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00:00Major funding for Henry David Thoreau was provided by the Better Angels Society, Jeff Skoll, the Mansueto Foundation, Tyson Foods,
00:12and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
00:15Funding was also provided by the Tyson Family Foundation, the Neil and Anna Rasmussen Foundation, and by the Better Angels
00:23Society members, the Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment and Mark A. Tracy.
00:30Additional funding was provided by Roxanne Quimby Foundation, Jim and Mona Milan through the HeartSpace Fund, and Elizabeth Kenney.
01:08Every now and then, a sentence, a paragraph, an essay continues to speak to people and has some value in
01:18the present.
01:18There is something incredibly powerful about taking someone else's words inside yourself, and your body is involved in those words,
01:30in making those words real.
01:32Words start wars, they save people, and they convert us from thinking one way to realizing that we're wrong in
01:44what we think.
01:45The stories we tell, the ways we think about the world, have huge consequences, and so do our actions.
01:58Ideas shape reality, and they can change the world.
02:04His life was a relentless search for truth.
02:08His words have inspired revolutions, social movements, and environmental actions all around the world for more than 150 years.
02:18His name was Henry David Thoreau.
02:30I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.
02:37To live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.
02:44To drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.
02:50And if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish
02:58its meanness to the world.
03:00Or, if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it
03:08in my next excursion.
03:13Most people today would say, why am I not happy?
03:18They realize that the path that they took to happiness has not precisely worked out for them.
03:26Thoreau was trying to make sense of life.
03:29He lived exactly the way he wanted to live.
03:33And there was an enormous freedom for him that most people just don't get.
03:39The things he's getting at were mostly ignored then, and they're mostly ignored now.
03:45But Thoreau understood that language matters.
03:58Henry David Thoreau wrote about the impact of industrialization on nature and society.
04:04The hypocrisy of slavery in a country that declared all men equal.
04:09And the mindless pursuit of wealth, which he said led to lives of quiet desperation.
04:17So much of what we spend our lives and our days doing, we don't really care about.
04:22And yet somehow we've found ourselves in the middle of a life with obligations.
04:28People don't know where to find meaning, and they don't take the time to try to find it.
04:33Which Thoreau says is essential.
04:35You can't even ask the deep questions if you don't stop to figure out what the deep questions are.
04:40Our lives are overcomplicated.
04:43It's so easy to lose sight of what matters.
04:49His big project as a writer is to wake us up.
04:53He spent his time observing, contemplating, and experimenting.
04:57Including two years in a small house he built near a pond, where he tried to live a simple, spiritual,
05:04and intentional existence.
05:07He never stopped asking questions, and never settled for easy answers.
05:13Rather than love, then money, then fame, he wrote, give me truth.
05:19The program of his life is to seek other ways of being and of connecting.
05:27It involves distancing yourself from norms until you begin to see things that you could never have seen in any
05:35other way.
05:36Things that most people can't see.
05:40Thoreau was a lecturer, philosopher, pencil maker, and surveyor.
05:44A teacher, scientist, and an abolitionist.
05:49But above all, he was a prolific writer.
05:52His journal alone was more than two million words.
05:57He wrote two timeless manifestos.
05:59One on discovering spiritual truths in nature.
06:03And the other on a citizen's obligation to stand up against injustice.
06:09Two seemingly different doctrines that Thoreau would prove are profoundly interconnected.
06:16I think if 20 people read Thoreau, each one of us will get something different.
06:21And yet, what they're getting from Thoreau, I think, is very much the same.
06:26A sense of possibility, a new dawn, a reminder to think about the essential facts of life.
06:32There's so many ways in which his work and his life and his ideas and his creativity and his passion
06:38and his vulnerability shape our world today.
06:41His life was rife with contradictions.
06:45He yearned for solitude, but became a public figure.
06:50He believed in the preservation of wild nature, yet knowingly contributed to its destruction.
06:56He was committed to freedom and equality for one race of people, but often failed to take action against the
07:04inhumane treatment of another.
07:07Ultimately, his life would be reduced to legend and his complex prose to one-liners.
07:14And while he rarely traveled far from his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, he became a man of the world.
07:23Life can always be endless adventure and discovery, even if you've only traveled widely in Concord.
07:32And Thoreau is a genius at packing a thousand miles into a single step in how he writes.
07:42Man thinks faster and freer than ever before.
07:48He, moreover, moves faster and freer.
