Nature vs. Technology: The Views of Thoreau and Merton
In the year 1854, the famous writer and poet Henry David Thoreau wrote about his experience at Walden. His secluded pond allowed for him to reflect on nature and its impact on community in a passage he named, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”. He also wrote two short but important proposals for land preservation around 1858. In the year 1963, famous writer and theologian Thomas Merton wrote a letter to Rachel Carson discussing her book Silent Spring in which she exposed the danger of DDT which was previously thought harmless. In 1967 in the time of the cold war and the space race, Merton wrote a letter to Barbra Hubbard about human ecological responsibility in space. Merton and Thoreau
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In his mind he practices buying land and what he would say to the current land owners. He believed that wherever he sat could be his home, his “sedes”. He intentionally makes this point in order to create the picture of the home as a seed, growing out of the ground. He continues to say that the only home he ever really had was when he bought the Hollowell Place. Over the years, Thoreau had taken many voyages up the river to view the house in all of its glory. To paint a picture of the land, Thoreau says, “the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples though which I headed the house-dog bark,” (Walden,1997). This image conveys the livelihood of the farm which is destroyed by the farmer who owned the farm before Thoreau. At the point when Thoreau wishes to buy the farm it had changed greatly, become grey and broken down. There were no longer trees, or rabbits eating vegetation in the spring. For Thoreau’s purposes, it is dead. Thoreau sees the farmers, “improvements”, the “getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture,” as detriments (Walden, 1997). Thoreau wanted to buy the property so the farmer couldn’t ruin it any further. He believes that by planting his “sedes” there, he can make the land grow again. He says that he isn’t afraid to let nature be nature. He presents the dichotic images of the poet and the farmer. The poet can look at the land and, “put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk,” (1997). The poet takes in all of the beauty of the land and can walk away with it, whereas the farmer, who cannot see the beauty of the land is left with only a crop of a few apples, bound to be
Stacy notes that this passage is related to "a person getting a sense of their self in relation to Nature." The Web material describes Thoreau’s practice of linking landscape and identity.
on ways to be civil but disobedient, they have opposite ways of convicing you. Dr.
In the first paragraph Thoreau states “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had no lived.” Here he is saying that he wanted to live simply, and to go through life knowing that one day, when he does die, he lived his life to the fullest extent possible. “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Thoreau wishes to take all that life has to offer him and make the best out of it. He does not wish to die knowing that he didn’t live as much as he could’ve. By ‘suck the marrow out of life’ he means taking all that he can out of life. He feels that by going off on his own into the woods he can have new experiences that will help him figure out his purpose.
Mahatma Gandhi, a prominent leader in the independence movement of India once said, “Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless and corrupt.”(brainyquotes.com) Gandhi states that protest and civil disobedience are necessary when the authority becomes unscrupulous. This correlates to “Declaration of Independence,” by Thomas Jefferson; “Civil Disobedience,” by Henry David Thoreau; and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” by Martin Luther King Jr., because all three leaders felt that civil disobedience was important to help protest against an unjust ruling. Jefferson stood up to the injustice of the king by writing the Declaration of Independence and urged others to stand up for the independence of America. Thoreau exemplified
Thoreau and Socrates start Civil Disobedience and Crito with basically the same premise. They both believe that humans are essentially moral beings. Thoreau says that people if left to their own ends will act justly, and should be treated accordingly by the law. Socrates says essentially the same thing, he says that "no one wants to commit injustice" for its own sake, many people end up doing so anyway. Socrates says that the citizens of a government have entered into an agreement to abide by its laws in exchange for protection. He also says that if one believes these laws to be unjust, one can always leave, but if one agrees to abide by the laws they have a duty to be subjected to punishment if they break these laws. Thoreau on the other hand says that it is the duty of the people not to abide by a law if they perceive it to be unjust, and if they claim to be opposed to it and nevertheless abide by it, they are a hypocrite.
