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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 Mylan through the HeartSpace Fund, and Elizabeth Kenney.
00:45In the spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau was 27 years old.
00:52For years, he had dreamed of spending time away from society, so he asked his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo
01:01Emerson, if he could build a small one-room house on land that Emerson's family owned, not far from the
01:08village of Concord, Massachusetts.
01:12Emerson agreed.
01:21I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among
01:30the reeds.
01:31It will be success if I shall have left myself behind, but my friends ask what I will do when
01:39I get there.
01:40Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?
01:46Henry David Thoreau.
01:50Still mourning the loss of his brother John, who had died three years before, and facing an uncertain future, Henry
01:59was ready to try what he called my own experiment.
02:04For the next two years, he would live in a small cabin at Walden Pond.
02:09There, he could focus on his writing while contemplating the natural world and himself.
02:17He begins a lot with Emerson's ideas about nature and civilization.
02:22He has to try to put them into practice and see how they hold up.
02:27He's not going into the wilderness.
02:29He's not trying to be a hermit.
02:31He wants to position himself on the edge of society to see if he could live there, get by, and
02:39be happy about it.
02:41His stay would be interrupted by an expedition to the wilderness of northern Maine, and by a night in prison
02:48at the local jail, both of which would expand his understanding of freedom.
02:56Writing about his experiences would change the lives of countless others around the world for generations to come.
03:04After you figure out how to live, what does that mean?
03:07He really reduces that question to its absolute barest terms, and then proceeds to see what he can learn about
03:17being alive.
03:35July 5th, 1845.
03:39Yesterday I came here to live.
03:56On July 4th, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a 10-by-15-foot house on the northern shore of
04:05Walden Pond.
04:07He had built most of it himself, cutting down trees to make a post and beam frame, which friends helped
04:15him raise.
04:16He then attached siding from a shanty he had purchased from an Irish railroad worker, hauled up rocks from the
04:23pond for a chimney, and dug a root cellar.
04:27He moved in, bringing along his cane bed, green writing desk, a small table, and three chairs.
04:35One for solitude, he said, two for friendship, and three for society.
04:42Some people called it a lonely hut and a wooden inkstand.
04:49For Henry, it was home.
04:51My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it.
04:58It was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping room.
05:03I enjoyed it all.
05:14July 6th.
05:16I wish to meet the facts of life, the vital facts, which are the phenomena or actuality the gods meant
05:26to show us.
05:29Life.
05:30Life.
05:30Who knows what it is, what it does.
05:37July 7th.
05:39Tonight, as I sit by my door, I hear the far-off lowing of a cow.
05:46Why should I find anything to welcome me in such a nook as this?
05:54After the evening train has gone by and left the world to silence, and to me, the whippoorwill chants her
06:03vespers for half an hour.
06:06And when all is still at night, the owls take up the strain like mourning women, their ancient Yululu.
06:20On most mornings, Henry got up at dawn to tend to his vegetable garden, including row after row of beans,
06:28an endless task, only made harder by the woodchucks that dined on the shoots.
06:35Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with nature
06:44herself.
06:46I got up early and bathed in the pond.
06:49That was a religious exercise.
06:51And one of the best things which I did, renew thyself completely each day.
06:57His morning bath, he describes as a religious exercise, not just as some sort of random dunk that he took
07:06in the pond, but as a sort of ritual act that has suddenly a significance beyond itself.
07:15Thoreau also said I needed to clean the house, so I took all the furniture out, and the furniture was
07:21happy to have a little excursion into nature.
07:24He said, I almost regretted having to bring it back in.
07:27He waited until November to plaster his house, and before that, there were all these cracks where, you know, animals
07:36came in, bugs came in, and the air came in.
07:39And he loved that.
07:41In the afternoon, he often took long walks and made detailed field notes of everything he heard and saw, a
07:51practice he would continue for the rest of his life.
07:57Walking was a writing practice, a process of taking notes that would become the content of his journals as inspiration
08:06would spark to turn it into a kind of larger mythology.
08:10What he observed fed what he would write about, but what he wrote about would also lead him deeper back
08:20into observation.
08:24Thoreau filled page after page of his journal with reflections on nature and the human condition, often referencing Greek and
08:32Roman literature, as well as ancient Eastern texts like the Bhagavad Gita and Buddhist Sutras.