07:54He is more restless because he's more independent than ever.
08:01The winds and the waves are not enough for him.
08:06He must ransack the bowels of the earth that he may make for himself a highway of iron over its
08:14surface.
08:20Think of our life in nature.
08:24Daily, to be shown matter.
08:28To come in contact with it.
08:31Rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks.
08:34Rocks, the solid earth, the actual world, the common sense.
08:40Contact.
08:44Contact.
08:46Contact.
08:47Contact.
08:47Who are we?
08:48Where are we?
08:54And he never let those questions settle.
08:57And I think that makes him relevant always, in every time.
09:02But particularly in a time like ours, where we are really thinking about what it means to be a human
09:07being on this planet.
09:09But you have to open the book, and Thoreau says, all right, I've got your attention now.
09:15Keep reading, and I'll help you sort this out.
09:29Henry David Thoreau was born July 12, 1817, on his grandmother's farm in Concord, Massachusetts, a town some 18 miles
09:40northwest of Boston.
09:44The United States of America had won its independence from England only 34 years earlier.
09:52The early 1800s were a very introspective and also a very outward time for America.
09:59It was growing.
10:01It was trying to figure out what it meant to be a democratic republic and how to improve this democratic
10:07republic.
10:09Henry was the third of four children of John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar.
10:15He had an older sister, Helen, and a younger one, Sophia.
10:20His older brother, John Jr., was his closest friend.
10:25After two years of dwindling harvests and the failure of a dry goods store,
10:31according to legend, Henry's father, John, was forced to sell his wedding ring to make ends meet.
10:38The family shared a love of the outdoors and took day-long walks in the Concord countryside.
10:45Cynthia encouraged the children to pay close attention to nature's sights and sounds.
10:52When Henry was five years old, she took him to nearby Walden Pond.
10:59He would later say,
11:00That woodland vision for a long time made the drapery of my dreams.
11:08Thoreau's interest in what was beyond what he could see started very early.
11:15His mother came up one night and said,
11:18Henry, why aren't you asleep?
11:21And he said he was looking at the stars trying to see God behind them.
11:29He once said,
11:30This is a world where there are flowers.
11:33And you can feel his wonder at that fact.
11:38Imagine how many different worlds there could be on how many different planets.
11:41And we are the lucky idiots who landed on the world with flowers.
11:47As a boy, Henry was aloof, introspective, and intensely curious.
11:53His brother, John, was athletic, charismatic, a jokester, and an instigator of rough and rambunctious games.
12:02Henry usually watched from the sidelines.
12:06But he and John were always together, swinging on the branches of a birch tree.
12:12Climbing nearby Fairhaven Hill to see the sunrise.
12:16Or down at the Concord River, fishing, swimming, and exploring.
12:20At times, they would also participate in what they called Indian play.
12:30John and I had been searching for Indian relics when, with our heads full of the past and its remains,
12:38I broke forth into an extravagant eulogy on those savage times.
12:45There, on Neshadik, said I, was their lodge, the rendezvous of the tribe.
12:51Here, I exclaimed, stood Tehadawan.
12:57How often have they stood on this very spot, at this very hour.
13:03He's always keenly aware and curious about where he is.
13:09When he finds an arrowhead, he recognizes it has significance.
13:16Even when he's a young boy and doesn't yet know fully the history attached to such an item.
13:23He's so deeply fascinated by Native people, and yet really doesn't understand America's long colonial dispossession.
13:33The Muscatacood people have been living in the Concord area for thousands of years.
13:38But the Native people Thoreau knew in Concord were ones he knew really by their relics.
13:44Henry and John had begun their education by attending a one-room public schoolhouse on the town common.
13:53Then they enrolled in a new private school for promising children called the Concord Academy.
14:01As much as he was busy reading at school, he was in the woods and the local hills.
14:08He had spent so much time in the hills and on the river that he nearly squandered his chance to
14:16be a college student.
14:18On August 30, 1833, Henry David Thoreau entered Harvard College in Cambridge.
14:25He was 16 years old.
14:28Thoreau was a voracious reader and spent hours in the library, where he began a lifelong habit of copying passages
14:36from books for later reference.
14:38But his mind was often elsewhere.
14:42Though bodily I have been a member of Harvard University, heart and soul I have been far away among the
14:50scenes of my boyhood,
14:52scouring the woods and exploring the lakes and streams of my native village.
