Thoreau's Walden: Points of Particular Interest

Chapter III - Reading; (and Transcendentalism link)

• Thoreau on reading the Classics; look for any parallels with Emerson's notions in "The American Scholar." This seems the spot for a reminder that these New England intellectuals generally were part of (or came apart from) the Unitarian church (remember our "Old Light" Calvinists), and the God they sought was a philosopher's god, not a clock-maker's god. Various among them sought "the deeper Unity," "the Higher Purpose," or such like of creation, and sought this Higher Truth through some combination of intellectual inquiry, contemplation, and observation. Thoreau is, in the Walden period, seeking Truth by observing Nature and contemplating the self. They are termed "The Transcendentalists"; this website offers a great overview: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/ . I am going to offer this extremely vague definition of the movement: The Empiricists (Locke, Jefferson, etc.) stated that we are shaped by our environment; in reaction the Transcendentalists suggest the complementary, that our ideas shape our environment, perhaps even reality itself. See the website (above) for more complete definitions and descriptions.
• We should note that Thoreau was a considerably more avid reader than he makes himself out to be in this chapter. I do not know if his Plato actually went unread (as he claimed), but he certainly read enough of the contemporary world to proclaim the then young Whitman a great poet (though suggesting that he found Whitman's explicit interest in sex a bit discomforting).

Chapter IV - Sounds

• Initial images are of silent contemplation; how many of us have ever truly seen the world?
• He discusses nature's scenes and the sight of his sparse furnishings in the woods outside his house (removed for cleaning).
• He discusses the train that runs past the Pond, treating it as a curious thing of nature. As our modern scientist looks at us and says, "This too is Nature," Thoreau attempts to cast his eye on 19th. Century commerce as an outside observer, suggesting that this too is Nature, for this is the behavior and concerns of that curious animal, man.
• For the rest of the segment, Thoreau's response to human sounds (town bells, some farmer's cows, wagons, etc.) are interspersed with his response to woodland sounds (birds, an owl, etc.).

Chapter V -- Solitude

• A mention of visitors and their behavior.
• Description of the (somewhat illusory) aloneness of his shack in the woods.
• 1431 - "Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of ... ." Thoreau suggests, not that he is better than others, but that he is more fortunate: he has been granted a peculiar and very precious gift, that the gods allow him to perceive something of Nature which other men do not seem to possess the capacity to see.
• 1434 - suggests that fear of solitude is fear of one's own thoughts, of what occupies one's own mind.
• 1434 (bottom) - 1435 (top) Thoreau describes "visits" on long winter evenings from the Creator ("dug Walden Pond ...") and Mother Nature ("whose odorous herb garden ...").

Chapter VI - Visitors

• Somewhat playful talk of human guests, which should serve to remind us that Thoreau had many visitors and if, as he claims, he fed them but poorly, the cause is clearly lack of a rich larder rather than any parsimonious spirit.
• Portion on the "natural man," Thoreau's Canadian friend, seems a positive piece on the "animal comforts" and "animal happiness" the friend enjoys (that man is in harmony with himself), but also notes the limits of the man's thought; one does not have energy enough to both work and think. [Trivia: it was not Plato, but his successor at his Academy, an otherwise forgotten mathematician, who defined man as "the featherless biped"; your editor repeats Thoreau's misattribution.]
• Thoreau also speaks of the itinerant poor (presumably looking for work) who drifted through the woods in the spring, as well the various people who have business at the Pond or take their exercise in the woods (he notes especially young women, girls and boys -- he is suggesting couples and strolling clumps of teenagers) .