Edited by Roderick MacIver
Watercolors by Roderick MacIver
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same. She casts the same thoughts into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Beautifully shines a spirit through the bruteness and toughness of matter."
From the Introduction by Roderick MacIver
Thoreau thought through our potential as human beings to live complete lives — lives that encompass joy, adventure, reflection, natural beauty, meaningful work, and relaxation. He thought and wrote about nature, about love and friendship, art and creativity, spirituality, aging and death, simplicity, wisdom. He tried to live his conclusions. He was deeply devoted to the craft of writing. From these roots emerged a powerful and contradictory body of work that continues to inspire and confuse us.
Thoreau’s work is important in large part because our culture desperately needs the perspective of people who know and love nature. Ellery Channing wrote after Thoreau’s death, “His habit was to go abroad a portion of each day, to the field or woods or the Concord River…. During many years he used the afternoon for walking, and usually set forth about half past two, returning at half past five.” He carried a notebook and a small magnifying glass in order, he said, “to see what I have caught in my traps which I set for facts.” There is the walking in the beauty, the rain, the cold, of course, but there is also the time for reflection, and that reflection is one of the reasons that Thoreau’s work has endured.
According to everything we know, Thoreau was unsusceptible to temptation. He believed that wisdom and simplicity were closely related. He declined invitations to dinner parties, avoided alcohol because it interfered with his taste for water, and when asked what food he liked best, he responded, “The nearest.” He seems to have distrusted the pleasures of intimate sensuality.
"When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality."