08:39He's saying, all of these texts and traditions have something to teach me. Thoreau is taking his own experience and
08:49he's elevating it.
08:53The vision of simplicity had been explored in Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, but in Concord in 1845, I think it was
09:03something radical and liberating.
09:06So whether he knew those works or not, he inwardly rhymed with them.
09:13Thoreau would find a way to incorporate many of these ancient teachings into the project he went there to write.
09:20A book about the trip he took on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers with his late brother John.
09:28He strengthened and oriented himself in writing.
09:33Writing was a way of being alive that was deeply nourishing to him.
09:51I am convinced that to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime, if we will
10:01live simply and wisely.
10:07Throughout his stay at Walden Pond, Henry kept meticulous track of his finances.
10:13He needed to spend money on seed and other garden expenses, but he actually made money selling his produce.
10:21It cost him less than $20 to live there for the first six months.
10:27The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life, which is required to be exchanged
10:35for it.
10:36His goal is to remind us how much energy it takes, how much work it takes to make a living.
10:45But why are you making a living?
10:47Well, to buy these things.
10:49But why do you need these things?
10:52His focus was on how much do I have to work to secure my sustenance so that I can do
10:58what I really want to do.
11:00Our life is frittered away by detail.
11:04Let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand.
11:12Simplify.
11:13Simplify.
11:14Simplify.
11:17Simplify.
11:17I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and
11:26see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die discover that
11:33I had not lived.
11:40we all get lost in the challenges of everyday life and our world has been set up to help you
11:48do that as i understand it the root of deliberate is from freedom and it's to do something
11:56because you choose to not because fate dictates it on some days he simply chose to do nothing
12:09there were times when i could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment
12:14to any work whether of the head or hands
12:21sometimes having taken my accustomed bath i sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon
12:30wrapped in a reverie amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs in undisturbed solitude and stillness
12:41while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house
12:47until by the sun falling in at my west window or the noise of some traveler's wagon on a distant
12:55highway i was reminded of the lapse of time
13:02i grew in those seasons like corn in the night and they were far better than any work of the
13:10hands
13:11would have been he practiced doing nothing which can be the hardest thing of all for many of us
13:18he saw the beauty of sitting still and he knew that if he just sat by his pond reflecting in
13:24every sense
13:25of that word he could find everything he needed he says that one of his job descriptions is to know
13:31the
13:31nick of time to be able to notch it on his stick he wants to be present he gets down
13:37and on the ground to
13:39look at the the battle of the black ants and the and the red ants at the pond he goes
13:45into the shallows and
13:46he finds a way to pet fish try that sometime you have to surrender to nature and nature's rhythms if
13:56you
13:56want to be whole and you will see things you never saw before and what you see will mean more
14:03than it ever did
14:09what sweet and tender the most innocent and divinely encouraging society there is in universal nature
14:20there can be no really black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has still his
14:28senses
14:31while i enjoy the sweet friendship of the seasons i trust that nothing can make life a burden to me
14:38here i know i am in good company
14:51in his bean field as he's holding his beans he came across these arrowheads and stone implements of
14:57native peoples and he gets a sense that people have lived here for thousands of years whose lives are
15:03very much written on the land he notices other signs in the landscape he saw bricks he saw cellar holes
15:13he saw trees and bushes that are not native to walden woods this meant someone had been there before
15:21who were they where had they gone what was their story for human society i was obliged to conjure up
15:30the
15:30former occupants of these woods the woods which border it were notched and dotted here and there with
15:38their little gardens and dwellings in this 19th century american new england town you think of this
15:43kind of thriving very close-knit community which conquer really was to a large degree and then on the
15:50outskirts there are other people and thoreau was fascinated by these people who were living on the edge
15:56living very close to the land these were people who had been enslaved in his hometown
16:03in the 1780s massachusetts became the first state to make slavery illegal but most black people
16:12in concord had to choose between working as servants or scratching out a living on poor quality land
16:19that no white person wanted to farm sentiments don't change just because a law is enacted
16:27the conditions of enslavement of labor those may change in the law but in practice is really servitude
