also required the damning of rivers to run them.
00:13:20He's working for hire mostly for people who are trying to maximize their profits.
00:13:28He knows what he's doing.
00:13:31At the same time, he's proud of his track record.
00:13:34He becomes famous for precision.
00:13:38He scorns society's dependence on new technologies,
00:13:42like the telegraph and the mass printing of newspapers.
00:13:46Yet he enjoyed them himself.
00:13:48He complained that the train sped up daily life,
00:13:52but it made his lecturing career possible.
00:13:56He traveled by rail more than 70 times.
00:13:59I'm not sure how contradictory Henry was,
00:14:03so much as willing to see things in multiple ways,
00:14:09which, sure, may seem contradictory.
00:14:12If there was some tension between the two, and there was, then I think that's human.
00:14:19All of us are bundles of contradictions.
00:14:26On September 18th, 1850, the US Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act.
00:14:33The new law made it legal for slave owners to reclaim any runaway, man, woman, or child.
00:14:40Even those who had managed to escape to the free states in the North.
00:14:46In April 1851, Thomas Sims, who had escaped from a Georgia rice plantation, was arrested in Boston and sent south
00:14:56to be re-enslaved.
00:14:59The authorities of Boston sent back a perfectly innocent man into slavery.
00:15:07I wish my townsmen to consider that whatever the human law may be,
00:15:14a government which deliberately enacts injustice and persists in it will become the laughing stock of the world.
00:15:26The average white American, North and South, knew slavery was wrong.
00:15:31But it was really inconvenient to have to get rid of it.
00:15:35Where does the sugar to sweeten your coffee come from?
00:15:39Where does the rice that you eat come from?
00:15:43The new law also mandated that helping an escaped slave was now a crime.
00:15:49At the time of the 1850s, the fine was up to $1,000, which in our day and time is
00:15:57about $40,000.
00:16:00$40,000.
00:16:02And then up to six months in jail.
00:16:04So you begin to understand the incredible high stakes of continuing to assist.
00:16:13I say, break the law.
00:16:16Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
00:16:23The women of the Thoreau household had already been active in the Underground Railroad,
00:16:29a secret network of safe houses, which abolitionists used to help slaves escape to freedom.
00:16:35Henry began to work alongside them.
00:16:40He escorted a fugitive named Henry Williams from the Thoreau home to the train station in Concord.
00:16:47But after seeing a policeman, he put Williams on a later train to Burlington, Vermont.
00:16:54Williams went on to freedom in Canada, one of several human beings that Henry helped escape.
00:17:03On April 23rd, Henry arrived at the Concord Lyceum to give a lecture called Walking for the Wild.
00:17:13I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness,
00:17:21as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.
00:17:26To regard man as an inhabitant or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society.
00:17:35I wish to make an extreme statement.
00:17:38If so, I may make an emphatic one.
00:17:42In wildness is the preservation of the world.
00:17:48It's not really about walking.
00:17:50I think that he's talking about what it is to be completely free.
00:17:57He's a white, privileged writer who can walk anywhere he wants.
00:18:02A fugitive slave doesn't have time to think about nature.
00:18:05So when Thoreau writes in Walking that the freedom to walk is essential, he's certainly pointing to, to the freedom
00:18:18that all human beings deserved.
00:18:20In a natural world that is flourishing, regenerative, inexhaustible.
00:18:28The freedom that the natural world allows can teach us ideas, hopes, thoughts we didn't know we had.
00:18:40Wildness, it's freedom.
00:18:43Sometimes it's the breeze blowing through the trees or the call of a bird.
00:18:48And so, wildness is, I mean, it's over my shoulder, it's underfoot, it's always in my heart in a way
00:18:55that allows me to access it, even when I can't get to it.
00:19:00Thoreau called his lecture, Walking, an introduction to all I may write hereafter.
00:19:07Walking, I think, is the birth of the modern environmental thinking.
00:19:12It's one of those things that has grown over time.
00:19:17It's the idea of wild and wilderness can be loved and protected and cared about.
00:19:23It becomes a part of us.
00:19:31In Walden, Thoreau writes, why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?
00:19:41And in the time after Walden, he turns to science to find the answer to that question.
00:19:49What are these objects?
00:19:52How do they interact with one another?
00:19:55How do they make seasonal change?
00:19:57How do they shape a soul?