15:00In his junior year, to defray the cost of his tuition, Henry left for a term to earn money as
15:07a visiting schoolmaster in the nearby town of Canton.
15:11He boarded with Unitarian minister, Orestes Brownson, who believed that social justice was a critical component of America's democratic experiment.
15:24And so here he is, and he's still just a kid, walking into the household of this ferociously brilliant, firebrand
15:33intellectual.
15:33And instantly, this man starts to talk to him, and they're up until midnight.
15:40This fury that Bronson had, that ideas will make you free, was something that really struck deep for Thoreau.
15:49Thoreau speaks of it as the day when my mind was born.
15:53And he came back to Harvard a different person, old, sassy.
15:59He talked back to his professors.
16:01Can you imagine?
16:03After suffering what may have been a sign of tuberculosis, Henry had to take another five months off.
16:12Thoreau graduated from Harvard College on August 30, 1837.
16:19It was a time of significant change.
16:23Political issues, particularly slavery, were dividing states, communities, and even families.
16:31The Industrial Revolution and the westward expansion of the country were reshaping the lives of many Americans.
16:39Those in the younger generation often had to choose between settling further west, where farmland was more plentiful,
16:46or moving into the cities to work in factories.
16:49This is a generation for whom there's no single clear path to follow.
16:58There's not enough land in Concord anymore for most farmers to set up their kids.
17:03Mills going up everywhere, up and down Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
17:08People streaming off the farm to work in those factories, being forced into worlds that they did
17:16not understand and were not suited for them.
17:20Thoreau understood what it would mean to the human spirit.
17:27In his senior year, Henry had read a book called Nature, written by a 34-year-old philosopher and fellow
17:35citizen of Concord named Ralph Waldo Emerson.
17:39In it, he spelled out an entirely new and radical approach to life.
17:45The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face.
17:52Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
17:59Why should not we have a poetry, a philosophy of insight, and not of tradition,
18:06and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
18:14There are new lands, new men, new thoughts.
18:19Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
18:27Emerson had graduated from Harvard Divinity School and later served as a minister in Boston.
18:33He then left the church for a new kind of ministry, an electrifying, spiritual, philosophical,
18:40and social movement that was attracting reformers and intellectuals to satisfied with society's values.
18:47It was called Transcendentalism.
18:52Transcendentalism is the first youth movement in American history.
18:57It was a reform movement to incinerate orthodoxies and rebuild from the idea that
19:06the individual genius trumped received wisdom.
19:10That was music to Thoreau's ears.
19:14Transcendentalism boils down to one very simple but very powerful idea
19:18that there is a spark of divinity within absolutely every single human being.
19:26That means every person who is enslaved, you are enslaving part and particle of God.
19:35Every woman who doesn't have full human rights,
19:38every child that you're depriving of an education,
19:42you're depriving that spark from developing.
19:46They're questioning religion, education, politics.
19:52They're asking questions about labor and freedom and enslavement.
19:58They're questioning the entire grounds of society.
20:02That's pretty radical.
20:05Emerson's book, Nature, had established him as the leader of this new movement.
20:12Henry, now 20 years old, became his protege.
20:16I delight much in my young friend, Emerson wrote,
20:20who seems to have as free and erect a mind as any I've ever met.
20:26I don't know if you've ever met.
20:27Brave Henry is content to live now and feels no shame in not studying any profession.
20:34For he does not postpone his life, but lives already and pours contempt on these crybabies of routine and Boston.
20:46Emerson saw Thoreau's potential as a writer and encouraged him, asking,
20:52what are you doing now? Do you keep a journal?
20:56On October 22nd, 1837, Thoreau wrote, I make my first entry today.
21:04His journal was meant to catch the flow of thoughts, of observations, and take that,
21:12that little emergent flame of, of whatever little spark is, is there and just explore it.
21:23Henry was now living with his family in Concord in a rented house on Main Street,
21:29where his mother, Cynthia, rent a boarding house.
21:33There, she and her daughters, Helen and Sophia,
21:37began having informal meetings with a group of abolitionist neighbors, 61 women in all,
21:44including Emerson's wife, Lydian, the new organization's leader, Mary Merrick Brooks,
21:51and the one Black founding member, Susan Garrison.
21:54They called themselves the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society.
21:59It is always astonishing to me to look at this point when the abolition of slavery in the United
22:07States is really being led by these little marginal groups. A lot of women, dissenters,
22:13Quakers, ex-slaves, they're not nearly recognized enough.