16:37for life using local lore and his own observations thorough pieced together the stories of what he called
16:46these former inhabitants which otherwise would have been all but lost from the historic record
16:53as he's writing a biography of the green space that we know of as walden woods or walden pond
17:00he's also writing the biography of a black space down the road lived brister freeman slave of squire cummings
17:09once there where grows still the apple trees which brister planted and tended large old trees now we're
17:17learning about a man who decided to claim for himself his new status as a free man but he couldn't
17:25plant a
17:26larger crop something more in line with what other conquered farmers were planting because it's not fertile soil
17:33so he's fairly able to make his way here by the very corner of my field still nearer to town
17:42zilpha a colored woman had her little house where she spun linen for the townsfolk he describes the
17:50life of zilpha white who is eking out an existence she spins threads and silks for the conquered women
18:00she led a hard life and somewhat inhumane one old frequenter of these woods remembers her muttering to
18:08herself over her gurgling pot you're all bones bones and he describes her as living a life that is cruel
18:18and
18:18witch-like this woman in the woods who's overheard stirring a pot and saying bones all ye are our bones
18:27and later he comes to a place where he says you know what she wasn't witch-like she's hungry
18:36east of my bean field across the road lived cato ingraham slave of duncan ingraham of concord village
18:44who gave him permission to live in walden woods and the man to whom cato is enslaved
18:49says you have freedom but you will receive nothing from me so cato begins to try to make a life
18:57for
18:58himself cato has tried to secure a future by planting walnut trees but he's preparing for a future that
19:07he never gets to enjoy what remains in the earth is central to african-american history so planting
19:17walnut trees is a way of understanding that they were there and also they have ownership
19:26ultimately it is enslavement that kills him because the terms of his freedom are so qualified
19:34they're so mean-spirited and this is the story henry tells us why did this small village fail
19:43thorough asked while concord kept its ground
19:48thorough is asking the question at the heart of american history at the heart of america itself
19:58the question of why after slavery a community of formerly enslaved people could not be included could
20:06not make themselves into a town that could survive and blossom the gentlemen of concord abandon them to
20:15their freedom he's trying to negotiate how there can be different histories alongside his at walden because
20:24he gets to move wherever he wants to because he's a person of privilege and all of that paves the
20:31way
20:31towards his increasing involvement in anti-slavery work and his outrage about injustice
20:44the minister of the congregationalist church once said who but some half crazy disgusted hermit would live alone and independent
20:56so thaler's choice is a choice that his neighbors are going to think is really strange
21:03why would you live alone i think he went to walden not to escape human society but to find a
21:10vantage from
21:11which to look at it criticize it i am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughed
21:19so loud
21:19or the walden pond itself what company has that lonely lake i pray i am no more lonely than a
21:29single
21:30mullein or dandelion in a pasture or a bean leaf or the north star or the south wind or the
21:38april shower
21:39or the first spider in a new house i had more visitors while i lived in the woods than any
21:46other
21:47period of my life walden was basically the town's backyard it turned out not to be a place of solitude
21:55at all because he's right by the road and this is the town's favorite fishing hole and picnic spot
22:01he received visitors regularly his friend ellery channing stayed with him for two weeks
22:07sleeping on the floor bronson alcott visited weekly others came by just out of curiosity
22:17people are stopping by and he wants to tell them what he's doing and why he's trying to simplify his
22:24life every day or two i strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going
22:32on there circulating either from mouth to mouth or from newspaper to newspaper which when taken in
22:41homeopathic doses was really as refreshing as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs he frequently
22:51headed into town to spend time with family and friends work at the thorough pencil company and do chores
22:58at home he also picked up supplies he needed and sometimes dropped off his laundry when everyone
23:06pretends to hate henry david thoreau for exploiting female labor they're pretending that the woman and
23:13his family were just domestic drudges that all they did was cook and wash clothes these women were leaders
23:22they were taking in the dirty laundry of america that is slavery so the laundry question is dismissive of
23:29all that and all the other ways he was contributing he paid rent to the family his whole adult
23:36life he did a lot of manual labor as well as being a teacher a nanny and housekeeper
23:46after learning the kernels and very last sieveful of news what had subsided the prospects of war and
23:54peace and whether the world was likely to hold together much longer i was let out through the rear avenues