00:20:01Endlessly curious, Thoreau began reading zoological and botanical texts,
00:20:07looked at Saturn's rings through his neighbor's telescope,
00:20:10and studied the findings of scientists who had traveled the world.
00:20:15After reading Charles Darwin's Voyages of the Beagle,
00:20:20Henry began seeing his own walks as miniature expeditions in their own right.
00:20:26June 7th.
00:20:28I wonder that I even get five miles on my way.
00:20:32The walk is so crowded with events and phenomena.
00:20:38How many questions there are which I have not put to the inhabitants.
00:20:44He could sit watching a vernal pool for frogs and tadpoles for hours on end.
00:20:52He was willing to invest his time and attention and the dividends paid out in his prose.
00:20:58And then the next thing you know, he's drawing inductions and generalizations.
00:21:02He might do 20 of these a day.
00:21:06Maybe it's one of these things that's feeding on itself.
00:21:09And that the more you know and the more detail, the closer you look, the more worlds you see.
00:21:15Just as an observer of nature, he's incredibly acute.
00:21:20And when he's doing that, he's not being romantic.
00:21:23He's being precise and empirical.
00:21:26But he'll veer from talking about some really technical aspect of a flower that he's noticing
00:21:34to something huge, you know, like his relationship to the stars.
00:21:41From the minute to the majestic.
00:21:45Look at anything around you and you can probably find the universe.
00:21:52Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
00:21:57I drink at it, but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.
00:22:06Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
00:22:16Like Darwin, Thoreau began discovering and identifying species of trees, plants, and flowers in the greater Concord area.
00:22:25More than 800 in all.
00:22:28His attic room became filled with notebooks, journals, books, maps, charts, tables,
00:22:35as well as collections of rocks, press plants, and birds' nests.
00:22:42He wasn't comfortable calling himself a scientist because the scientist is someone who looks at the world objectively.
00:22:49For Thoreau, when you're looking at something, the thing you're seeing is being filtered through your own experience.
00:22:58Henry called 1852 a year of observation.
00:23:02He was extremely patient as an observer of nature, but much less patient in tolerating what he thought were the
00:23:15shortcomings of his neighbors.
00:23:19And there was a bit of a lordliness to Emerson that Henry started to resent.
00:23:25He was always the teacher and Henry would always be the student.
00:23:29And as Henry started to feel that he wasn't just Emerson's student, but his equal, tension started to grow.
00:23:37My friend invites me to read my papers to him, Thoreau wrote in his journal.
00:23:43Gladly I would read if he would hear.
00:23:47There is no intellectual communion.
00:23:50Emerson confided in his journal that Henry was always stubborn and contradictory, writing dismissively,
00:23:57If I knew only Thoreau, I should think cooperation of good men impossible.
00:24:04Thoreau imagined telling Emerson what he really thought.
00:24:07I am offended by your pride, your sometime assumption of dignity, and your manners, which come over me like waves,
00:24:17adding, I am wiser than you think.
00:24:21Thoreau was the prodigal son to Emerson.
00:24:25And Emerson had ideas about, you know, what kind of career Thoreau should have.
00:24:31He never became the writer Emerson hoped he would become, because Thoreau was pursuing something else.
00:24:40Thoreau and Emerson were something like father and son.
00:24:45But we see in Thoreau's writings his doubts about whether his relationship with Emerson is good for him.
00:24:53And at a certain point you have to carve out your own space.
00:24:57And that is going to involve pushing against this formative influence.
00:25:03When he fell out with Emerson, he turned to the natural world to reconnect him.
00:25:13At 5 p.m., September 13th, 1853, I left Boston in the steamer for Bangor.
00:25:23When I arrived, my companion that was to be had gone upriver and engaged an Indian.
00:25:33In September of 1853, Henry's cousin, George Thatcher, invited him on a moose hunting expedition to Chisuncook Lake, deep in
00:25:43the Penobscot ancestral lands of Maine.
00:25:48Ever since he was a boy, Henry had been fascinated by indigenous cultures.
00:25:53For years, he had been reading about the history and customs of native peoples and had compiled what he called
00:26:00his Indian books.
00:26:02They eventually grew to thousands of pages.
00:26:06He was trying to find someone who can bring to life and test what he's been reading about all these
00:26:12years.
00:26:13They hired a Penobscot tribal leader named Joseph Attian.
00:26:19Joseph Attian was the son of the chief of the tribe.
00:26:23And Attian was considered the best boatman on the river.