When it comes to civil rights, there are two pieces of literature commonly discussed. One of these pieces is Henry David Thoreau’s persuasive lecture On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. In this work, Thoreau discusses how one must combat the government with disobedience of unjust laws and positive friction to create change. The second piece is the commonly known article Letter From a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr. This letter covers the ways in which peaceful protest and standing up against injustice can lead to positive results. Both pieces conveyed a similar message of standing up for what is right. The strongest rhetorical methods which Thoreau uses are allusions, logos, ethos and rhetorical questions. However, King’s use of
know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my
In Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he cites conscience as a guide to obeying just laws and disobeying unjust laws. In the same way, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his famous essay, “Civil Disobedience,” that people should do what their conscience tells them and refuse to follow unjust laws. The positions of the two writers are very close; they both use a common theme of conscience, and they use a similar rhetorical appeal to ethos.
An influential literary movement in the nineteenth century, transcendentalism placed an emphasis on the wonder of nature and its deep connection to the divine. As the two most prominent figures in the transcendentalist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau whole-heartedly embraced these principles. In their essays “Self-Reliance” and “Civil Disobedience”, Emerson and Thoreau, respectively, argue for individuality and personal expression in different manners. In “Self-Reliance”, Emerson calls for individuals to speak their minds and resist societal conformity, while in “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau urged Americans to publicly state their opinions in order to improve their own government.
People in modern day society should learn from past transcendentalists and engage in the concept of solitude. Henry David Thoreau and Chris McCandless were both transcendentalists that believed in the key fundamental idea of solitude. Henry Thoreau was a transcendentalist that practiced the form of solitude throughout his life. Later in his life, he left society and moved into woods to be alone. Henry David Thoreau wrote a book called, Walden where he recalled important lessons and ideas that his master Ralph Waldo Emerson taught him about transcendentalism. Along with Thoreau, a more modern-day transcendentalist was known as Chris McCandless. McCandless journeyed to the wilderness in Alaska to be able to experience a minimal amount of human
Henry David Thoreau born on July 27, 1817 was an American author, philosopher, poet, historian, naturalist, and leading transcendentalist. Thoreau is best known for his book, “Walden; or Life in the Woods” and also his essay “Resistance to Civil Disobedience.” He was born David Henry Thoreau, and later changed his name to Henry David after college. He was born to John Thoreau, who was a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar. Thoreau’s maternal grandmother, Asa Dunbar, led 1766 student Butter Rebellion at Harvard, which was the first recorded student rebellion in the colonies. He studied at Harvard, like his grandmother, between 1833 and 1837. At Harvard he took courses in rhetoric, philosophy, science, mathematics, and classics. After graduating
“Take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around” (Abbey 233). Embracing nature is the main idea in both Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey and Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey is an autobiography based on Abbey’s experiences as a park ranger at Arches National Monument and it was published in 1968. Walden by Henry David Thoreau is about Thoreau’s life in the woods, and it was published 1854. Although written more then a century apart from one another, both Thoreau and Abbey develop a philosophy of leaving society behind and living a more deliberate life through experiencing the wilderness in their works. However, Thoreau’s definition of living a deliberate life is based on
In many works of literature, authors often have a point they are trying to convey. This may be something about religion or politics, for example. In From Walden by Henry David Thoreau and Against Nature by Joyce Carol Oates, both authors are trying to make different claims regarding the topic of nature. Thoreau’s piece speaks more positively of nature whereas Oates’ piece contradicts the romantic views some writers have about nature. In making their claims, both authors utilize different structures to convey clear messages to the reader.
Henry David Thoreau was a renowned American essayist, poet, and philosopher. He was a simple man who built his life around basic truths (Manzari 1). Ralph Waldo Emerson deeply impacted Thoreau’s viewpoints and philosophies, specifically by introducing him to the Transcendentalists movement. There seems to be no single ideology or set of ideas that entirely characterized Thoreau’s thoughts, but principles encompassing Transcendentalism come closest (Harding and Meyer 122). Spending time in nature and in solitude gave Thoreau an entirely new perspective on life. In fact, his doctrines regarding nature and the impact of the individual on society have transformed realms of political, social and literary history. Politically and socially, Thoreau’s
As inspiration for Walden, Thoreau lived `in the woods...in a house I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond' for, we are told, 15 years, thus distancing himself from popular culture and humanity in general. During his time there he began questioning many things, especially Benj...