24:02and so escaped to the woods again he kept himself unencumbered no romantic relationships that we really
24:14know about he didn't have children um so the ties that bind ordinary people he was free of a lot
24:22of those
24:23and that was partly the basis of his freedom he was one of the towns in many ways most social
24:30people
24:31because he walked around and talked to people constantly henry was a good friend but he was a
24:39difficult friend sometimes he expected so much of friendship it's difficult for him to disagree with
24:47someone and still feel like he can go on being friends with you one of his friends said of thoro
24:53that his thoughts burned like a flame in him because of the earnestness of his convictions
25:01one of the ways you put ideas into practice is test them against other people's ideas
25:05so he enjoyed the argument that it helped them refine his ideas
25:11but he also had a sense of the other beings we share this planet with this is a time when
25:18nature is
25:18either a threat or a resource he's finding a whole other way to think about it it was a real
25:28series of particular relationships with particular species kinds of weather even individual organisms
25:39he considered the plants and the beans and the moon his friends as well and he said how could he
25:46ever
25:46be lonely when we're part of the milky way not all of us have such an expansive sense of friendship
25:58one day in the summer of 1846 after a year in his cabin he went to town to pick up
26:06a mended shoe
26:08there he ran into the constable and tax collector sam staples who pointed out that henry owed four
26:15years of state poll taxes an annual fee that every adult male citizen was required to pay in order to
26:23vote
26:24sam offered to pay it for him but thoro adamantly refused
26:30i was seized and put into jail because i did not pay a tax to or recognize the authority of
26:39the state which buys and sells men women and children like cattle at the door of its senate house
26:49the economy of massachusetts had depended on trade with the south and they were still constrained
26:56by the times that actually permitted enslavement to exist in the first place
27:01so by paying massachusetts taxes he continued to sustain this appalling immoral anti-american economic system
27:12and then there's the mexican-american war which is not just a war between two nations
27:20it's actually an american provocation and campaign to expand enslavement it's a territory grab
27:30henry david sees this and decides well how is my name actually attached to these enterprises
27:37through taxes the dollar can now have a different kind of currency henry was placed in an upstairs cell
27:47he spent the night there viewing his hometown from the fresh perspective of a prison window
27:54seeing more clearly he said the state in which i lived
28:00someone probably his aunt mariah bailed him out
28:03he was mad as the devil staples remembered that someone had interfered and paid that tax
28:12within 30 minutes of his release henry found himself picking berries on fairhaven hill surrounded by
28:20children i joined a huckleberry party on one of our highest hills he mused and then the state was
28:28nowhere to be seen the question of how to live a life of conscience is a major question for him
28:36how do you go on living at a time when simply living your life seems complicit with something you find
28:44morally intolerable just a week after his night in jail thorough invited the conquered female anti-slavery
28:52society to host their annual event at his cabin commemorating the end of slavery throughout the british
28:59empire from henry's open doorway a slate of speakers addressed the small crowd including william henry
29:08channing a unitarian minister who called for a new u.s constitution that excluded slaveholding
29:16and lewis hayden a rising abolitionist who had escaped from the plantation of the powerful kentucky
29:22senator henry clay hayden told the audience the tragic story of his wife and child being sold away from him
29:32and thoreau starts to realize that he had a social and ethical responsibility to speak out
29:40he needed to give this his time and attention in a deep way as well
29:46thoreau began to write in earnest on society's obligation to uphold the principles of freedom
29:52and justice culminating in an extensive essay that would be published three years later
30:00it would eventually be called civil disobedience
30:05under a government which imprisons any unjustly the true place for a just man is also a prison
30:16it is there that the fugitive slave and the mexican prisoner on parole and the indian come to plead the
30:25wrongs of his race should find them on that separate but more free and honorable ground where the state
30:35places those who are not with her but against her the only house in a slave state in which a
30:45free man
30:45can abide with honor in order to challenge the status quo in order to recreate a new sort of society
30:55there needs to be what thoreau calls counter friction slavery is a machine that is moving forward
31:02constantly friction creates heat and the machine itself breaks down
31:11the human revolution in a single person can change the course of history
31:18my uncle johnny went to prison he encountered a young man by the name of malcolm little and uncle johnny
31:26introduced thoreau to malcolm the only place that a free man can abide with dignity in a slave state
31:33is in a jail cell that resonated with malcolm that the world would choose as a matter of honor a