00:26:27At first glance, Henry was disappointed.
00:26:31Thoreau was surprised by how acculturated Attian is to white norms.
00:26:36He wears white clothing.
00:26:38He speaks English.
00:26:39He travels in the woods with Western gear, a rifle, and salt pork.
00:26:44He wanted somebody who more matched his idea of what an Indian should be.
00:26:48But as they canoed up the Penobscot River, Henry began to change his mind.
00:26:54He was impressed by Attian's knowledge of the wilderness and his skills at tracking moose.
00:27:01Thatcher eventually shot one, but it disappeared into the woods.
00:27:06Attian found the moose, skinned it, and carved off a portion of the meat, taking as much of it as
00:27:12he could carry.
00:27:14Thatcher was only interested in the antlers and the bullet.
00:27:18It's a sport.
00:27:20And they're slaying these animals, and you can't possibly eat that much meat, so they're leaving the carcasses to rot.
00:27:30Which is totally outside our cultural beliefs.
00:27:35Thoreau was appalled.
00:27:36This hunting of the moose merely for the satisfaction of killing him, he wrote, is too much like going out
00:27:43to some wood-side pasture and shooting your neighbor's horses.
00:27:50Toward the end of the trip, Attian invited him and Thatcher to camp with some local Indians.
00:27:58We lay on our backs, talking with them till midnight.
00:28:04There can be no more startling evidence of there being a distinct and comparatively aboriginal race than to hear this
00:28:13unaltered Indian language.
00:28:17It took me by surprise.
00:28:19These were the sounds that issued from the wigwams of this country before Columbus was born.
00:28:27They have not yet died away.
00:28:30He realizes that there are parts of this culture that are still vibrant and are going to live on, despite
00:28:39colonization.
00:28:43We've survived by remaining invisible.
00:28:48It's still with us, that feeling.
00:28:52People don't understand.
00:28:54There's things about our culture there's no words for.
00:28:59On their way home, Henry and George Thatcher stopped at Indian Island,
00:29:04the same Penobscot settlement Henry had considered forlorn and dreary on his first trip to Maine seven years before.
00:29:13It's the same village, but he's able to see it differently.
00:29:17He can see the village for what it is, which is a community of people who are making do in
00:29:23the present.
00:29:29The Boston courthouse is full of armed men holding prisoner and trying a man to find out if he is
00:29:38not really a slave.
00:29:41It was really the trial of Massachusetts.
00:29:46Every moment that she now hesitates to atone for her crime, she is convicted.
00:29:54In late May 1854, an escaped slave named Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston by federal marshals.
00:30:04His southern enslaver came up from Virginia and took his property back.
00:30:10A week later, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which empowered newly formed states in America's western territories to decide
00:30:20for themselves whether to permit slavery.
00:30:24Thoreau was enraged.
00:30:27On July 4th, a protest rally was held in South Framingham, Massachusetts, with speeches by abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell
00:30:37Phillips, Sojourner Truth, and Henry David Thoreau.
00:30:43Thoreau spoke in the afternoon.
00:30:46The lecture podium itself had the American flag turned upside down to indicate the danger to the country.
00:30:54It was a very, very hot July 4th, and the day's incendiary nature matched the heat.
00:31:01I feel that my investment in life here is worth many percent less since Massachusetts last deliberately sent back an
00:31:14innocent man, Anthony Burns, to slavery.
00:31:20Man's influence and authority were on the side of the slaveholder and not of the slave, of the guilty and
00:31:31not of the innocent, of injustice and not of justice.
00:31:38Nowadays, men wear a fool's cap and call it a liberty cap.
00:31:46I love the way that Thoreau called out everybody.
00:31:51He didn't just call out the Southerners.
00:31:56He was calling out people in Massachusetts.
00:32:00And he wasn't shy about that.
00:32:02Show me a free state and a court truly of justice and I will fight for them if need be.
00:32:13But show me Massachusetts and I refuse her my allegiance and express contempt for her courts.
00:32:26He says, laws will not make men free. Men must make the laws free.
00:32:32So, to be a good citizen of the government, you have to be willing to argue with it.
00:32:37You have to be willing to disobey it.
00:32:40This is the way to express your love and patriotism.
00:32:44I walk toward one of our ponds, but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?
00:32:54Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle?
00:33:04The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.
00:33:12Alone in the distant woods or fields, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, cold and
00:33:21solitude are friends of mine.