22:19A lot of women get worked up. They move the nation forward.
22:25Henry David Thoreau is living in a household with women who are determined to do something.
22:31The women of Concord, to a person, will outdo the men of Concord when it comes to actually thinking
22:40about justice. And you can imagine that hive of activity, that defines the Thoreau home.
22:50October 1837.
22:52To be alone, I find it necessary to escape the present.
22:58I seek a garret.
23:02Thoreau retreated to a small, east-facing room in the attic, where he could write in his journal
23:08in relative peace and quiet, while gazing out at the forest and hills in the distance.
23:15I yet lack discernment to distinguish the whole lesson of today. But it is not lost. It will come to
23:22me at last.
23:24My desire is to know what I have lived, that I may know how to live henceforth.
23:34He says,
23:35I feel ripe for something, yet do nothing. I feel fertile, nearly.
23:42He recognizes that you don't know where this is going, but you have to trust that because you love it,
23:50it will produce something.
23:53And pretty soon the whole world is reflected in that journal.
23:58It literally becomes the anchor of his entire life. And it is epic. All the universe is in it.
24:11Henry's first job after college was teaching at his old grammar school.
24:16But after only two weeks, he abruptly quit, when a supervisor told him he must strike his students
24:23to make them behave.
24:26I would make education a pleasant thing, Henry said, for both the teacher and the scholar.
24:33Then, with his brother John, he started his own school.
24:38Now, no student was physically punished. They were encouraged to speak up. Instead of following a
24:46static writing curriculum, they kept journals. And to break up long days in the classroom,
24:52Henry and John took them outdoors to explore the local woods and fields. Henry also began working
25:01at his father's business, making pencils, which later focused on selling its refined graphite.
25:08He would continue working there on and off his whole life. The business would prosper.
25:17Back in 1828, the citizens of Concord had become one of the first towns in the country to establish
25:25a lyceum, a program of regular lectures and debates on a variety of topics, and open to the general public.
25:33In Henry's time, there are two ways, really, to get one's thoughts and writings out to the world.
25:40One is publication, and the other is lecturing.
25:45The lyceum is an agent of progress. It was common for lyceum lecturers to challenge the ways people
25:54have done things, and to say, no, the new way to do it is this. And Thoreau is part of
26:00this.
26:03On April 11, 1838, Thoreau, now 20 years old, delivered his first lyceum lecture, entitled Society.
26:13The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary,
26:20degrades itself to a level with the lowest. Hence the mass is only...
26:26In the years to come, Thoreau would speak in towns all over New England.
26:31I take it for granted.
26:33Henry's lecture pleased me much, and I have reason to believe others liked it.
26:39A few lyceum fees would satisfy his moderate wants. To say nothing of the improvement and
26:47happiness it would give both him and his fellow creatures, if he could utter what is most within him,
26:54and be heard. Lydian Emerson
27:06Saturday, the last day of August, we too, brothers and natives of Concord,
27:14weighed anchor and dropped silently down the stream.
27:22In the late summer of 1839, John and Henry set off on an adventure on the Concord and Merrimack
27:29rivers in a boat they had built together and christened Mesquitequid in honor of the name given to the river
27:37lowlands by indigenous people. The brothers planned to row, pull, and pull their boat down the slow-moving
27:49Concord river, and then head up the mighty Merrimack to Hookset, New Hampshire, where they would continue
27:56on land to visit the White Mountains. This was a camping and hiking adventure to take in the history
28:06and signs of community and society along the way. There's these kind of wonderful stories about them
28:13spending hours and hours together playing in the woods. You can kind of sense this on the Concord and
28:19Merrimack rivers. Their relationship revolved around being together in the natural world.
28:29At times, their adventure was hijacked by what they saw.
28:36Traveling up the river was really traveling up a kind of highway for the industrial revolution
28:42that was going to completely change the New England that Thoreau knew so well and loved so much
28:48and changed the river forever.
28:51At Billerica, Massachusetts, they came upon a woolen mill powered by a dam that blocked the spawning of fish.
29:01Who hears the fishes when they cry? I, for one, am with thee. And who knows what may avail
29:10a crowbar against that Billerica dam?
29:15When they built the Billerica dam, it stopped the migrations of fish. And what he wanted to do was
29:22take a crowbar and take down the dam and let the fishes run free.