31:41jail cell
31:43malcolm little would later be known as malcolm x during his prison years he was often
31:51found reading the works of thoreau
31:57people just don't have brilliant ideas about justice and redemption from an empty blank slate
32:06martin luther king was reading thoreau
32:10civil disobedience the words of henry david thoreau could be used to disobey laws because they were unjust
32:17so a person like a king or nakamax found solace in what thoreau was talking about
32:25the first time gandhi was imprisoned somebody gave him a copy of thoreau's civil disobedience
32:34for him to read thoreau was thinking on the same lines as he was that's how gandhi began his civil
32:43the civilians campaign you need some adrenaline once in a while you need a booster shot and his essay
32:52provides that even this late in the 21st century how do we talk about problems of conscience when
33:00you're in the minority and you feel like your country is moving in the wrong direction
33:04he said i feel called upon to right the wrongs of my country
33:14the tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe whether it is a slight insult to
33:22the gods to climb and pry into their secrets and try their effect on our humanity
33:30their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited
33:38on august 31st 1846 thoreau left walden pond to join his cousin george thatcher on an excursion to katahdin
33:49in maine the highest mountain in the state
33:54he brought along a small notebook and pencil to write about what he discovered there
34:04he wanted to time travel to see what massachusetts looked like a few generations before and then
34:12come back and tell the tale of what he'd seen that feels like the exact opposite of what he has
34:18at walden
34:18pond it was a frontier that was very nearby at the same time he recognizes that it's not a pristine
34:27untouched wilderness you see industry bangor was the lumber capital of the world thoreau describes bangor
34:39in 1846 as this cosmopolitan city right on the edge of wilderness he also recognized that he was going
34:49through spaces that people had worked traveled and lived on for thousands and thousands of years
34:5713 miles north of bangor henry stood on deck as their steamship passed a penobscot reservation on indian island
35:10he watched a native hunter get out of his canoe carrying a bundle of fur skins and an empty keg
35:17of alcohol
35:18this picture will do to put before the indians history
35:23that is that is the history of his extinction i observed some new houses among the weather-stained
35:32ones as if the tribe had still a design upon life but generally they have a very shabby forlorn and
35:40cheerless look the church is the only trim looking building good canadian it may be but it is poor indian
35:52these were once a powerful tribe i even thought that a row of wigwams with a dance of powwows and
35:59a
35:59prisoner tortured at the stake would be more respectable than this
36:06oh they're always saying that we're the last of this the last of that if you knew what the hell
36:15we had to go through yeah we look we'll be gone this was our homeland
36:24these are people who have been robbed of their territory and forced to live a very impoverished
36:29existence on the margins of society and what thorough cannot see is that he's part of this
36:34world as well and part of the process that makes this happen standing there with that postcard view
36:39of indian island looking for that noble savage he's disappointed all his life he's looking for relics
36:50he's looking for relics and people too thoreau is is not coming to maine really to engage with native
36:59people at this point he's going to find the biggest wildest mountain he can find and see what's on top
37:05and bring that back once they reached the wilderness they continued under the guidance of two white settlers
37:14who knew the terrain well on september 5th 73 miles north of bangor they paddled across quakish lake
37:30we had our first but a partial view of katahdin its summit veiled in clouds like a dark isthmus
37:38in that quarter connecting the heavens with the earth after three more days of paddling they arrived
37:49at the base of the mountain at the summit of mount katahdin it's unpredictable weather up there
37:57if you're up there and be ready for anything you're gonna be tested while the others set up camp
38:04henry tried to reach the summit alone but failed the next morning the party set off together
38:13thoreau scrambled upward in earnest leaving his fellow travelers far behind
38:21i was deep within the hostile ranks of clouds and all objects were obscured by them
38:28the cloud line ever rising and falling with the wind's intensity the mist driving ceaselessly between
38:36it and me it was vast titanic and such as man never inhabits
38:46he's freaked out he was scared up there in a way that he had not been scared anywhere before
38:55henry never made it to the summit he was forced to turn back his companions were waiting for him
39:02below and following a stream they made their way to a meadow farther down the mountain
39:10there thorough made an exhilarating discovery far more transcendent than what he had hoped to experience
39:17on the summit he has this eerie feeling of displacement that really throws him
39:28he's thinking about the fields in concord and the field on the side of mount katahdin these two places
39:36together familiar and strange i'm not even sure he quite understood what had happened to him at the time