00:33:25I wish to get the conquered, the Massachusetts, the America out of my head and be sane a part of
00:33:33every day.
00:33:35I wish to be made better.
00:33:38I wish to forget.
00:33:39I wish to be made better.
00:33:42Thoreau now began to feel a weakness in his legs.
00:33:45Another symptom of tuberculosis that left him, he wrote, sick and good for nothing but to lie on my back.
00:33:54Thoreau had tuberculosis most of his adult life.
00:33:57And it's a wasting disease that makes you weak and exhausted.
00:34:02He had a terminal disease and he knew it.
00:34:06When he's talking about driving life into a corner, not getting to the end of his life and saying he
00:34:13has not lived, he means that.
00:34:17He's saying, I don't know when my time is going to be up.
00:34:19I'm not going to waste a minute.
00:34:21He kept active, traveling to visit friends, making trips to do research at the Harvard Library and continuing to work
00:34:30as a surveyor.
00:34:32He even took two lengthy walking excursions to Cape Cod.
00:34:37In July of 1857, he left on his third and most ambitious trip to Maine, this time with his friend,
00:34:46Edward Hoare.
00:34:49The first stop, once again, was on Indian Island to find a guide.
00:34:55So in his third journey, the Indian guide becomes the whole point.
00:34:59I think there's a very clear sense that he wants to find someone who can bring to life and test
00:35:04what he's been reading about all these years in Indian notebooks.
00:35:07And I think he really wanted to have a more immersive experience and really get to know what it means
00:35:18to be in this nature.
00:35:20They hired Joe Polis, a Penobscot spiritual and political leader.
00:35:27Polis is in his yard.
00:35:30He's skinning a deer hide against a slanted log, but he's amongst these manicured gardens.
00:35:37There's some sophistication to Polis.
00:35:41He's articulate, he's very knowledgeable, but he also is very indigenous.
00:35:46And Thoreau's trying to grapple with those two pieces of Polis.
00:35:56Together, they would travel more than 300 miles up the Aliash Lakes and then down the east branch of the
00:36:03Penobscot River by canoe and on foot, including portages around waterfalls and river rapids.
00:36:10They carried the canoe and their supplies, hundreds of pounds in all, through mosquito infested, muddy swamps and dense forests.
00:36:21The trip gave Henry another opportunity to learn about how natives negotiated the Maine wilderness.
00:36:31Thoreau is watching a Penobscot person living with incredibly intricate knowledge of the land as part of who they are.
00:36:39When we say all our relations, we mean everything.
00:36:48Minerals, trees, rocks.
00:36:51Those are our relations.
00:36:53Because without them, we know we'd be nothing.
00:36:57Right?
00:36:58Thoreau thinks, I can never have that other half of what Polis has, that indigenous half.
00:37:06Polis taught Henry the words his people used for plants and herbs, leaves and roots.
00:37:14It's a dynamic, verb-oriented language.
00:37:20A jesatigwe is one who's painted many colors.
00:37:24That's a dragonfly.
00:37:25The word for a birch bark canoe is a guiden.
00:37:30And it means that which floats lightly.
00:37:33You get this characteristic that is embedded within the meaning of that word.
00:37:41The more he asks Polis about what each word is, the closer he is getting to understand that indigenous worldview
00:37:48of the nature around him.
00:37:50And what a gift.
00:37:53Thoreau instantly grasps that mainstream American white culture has a lot to learn from Native people.
00:38:00A very different way of being in the world.
00:38:02And language is one of the key entry points into it.
00:38:06For Thoreau, going from calling the tribe on its way to extinction, to a point where Polis is a person
00:38:14who he admires the most.
00:38:17He sees these men beyond the color of their skin.
00:38:21And he grows as a human being in relationship to this indigenous culture.
00:38:29But his goal was never really to use that to politically help Native communities.
00:38:35His goal was really to reform white society, to make it more responsive to the environment.
00:38:41To make it less immersed in this really rapacious capitalist world he can see coming.
00:38:48And he comes back from Maine with a deeper appreciation for what it means to live in your native ground.
00:38:55And eventually he starts to go over his journals and gather the notes of his own place.
00:39:00And to track much more carefully the phenomenon of Concord that will become the calendar project.
00:39:06This great final project, which is this grand account of the Concord ecosystem.
00:39:10And he's done.
00:39:13Why should just these sights and sounds accompany our life?
00:39:18I would fain explore the mysterious relation between myself and these things.
