To the extent that we often spend our lives like hamsters spinning the wheel, traveling so far on the treadmill of life and yet discovering so little, Thoreau is the chanticleer calling us to wake up and discover the essence of life...Thoreau may be 150 years gone, but he continues to speak to the buried teenager in all of us.
Yeah, Thoreau was the eternal teenager, a messy room, no family to support, eating what his mothers and sisters cooked for him, and stumping over to a neighbor's house for a good meal all the time.
He visited Concord Village almost every day; Thoreau's mother and sisters, who lived less than two miles away, delivered goodies baskets every Sunday, stocked with pies, doughnuts, and meals; Thoreau even raided the family cookie jar during his frequent visits home.
The more one reads in Thoreau's unpolished journal of his stay in the woods, the more his sojourn resembles suburban boys going to their treehouse in the backyard and pretending they're camping in the heart of a jungle....
"It was not a lonely spot," understates Walter Harding in his excellent The Days of Henry Thoreau. "Hardly a day went by that Thoreau did not visit the village or was visited at the pond." The joke making the rounds in Concord was that when Mrs. Emerson rang the dinner bell, Thoreau came rushing out of the woods and was first in line with his outstretched plate.
MaryAnneGlendon, in her book Rights Talk, discusses the philosophers who imagine the noble individual man completely free of society's mandates, and then asks:(I paraphrase) When all these philosophers are discussing the rights of this independent man, none of them seem to try to figure out how the independent women and children are doing at the time.
The answer, of course, is that she is Julia, depending on the government instead of the family.
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