39:44because it's not until he's down the mountain and really letting it sink in and reflecting on it
39:51that he actually writes the memorable passage contact contact
39:57i most fully realized that this was primeval untamed and forever untameable nature
40:07here was no man's garden but the unhancelled globe it was the fresh and natural surface of the planet earth
40:17as it was made forever and ever i stand in awe of my body this matter to which i am
40:27bound has become so
40:29strange to me talk of mysteries think of our life in nature daily to be shown matter to come in
40:40contact
40:41with it rocks trees wind on our cheeks the solid earth the actual world the common sense contact contact
40:56who are we where are we where are we you can see thorough finding language failing him
41:05who are we and where are we aren't questions you want to answer they're questions you want to live
41:14not till we are lost in other words not till we have lost the world do we begin to find
41:22ourselves
41:23and realize where we are from the infinite extent of our relations
41:31the membranes between him and nature are completely dissolved
41:35that sort of mystical scary experience he brings with him after two weeks in maine henry arrived home
41:46as he looked upon the familiar landscape that surrounded him he realized what he had experienced at
41:53katahdin could be experienced everywhere and it was a feeling of wildness and his writing starts to
42:02a bubble with all the extraordinary observations he's able to make nature is all around us
42:10it's right in the tree that you have walked by every day of your life and then you see something
42:15new
42:16that you've never seen before it blows you away
42:23speaking of autumn leaves he said
42:27if this had happened only once it would have gone down in mythology as one of those events we read
42:33about in greek myth or whatever that suddenly all the leaves turn red and yellow and the forest was on
42:40fire
42:42but of course it happens every year and you know we take it for granted
42:47this is the wonderful way in which thoreau sometimes shocks you into an awareness that you should have had
42:53yourself but you didn't
43:12he did some of his most brilliant writing in the winter
43:17it was the time he went to his journal with new inspiration and a sense of digging in exploring
43:24inner worlds and then he'd go out and do things like study ice crystals and come to great cosmic
43:32realizations from the smallest of things to the largest of things he loved cold
43:41in the winter of 1847 henry ventured outside not only to take long walks and ice skate but to drill
43:50hundreds of holes in the ice to collect data about walden's temperature and depth culminating in a unique
43:58map of the pond that same winter a team of irishmen came from cambridge to harvest
44:0610 000 tons of ice to sell for refrigeration henry studied the ice noting the gradations of color
44:15its changing texture and how quickly it melted and imagine just how far it could be shipped
44:23perhaps the inhabitants of madras and bombay and calcutta will drink at my well he wrote
44:30so that walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the ganges this is a way for him to
44:37say
44:38profound sacredness can be found anywhere if you commit to seeing it
44:46march 26th
44:49suddenly an influx of light filled my house
44:54i looked out the window and low where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond
45:02already calm and full of hope i heard a robin in the distance the first i had heard for many
45:10a
45:11thousand years it was no longer the end of a season but the beginning
45:20spring rain brought new life to the woods and fields around thoreau's cabin and revealed an intriguing
45:27phenomenon that appeared in what he called the deep cut a man-made excavation carved into the earth
45:35so that railroad tracks could be laid flat when there was just the right amount of water it would burst
45:42forth on the surface and start giving miniature rivulets of sand flows he could see what looked
45:50like leaves of ferns the leaves of trees that would just be created on the bank
45:56i'm affected as if in a peculiar sense i stood in the laboratory of the artist who made the world
46:04and me
46:06had come to where he was still at work strewing his fresh designs about
46:13what is man but a mass of thawing clay there is nothing inorganic he sees life organizing itself
46:25through matter and he realizes that there is not only no divide between human and natural there's
46:32really no divide between organic and inorganic so we are in there we're like the dirt we're like the
46:39the trees we're matter we have been created by this world and we are of it and part of it
46:47he's starting
46:49to recognize the interconnection of everything even though we may not all speak the same language we
46:58ultimately all depend upon the same air the same water the same soil so the whole idea of a kinship
47:05with nature puts us in a place where we're responsible
47:22why i left the woods i do not think that i can tell i've often wished myself back perhaps i
47:32wanted
47:32a change there was a little stagnation that may be perhaps if i lived there much longer
47:41i might live there forever one would think twice before he accepted heaven on such terms
47:51on september 6 1847 after two years two months and two days henry david thoreau left walden pond