00:39:25Make a chart of our life.
00:39:28Know how its shores trend.
00:39:30That butterflies reappear and when.
00:39:34Know why just this circle of creatures completes the world.
00:39:40The depth of what he included in his records is pretty unique.
00:39:46He cared enough about it to want to be present at the opening of every wildflower in the spring.
00:39:56The calendar charts are the study of the climate as it changes through the seasons.
00:40:04And he always was moving toward this kind of greater and greater fullness of vision.
00:40:09To bring many perspectives, many temporal points together into a kind of symphony.
00:40:17Thoreau poured through decades of his seasonal observations and combined them with new ones, creating records so precise they have
00:40:26proven to be invaluable for scientists measuring the effects of climate change almost 200 years later.
00:40:34You can't see climate, but you can see the manifestation of a climate change in the phenomenon around you.
00:40:41So if you can have measurements from the 1850s, people can really understand things have changed.
00:40:50He wrote, don't underrate the value of a fact.
00:40:54One day a fact will flower into a truth.
00:40:58In the summer of 1859, Henry also began collecting data about the ever-changing Concord River.
00:41:07Henry began to see the river as a whole entity, with its own unique history, culture, and laws.
00:41:14The data he collected was, for him, further proof of what he had seen in Maine, Cape Cod, and elsewhere.
00:41:23The signs of inevitable decline caused by human efforts to tame nature's wildness.
00:41:32He began to imagine natural places that humankind might one day simply leave alone, where a stick should never be
00:41:41cut for fuel, a common possession forever.
00:41:46He spent 18 months with the River Project, and he was still on it, hardcore, until the John Brown affair
00:41:52kicked in.
00:41:53And when that kicked in, he dropped it because that's the higher calling.
00:41:58In his essay, Civil Disobedience, Thoreau had asserted that each citizen should resist a government that supported slavery.
00:42:08A militant abolitionist named John Brown had a more aggressive strategy, armed resistance.
00:42:17Back in 1856, after a series of clashes between pro- and anti-slavery militia,
00:42:23Brown had killed five unarmed pro-slavery settlers in Kansas.
00:42:30Brown traveled to Concord in 1857, looking for support for his cause, and went there again in May of 1859.
00:42:38During that visit, Henry met with Brown, and would later describe him as a meteor flashing through the darkness in
00:42:46which we live.
00:42:49That fall, John Brown and his men raided the Federal Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to arm a slave
00:42:57uprising with the weapons there.
00:43:01They failed, and Brown was captured.
00:43:06John Brown is a conundrum.
00:43:08John Brown is a conundrum.
00:43:09You can look at him very clearly and make an argument that he is a terrorist, and you can also
00:43:14call him a liberator.
00:43:16But it became a tipping point, John Brown.
00:43:18He became a symbol for anti-slavery.
00:43:22It galls me to listen to the remarks of craven-hearted neighbors who speak disparagingly of Brown because he resorted
00:43:32to violence, resisted the government, threw his life away.
00:43:36What way have they thrown their lives, pray?
00:43:41Such minds are not equal to the occasion.
00:43:46He sits down and he writes, and he writes, and he writes, assuming that Brown will be executed.
00:43:54He wants to get the word out before a judgment is made.
00:44:01On October 30th, Thoreau gave a fiery speech in Concord, the first person to publicly defend Brown's actions.
00:44:10I do not wish to kill or be killed, he asserted, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these
00:44:17things would be by me unavoidable.
00:44:22He's saying, forget the law, forget what the federal government says, you know what's right and wrong.
00:44:28And if people have to die to do away with slavery, we have an obligation to do it.
00:44:34John Brown was hanged on December 2nd.
00:44:40Thoreau wrote a news speech called The Last Days of John Brown.
00:44:44It was read aloud six months later at Brown's gravesite.
00:44:50He is the clearest light that shines on this land, he wrote.
00:44:54He is an angel of light.
00:44:57What is it about John Brown that so shifts, like it's a seismic shift in Henry David's life?
00:45:07He realized what it takes to achieve change.
00:45:12The issue of slavery would be decided on the battlefield.
00:45:24January 1st, 1860, a friend of Thoreau's invited him to a dinner party because they just got a copy of
00:45:32a new book by Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
00:45:36Thoreau quickly got a hold of that book and read it voraciously.
