1. Your own topic
If you would like to write on your own paper topic, you must
Write a paragraph posing the question, as if it were a paper topic you were assigning to the class. It could be on Emerson or Thoreau, or both.
Meet with me no later than Thursday December 8 to have this topic approved.
2. Mature Thoreau (“Autumnal Tints”)
In his essay “Thoreau,” Emerson wrote: “It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task, which none else can finish,–a kind of indignity to so noble a soul, that it should depart out of Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is” (411). Now, “Thoreau” was published in a volume titled Excursions, which Emerson and Sophia Thoreau edited after Thoreau had died. That book included the essay “Autumnal Tints,” which is permeated by Thoreau’s awareness of his own impending death (he worked on it the months leading up to his death in 1862). Consider, in your essay, how “Autumnal Tints” completes Thoreau’s work and life—and, thus, can serve as a refutation of Emerson’s charge that Thoreau’s life and work were a “broken task.” In addition to discussing the more direct ways the essay reckons with the end of the year and the end of a life, consider how its method, its tone, and its preoccupations show a coming to maturity of passions and concerns that have preoccupied Thoreau all along.
3. Extra vagance
In Walden, Thoreau writes, “I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra- vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! It depends on how you are yarded” (218). If Emerson wished to live “by abandonment,” one could say Thoreau wishes to live and to write in a state of extravagance. What does “extra vagance” mean, as Thoreau develops this concept across his work? You could answer this question by looking into his thoughts about wandering and walking—being a “walker errant” (J, 5) or a “saunterer” who actually “is no more vagrant than the meandering river” (“Walking,” 260). But, you could also expand from the consideration of the rambling walk and prose, to consider other ways in which forms of extravagance, and even excess and luxury, mark the work of this notoriously thrifty figure. (Example: “I saw the reflections of the moon sliding down the watery concave like so many lustrous burnished coins poured from a bag—with inexhaustible lavishness—[J, 75].)
4. “I seem to be more constantly merged in nature” (J, 264)
In “Thoreau,” Emerson observed of his friend that “the meaning of Nature was never attempted to be defined by him” (405-406). This may be so, but Thoreau was frustrated by the failure of literature—including Emerson’s Nature—to provide what he called “any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted” (J, 14). How, in your view, does the Journal rise to the occasion of providing that “adequate account” of nature? In answering this question, you may want to pay particular attention to the “acquaint[ance]”—the relationship, even the friendship?—that Thoreau has with nature, or seeks to develop with nature.
5. Violence, Force, and Resistance
Be it known that in Concord where the first forcible resistance to British aggression was made in the year 1775 they chop up the young calves & give them to the hens to make them lay—it being considered the cheapest & most profitable food for them– & they sell the milk to Boston (A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, 118)
Thoreau is justly famous for his articulation of the principle of nonviolent protest in “Civil Disobedience.” He is also capable of feeling and thinking violently, even in the partly ironic assertion in Walden that he could eat a muskrat raw, or in his praise for John Brown. He is also notable for the expression of disgust with, anger at, and hostility to his world, as for a sense that the world is itself at war (think of the ants in Walden). The latter view can be framed with a disarming combination of opprobrium and placidity, as in his observation of those ants or in a comment such as, “Those Mexican’s were mown down more easily than the summer’s crop of grass in many a summer’s fields” (J, 15): although the primary point there is how violent mowing is, the passage remains unnerving. Trace through several passages in which Thoreau pursues his investigation—his research—into aspects of nonviolence and violence, and ask yourself: what is the difference between violence, force, and resistance? Recall that the alternative title to “Civil Disobedience” is “Resistance to Civil Government,” and note the appearance of “resistance” in the above quotation…