48:03he had completed the first draft of a manuscript about his river trip with john and he had also begun
48:10drafting a second one about his experiences at walden over the next seven years he would revise it
48:18multiple times incorporating ever deeper insights with each draft and combining his two years of
48:26experiences into one cycle of seasons walden or life in the woods would be released in 1854
48:38the book would eventually sell millions of copies reaching into every corner of the globe
48:47he's not someone who turned his back on his society to go live in the woods
48:53he was writing a critique of the world he was born into
48:58and he thought that what nature gave us was a firmer place to stand
49:05i think there's a sense that if you walk and travel thoughtfully then the land will tell you things
49:12about what it means to be part of this rhythm of life that feels very different from the frenetic pace
49:17of the village
49:22i learned this at least by my experiment
49:26if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has
49:34as imagined he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours he will put some things behind will pass
49:44an invisible boundary
49:47new universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him
49:57and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings he says you will cross an invisible
50:06boundary
50:07crossing the invisible boundary is the experiment that he was in
50:12thorough is trying i think to show us that the divide that we assume is out there somehow dividing us
50:20from
50:20the natural world really doesn't exist we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake
50:29not by mechanical aids but by an infinite expectation of the dawn to carve and paint the very atmosphere
50:40and medium through which we look to affect the quality of the day that is the highest of arts
50:50his insistence on practice it wasn't enough to have an idea you had to live it if you wanted to
50:58reduce walden to
50:59its essentials i would say its message is wake up we're sleepwalking through life a lot of the time
51:08we have technologies for the avoidance of what's important look around you pay attention to what matters
51:16be conscious be he never is asking people to go put up a shanty by a pond he's saying each
51:28person is an
51:29individual so his message is to wake you up to your own life and then you follow it
51:38shortly after leaving walden thoreau wrote to his harvard class secretary in response to a survey
51:46marking the 10-year anniversary of their graduation
51:51i confess that i have very little class spirit however i will undertake at last to answer your questions as
52:00well as i can i am not married i am a schoolmaster a private tutor a surveyor a gardener a
52:13farmer a
52:14painter i mean a house painter a carpenter a mason a day laborer a pencil maker a writer and sometimes
52:24a
52:24poet for the last two years i have lived in concord woods alone something more than a mile from any
52:33neighbor in a house built entirely by myself i have found a way to live without what is commonly called
52:41employment or industry attractive or otherwise indeed my steadiest employment if such it can be called
52:50is to keep myself at the top of my condition and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or
52:58on earth
52:59isn't the whole point of living an experiment is to try something out and if it works you can then
53:05take it out into the world but i think maybe he understood that the problem of how to live was
53:14not
53:14something he was going to solve once but that was going to be an ongoing problem and that he was
53:20going
53:21to solve it different ways on different days in different experiments through the rest of his life
53:27it seemed to me that i had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for
53:35that one
53:47so
53:57so
54:33Next time on Henry David Thoreau.
54:35I had several more lives to live.
54:38The point was to take Walden back out into the world.
54:42New pursuits.
54:43Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
54:47And new discoveries.
54:48To hear this unaltered Indian language, it took me by surprise.
54:53The thing he models for us is a life committed to ongoing investigation.
54:58Rustling leaves.
54:59They teach us how to die.
55:01Don't miss the conclusion of Henry David Thoreau.
55:05Scan this QR code with your smart device to watch the whole series.
55:10And learn more about Henry David Thoreau.
55:14The Henry David Thoreau DVD is available online and in stores.
55:19The series is also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.
55:25The digital companion soundtrack is also available online.
55:29We're recording also available online.
55:31The Henry David Thoreau的请 San Diego David Thoreau.
55:32Have a great day.
55:32Have a great day.
55:33Have a great day.
55:43Have a great day.
55:46Have a great day.
55:48Have a great day.
55:52Bye.
56:14Major funding for Henry David Thoreau was provided by
56:17The Better Angels Society, Jeff Skoll, the Mansueto Foundation, Tyson Foods, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
56:29Funding was also provided by the Tyson Family Foundation, the Neil and Anna Rasmussen Foundation,
56:36and by the Better Angels Society members, the Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment and Mark A. Tracy.
56:44Additional funding was provided by Roxanne Quimby Foundation, Jim and Mona Milan through the HeartSpace Fund, and Elizabeth Kenney.
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