29:30As they made their way up the Merrimack River to Lowell and then to Manchester, New Hampshire,
29:35they witnessed a booming textile industry where young women and children earned only three dollars
29:42a week for working six 12-hour days. I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode
29:50by which men may get their clothing. As far as I've heard or observed, the principal object is not that
29:57mankind may be well and honestly clad, but unquestionably that corporations may be enriched.
30:08Our nice clothes all about enriching corporations. Is that why we have these dams? Is that why we
30:15have these factories? He names it the critique of consumption.
30:25Henry and John's journey lasted two weeks, ending with such a strong wind at their backs,
30:31that they were able to travel the last 50 miles home in a single day.
30:37Thus we sailed, not being able to fly, making a long furrow in the fields of the Merrimack
30:45toward our home. With our winds spread, but never lifting our heel from the watery trench,
30:53gracefully plowing homeward with our brisk and willing team. Wind and stream pulling together.
31:11We do not wish to say pretty or curious things, or to reiterate a few propositions in varied forms.
31:19The pages of this journal will be filled by contributors who possess little in common,
31:26but the love of intellectual freedom and the hope of social progress. Margaret Fuller.
31:35In May of 1840, Ralph Waldo Emerson and a small group of transcendentalists started a new quarterly
31:43journal to help spread their radical ideas. It was called The Dial, a magazine for literature,
31:50philosophy, and religion. Sarah Margaret Fuller, a highly respected intellectual, became its editor.
32:00Thoreau was determined to write for The Dial.
32:03Which meant that if he was going to be published, he would have to go through the formidable Margaret Fuller.
32:09And she was hard on him. The thoughts seemed to me so out of their natural order that I cannot
32:17read it
32:17through without pain. It is true, as Mr. Emerson says, that essays not to be compared with this have
32:26found their way into The Dial. But yours is so rugged that it ought to be commanding. Yet I hope
32:35you will
32:36give it to me again. When the first issue came out on July 1, 1840, it included one of his
32:46poems and an essay.
32:48We don't see his early writings as fantastic art. He's writing like a young writer who's working his way
32:58to being a great writer. Fuller would become Thoreau's colleague and friend. But she would also
33:07remain one of the fiercest critics of his writing. Meanwhile, after a year of teaching at the new school,
33:16Henry's brother John became ill and no longer had the strength to continue. They closed the school on April 1,
33:241841.
33:27That same month, Lydian and Ralph Waldo Emerson asked Henry to come live with their family
33:34in exchange for doing chores, tutoring their young son Waldo, and serving as Emerson's assistant.
33:42Henry moved in, simply noting in his journal, at RWE's.
33:49My good Henry Thoreau made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity and clear
33:57perception. How comic is simplicity in this double-dealing, quacking world?
34:06Everything that boy says makes merry with society, though nothing can be graver than his meaning.
34:15Henry was funny and loved to pull people's legs. But underneath all that, Emerson also saw
34:22a kind of rebelliousness against convention and against the kind of immorality that he thought
34:29was all too common around him. And that was the kind of thing that Emerson looked for.
34:37Emerson was pleased with the arrangement, telling a friend that Thoreau was a writer you may one day be
34:43proud of, a noble youth full of melodies and inventions.
34:49My dear Henry, will you not come up to the cliff this p.m. at any hour convenient to you,
34:57where our ladies will be greatly gratified to see you? And the more, they say, if you will, bring your
35:05flute.
35:08I am living with Mr. Emerson in very dangerous prosperity.
35:14Very dangerous prosperity. Well, a big house with servants, good food, leisure. I think there was a
35:25little bit of resentment there. He knew very well that his family wasn't living in that kind of luxury.
35:31Creature comforts have a way of allowing us to forget the friction with reality that is at the heart.
35:40I see Thoreau as needing friction.
35:47I seem to see somewhat more of my own kith and kin in the lichens on the rocks than in
35:53any books.
35:56Meet me on that ground and you will find me strong.
36:04On Christmas Eve, Henry confided to his journal one of his innermost wishes.
36:14December 24th, 1841. I want to go soon and live away by the pond,
36:23where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds.
36:28It will be success if I shall have left myself behind.
36:35On New Year's Day, John Jr. cut his ring finger while shaving.
36:41They wrapped it up with a bandage, thinking absolutely nothing of it.
36:47And by the time it was looked at by a physician,
36:50he pronounced it technus, which they called lockjaw at the time, and said there was absolutely nothing anyone could do.
37:01Henry rushed home.
37:05Henry stayed with John right through to the end.