00:45:42Darwin's Origin of Species introduced natural selection, the idea that the most adaptable members of a species pass on their
00:45:52traits to the next generation instead of the long-established belief that all species had been created by God.
00:46:01Thoreau was so excited by what he read in Darwin because Thoreau too saw a world that was dynamic, constantly
00:46:11undergoing transformation.
00:46:13He was puzzled by why you'd cut down pines and oaks would spring up and why you would cut down
00:46:19oaks and pines would spring up.
00:46:21So he pursues his own idiosyncratic form of science.
00:46:25One day in June of 1860, he threw a stick of wood against a pine tree in bloom.
00:46:32As the pollen floated away in a cloud, he realized just how far it could travel.
00:46:41Charles Darwin said, there's something that we don't understand, which is how it is that the succession of forest trees
00:46:49works in North America.
00:46:51And it must have astonished Thoreau because he had been working on precisely that scientific question intensively for three or
00:47:00four years.
00:47:04In September, Thoreau delivered a lecture called Succession of Forest Trees in which he answered the question that had puzzled
00:47:12Darwin.
00:47:12The key to the mystery of how different species of trees grew where they hadn't before, Thoreau argued, was seeds.
00:47:23A beautiful thin sack is woven around the seed with a handle to it, such as the wind can take
00:47:32hold of.
00:47:32And it is then committed to the wind expressly that it may transport the seed and extend the range of
00:47:40the species.
00:47:42This is new knowledge.
00:47:45Because seeds travel, he could prove that species were moving often great distances across landscapes.
00:47:53I have great faith in a seed.
00:47:58Convince me you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.
00:48:06Thoreau's literary agent in New York, Horace Greeley, published the essay, and it was picked up by newspapers nationwide.
00:48:15He'd worked out the complete theory.
00:48:18It turned him into our first pioneering plant ecologist.
00:48:23He literally invented an entire science.
00:48:34August 15th, 1861.
00:48:38My cold turned to bronchitis, which made me a close prisoner.
00:48:45My ordinary pursuits, both indoor and out, have been for the most part omitted.
00:48:53Indeed, I have been sick so long that I have almost forgotten what it is to be well.
00:49:00In early spring, Henry had begun having more serious symptoms of the illness that had plagued him off and on
00:49:07for most of his life.
00:49:10Henry contracted what he hoped was a cold, and then perhaps hoped was bronchitis, but indeed was tuberculosis in 1860.
00:49:20He would have known the signs.
00:49:23In September, he managed to visit Walden Pond.
00:49:28Sophia was with him.
00:49:30It would be his last trip there.
00:49:35His illness steadily worsened and eventually confined him to his bed in the family home.
00:49:42He could write only intermittently.
00:49:45When Henry could no longer hold a pen, Sophia served as his scribe.
00:49:51Together, they collected, edited, and revised essays that would become the Maine Woods and Cape Cod.
00:49:59And he always was moving toward this kind of greater and greater fullness of vision.
00:50:04But he knows he doesn't have long.
00:50:08He couldn't walk outside anymore.
00:50:11So his own journal becomes his representation of nature that he could then walk into.
00:50:20It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves.
00:50:27They that soared so loftily and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree,
00:50:37and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high.
00:50:45They teach us how to die.
00:50:50Surrounded by his family, Henry David Thoreau died at 9 o'clock in the morning on May 6, 1862.
00:50:59He was just 44 years old.
00:51:03His passing was so peaceful that Sophia wrote,
00:51:07I feel as if something very beautiful has happened.
00:51:11Some say the last words of the naturalist, who had so many transcendent experiences, were simply,
00:51:18moose, Indian.
00:51:22Sophia, who was reading to him about his river trip with John, said that his last words were,
00:51:29Now comes good sailing.
00:51:37We found our boat in the dawn, just as we had left it.
00:51:42As if waiting for us, there on the shore, all cool and dripping with dew.
00:51:51We too, brothers and natives of Concord, with a vigorous shove, we launched our boat from the bank,
00:51:59and dropped silently down the stream.
00:52:04We bade adieu to familiar outlines, and addressed ourselves to new scenes and adventures.
00:52:13Nought was familiar, but the heavens.
00:52:23Three days later, after the church bell tolled 44 times, Concord gathered for his funeral.
00:52:32School had been dismissed early, so that the students, more than 300 in all, could attend.
00:52:40Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the eulogy.
00:52:46He was bred to no profession.
00:52:49He never married.
00:52:51He lived alone.