37:09He was perfectly calm, ever pleasant, while reason lasted.
37:15And gleams of the same serenity and playfulness shone through his delirium to the last.
37:23On January 11th, 1842, John Thoreau died in his brother's arms.
37:30He was just 27 years old.
37:35They were the closest of friends, the closest of brothers.
37:40For Henry, I think with John's death, half of him died too.
37:46Then Thoreau collapsed.
37:49He contracts what looks like also lockjaw.
37:55And this turns out to be a kind of sympathetic response of his nervous system.
38:00He was so devastated that he, in fact, died a kind of death himself.
38:07Another tragedy struck shortly thereafter.
38:11The Emerson's young son Waldo died suddenly of scarlet fever.
38:19A month later, Thoreau wrote a condolence note, hoping that the slow lifting of his own grief
38:26would give Emerson some solace.
38:30March 11th, dear friend.
38:34The sun has just burst through the fog.
38:38And I hear bluebirds, song sparrows, larks, and robins down in the meadow.
38:46The wind still roars in the wood, as if nothing had happened out of the course of nature.
38:54Every blade in the field, every leaf in the forest, lays down its life and its season as beautifully as
39:01it was taken up.
39:09Henry writes how he hears and feels John's presence everywhere in the woods and fields that he used to travel.
39:18Nature starts to speak to him in a way that it really hadn't, I think, quite before.
39:25And he starts to listen.
39:27And he is reborn.
39:30After John's death, he writes his first great nature essay, The Natural History of Massachusetts.
39:40We must look a long time before we can see.
39:46I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom.
39:52Nature will bear the closest inspection.
39:57She invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf and take an insect view of its plane.
40:05I explore, too, with pleasure, the sounds which crowd the summer noon,
40:14and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made.
40:22To him who contemplates a trait of natural beauty, no harm or disappointment can come.
40:32Surely joy is the condition of life.
40:38From then on, he has a mission to spend as much of his writing time as possible
40:44to express what he sees and hears and feels outdoors.
40:49And I think this is really the birth of the Henry that we know.
40:57After returning to live with the Emersons, Thoreau spent as much time as he could reading,
41:03writing, and going for long, solitary walks around Concord.
41:09Emerson mentored him, gave him books to read.
41:13There was this whole other realm of great world literature that Emerson put Thoreau onto.
41:21Emerson was now the editor of The Dial.
41:24He asked Thoreau to work on a new column called Ethnical Scriptures,
41:29introducing readers to Eastern religious traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism.
41:36Every society faces the fundamental questions of life.
41:40What are we called upon to do in our life?
41:43What happens when we die?
41:44And for most of the history of Western civilization, we have simply accepted the Bible.
41:51What about Islam?
41:53What about Judaism?
41:55What about Hinduism?
41:57What about Confucianism?
42:00I often think about where you could put a lens down on the map of the United States
42:05and take what you get in that lens to reflect the substance and the cast of characters and the
42:14importance of and the nature of the history of our country.
42:18Concord, Massachusetts is, to me, a good choice.
42:21You not only have the start of the revolution with the battles of Concord and Lexington,
42:27but you have the creative residences and workplaces of people like Ralph Waldo Emerson
42:35and Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcock and Henry David Thoreau.
42:41How these clusters of brilliant people can emerge and flourish and change how we view the world is one of
42:53the mysteries of history.
42:56How these clusters of brilliant people can emerge and change how we view the world is one of the mysteries
43:00of the world.
43:01Years ago, the ladies used to be admonished to leave off meddling with what did not belong to them
43:08and stay at home and mend stockings.
43:13I always replied that I would be very happy to do so when the men would fulfill their obligations.
43:21Mary Merrick Brooks, president, Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society.
43:29Women weren't accepted as public speakers at this time,
43:33so they directed their efforts to bring in the most fervent speakers.
43:39Frederick Douglass became an important speaker in the area
43:43and Mary Merrick Brooks insisted that he visit Concord.
43:49Douglass' impassioned and inspiring speeches would make him one of the country's most renowned abolitionists.
43:56He and Helen Thoreau would become close friends and allies in the fight against slavery.
44:03Presumably, he boarded with the Thoreaus in their home.
44:08It must have been very fulfilling for Thoreau and inspiring.
44:15One of the things that can be taken from Thoreau's time is to look at ways in which you read
44:23and interact with
44:24writers and authors and thinkers that you might not traditionally engage with and then listen to them.
44:32And then when you think you've listened enough, keep your mouth closed and listen some more, right?
44:37Just opening and appreciating a different lens and appreciating how complex it is
44:43because it's better to struggle with that complexity than to imagine that it doesn't exist.
44:51On August 1st, 1844, the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society held a rally to celebrate
44:59the anniversary of the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies.
45:04The society convinced Ralph Waldo Emerson to give the keynote address.
45:11The women had hoped to hold the event at the Unitarian Meeting House, but church officials refused.
45:19The abolitionists by this time, the mid-1840s in Concord, were anathema.
45:26The preachers didn't want them. The institutional buildings didn't want them.
45:33When the event was moved to the courthouse, no one dared ring the bell used for major announcements.
45:41Henry decides, well, that's ridiculous, and starts tolling the bell himself.
45:48He made it clear that the talk you're about to hear deserves the attention of ringing the bell
45:55the same way that we would for a fire or a community emergency.
46:00I like to think of it as symbolically beginning what will be a turn in his own anti-slavery thinking.
46:10Then Emerson addressed the crowd.
46:14If we saw the whip applied to old men, to tender women, and undeniably, though I shrink to say so,
46:24pregnant women.
46:26If we saw men's backs flayed with cowhides, if we saw the runaways hunted with bloodhounds into swamps and hills,
46:37If we saw these things with eyes, we too should wince. They're not pleasant sights.
46:47The blood is moral. The blood is anti-slavery. It runs cold in the veins.
46:57The stomach rises with disgust and curses slavery.
47:04Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandfather enslaved folks. So he's taking accountability for the damage it did
47:16and the profit it made. And he inspires others to do more.
47:26Afterwards, Henry arranged to have copies of Emerson's speech printed and distributed,
47:32now openly identifying himself as an agent for the conquered female anti-slavery society.
47:39He's trying to figure out, what am I called upon to do? Is a Lyceum lecture enough?
47:45And the answer is no, that this situation calls upon us to rise to
47:53an unprecedented level of personal moral courage and integrity.
48:01Henry was 27 years old and caught up in a myriad of social, political, and personal crises.
48:07As the United States moved westward, the question of the expansion of slavery ripped at the union of the country,
48:16dividing states and communities. Industry and innovation were transforming the landscape.
48:31Thoreau's riding career had stalled.
48:44Thoreau's riding career had stalled.
48:48David O' детстве.
48:52Thoreau's riding career was the future of driver's ambition.
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49:17to live that was daunting for him as it is daunting for people today it was very
49:26easy to just be dragged along by the currents of the world around you and I
49:33think Thoreau was questioning all of that and saying I want to figure out for
49:40myself what I actually want to do I want to live deliberately it was time for
49:49Henry to make real that woodland vision of his childhood to find a place where he
49:55could quiet himself and write at the pond he had visited so many times since he
50:01was a boy his friends encouraged him my dear Thoreau I see nothing for you on
50:09this earth but that field which I once christened briars go out upon that build
50:16yourself a hut and there begin the process of devouring yourself alive eat
50:23yourself up Concord is just as good a place as any other
50:28Eloy Channing dearest Henry do not say constantly of nature she is mine for she
50:38is not yours until you have been more hers seek the Lotus and take a draft of
50:47rapture let me know whether you go to the lonely hut Margaret Fuller what I began by
50:56reading I must finish by acting
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51:58next time on Henry David thoreau I went to the woods because I
52:02wished to live
52:03deliberately an experiment in living I think he went to Walden not to escape
52:09human society but criticisms a Knight in jail that did not pay a tax to the
52:16state which vide and sells men women and children and a daring expedition not
52:22till we have lost the world do we begin to find ourselves when henry david thoreau continues
52:30scan this qr code with your smart device to watch the whole series and learn more about henry david
52:37thoreau the henry david thoreau dvd is available online and in stores the series is also available
52:46with pbs passport and on amazon prime video the digital companion soundtrack is also available
53:22so
53:39major funding for henry david thoreau was provided by
53:42the better angels society jeff skull the mansueto foundation tyson foods and the arthur vining davis
53:53foundations funding was also provided by the tyson family foundation the neil and anna rasmussen
54:00foundation and by the better angel society members the keith campbell foundation for the environment
54:06and mark a tracy additional funding was provided by roxanne quimby foundation jim and mona mylan
54:14through the heart space fund and elizabeth kenny
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