00:52:53He chose wisely, no doubt for himself, to be the bachelor of thought and nature.
00:53:01Mr. Thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills and waters of his native town.
00:53:12He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his
00:53:20own.
00:53:21I cannot help counting it.
00:53:24I cannot help counting it a fault in him, that he had no ambition.
00:53:28Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a Huckleberry party.
00:53:38But these foibles, real or apparent, were fast vanishing in the incessant growth of a spirit so robust and wise,
00:53:49so noble a soul, that he should depart out of nature before yet he has been really shown to his
00:53:56peers for what he is.
00:54:00But he, at least, is content.
00:54:05The last sentence in Walden is, the sun is but a morning star.
00:54:10What does he mean?
00:54:11It means, you've just begun to think through the meaning and the significance of what I've produced here.
00:54:35As Thoreau said,
00:54:38Don't, when you come to die, discover that you have not lived.
00:54:44He died young, but he didn't end his life realizing he had not lived.
00:54:52It happens to millions of people today and then, to realize, I just existed. I just lived. I don't know
00:55:00what it meant. I never really figured it out.
00:55:03He was arguing for being aware at all times, to waking up to the facts of your life, to being
00:55:11conscious.
00:55:13Being aware, being present.
00:55:18The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
00:55:24They honestly think there is no choice left.
00:55:29Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive
00:55:38hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
00:55:44We built the world that Thoreau feared, a world that's so noisy and crowded, that we don't have any time
00:55:51to think for ourselves anymore.
00:55:53Most people are hostage to their upbringing, their economic status, and they don't get excited about the adventure of being
00:56:03alive.
00:56:04And it's like watching an incredible birthright being extinguished, because we're muddling through life. And that's the death of freedom.
00:56:16Many of the decisions that pertain to our lives have been made by others, been made by circumstances that have
00:56:23been beyond our control.
00:56:24A very human-centered view of the world has now raised the temperature to the point where our great forests
00:56:32catch on fire.
00:56:33Where, already, hundreds of millions of people can no longer live in the places where they were born.
00:56:43Thoreau intuits that if we're going to make it, we're going to have to turn to the natural world for
00:56:49help.
00:56:49In wildness is the preservation of the world.
00:56:54It feels as if the whole living world is calling out to us to pay attention.
00:57:02But he says, you know, even in the muck of all this, I encountered a white water lily.
00:57:09And lilies like that grow in slime and grow in spite of it.
00:57:16He was open always to accepting signs from nature that all was not lost.
00:57:24Thoreau was saying, if you're beginning to die within, take measures right now.
00:57:29There must be some cabin in the woods within you.
00:57:32There must be some space where you can regenerate yourself and remember what is most essential to you.
00:57:39I think Thoreau gives us the bridge to do that.
00:57:42If we would just open up our heads and hearts to those lessons, I think it could take us a
00:57:50long way on that path.
00:57:52And here he is still offering these messages.
00:57:58It's up to us to open the book and read.
00:58:02There is a season for everything.
00:58:07You must live in the present.
00:58:09Launch yourself on every wave.
00:58:13Find your eternity in each moment.
00:58:17Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land.
00:58:25There is no other land.
00:58:28There is no other life but this.
00:58:32Henry David Thoreau.
00:58:35Henry David Thoreau.
00:58:45Welcome back to us.
00:58:46My friend is a great question.
00:58:53I'm trying to find my son, which is my son.
00:58:55I take the child.
00:58:55My son is a friend.
00:58:56I pray to God.
00:58:58I pray to God.
00:59:32Scan this QR code with your smart device to watch the whole series and learn more about Henry David Thoreau.
00:59:41The Henry David Thoreau DVD is available online and in stores.
00:59:46The series is also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.
00:59:52The digital companion soundtrack is also available online.
01:00:10The Henry David Thoreau DVD is available online and has a platform thats the way to learn more about Henry
01:00:12David Thoreau.
01:00:15The Henry David Thoreau DVD is also available online and is also available online.
01:00:24As an我ら as a student, the new reality is available online and is available online and is available online and
01:00:27is available online.
01:01:31The Neil and Anna Rasmussen Foundation, and by the Better Angel Society members, the
01:01:36Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment and Mark A. Tracy.
01:01:41Additional funding was provided by Roxanne Quimby Foundation, Jim and Mona Milan through
01:01:47the HeartSpace Fund, and Elizabeth Kenney.
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