PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1 “MR. AMERICA” (WARTS AND ALL) WALDO EMERSON BORN 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 DIED 1. Harold Bloom would refer to this man in this manner in the New York Review of Books on November 22, 1984 (pages 19-24). HDT WHAT? INDEX RALPH WALDO EMERSON WALDO EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN WALDEN: There was one other with whom I had “solid seasons,” long PEOPLE OF to be remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in WALDEN upon me from time to time; but I had no more for society there. WALDO EMERSON “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX WALDO EMERSON RALPH WALDO EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK GO BACK TO THE START OF HIS LIFE 1837 Thomas Carlyle’s THE LIFE OF FRIEDRICH SCHILLER. COMPREHENDING AN EXAMINATION OF HIS WORKS. ... FROM THE LONDON EDITION. (New York: George Dearborn & Co.). A copy of this would be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library. THE LIFE OF SCHILLER From this year into 1840 Carlyle would be offering four courses of lectures in London, on German Literature and on Heroes. The argument for the almost magical growth of this Scottish author’s reputation was first made by the HDT WHAT? INDEX RALPH WALDO EMERSON WALDO EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN peripatetic English reformer, Harriet Martineau, in her controversial travelogue SOCIETY IN AMERICA: No living writer exercises so enviable a sway, so far as it goes, as Mr. Carlyle ... [whose] remarkable work SARTOR RESARTUS, issued piecemeal through Fraser’s Magazine, has been republished in America and is exerting an influence proportioned to the genuineness of the admiration it has excited. Perhaps this is the first instance of the Americans having taken to their hearts an English work that came to them anonymous, unsanctioned by any recommendation and even absolutely neglected at home. It has regenerated the preaching of more than one of the clergy. This English author’s published account of the situation, above, is of course entirely disingenuous, is a deliberate act of mystification of her audience. She had herself already become part of the American movement for this book by Carlyle before she had returned to England. SARTOR RESARTUS HDT WHAT? INDEX WALDO EMERSON RALPH WALDO EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK In April 1835 she had been had been “[fed] with the SARTOR” by the Reverend William Henry Furness in Philadelphia out of the copy he had just received from Waldo Emerson in Boston. In May 1835 while vacationing with Mrs. Sophia Dana Ripley and the Reverend George Ripley she had “made the SARTOR her constant companion.” In June 1835 while visiting the Reverend James Freeman Clarke in Lexington, Kentucky she had told him that what she was up to was “preparing the people for Carlyleism.” In August 1835 while visiting the Reverend Clarke’s cousin Margaret Fuller they had had “some talk about Carlyleism.” During Fall 1835 she had met with Emerson himself several times as he exercised himself in behalf of Thomas Carlyle. She had visited several times with Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley in Waltham, and in October 1835 she had been staying with the Reverend William Ellery Channing in Newport, Rhode Island when Emerson had sent the Reverend Channing a copy of SARTOR RESARTUS. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT This was the year in which Waldo Emerson would deliver his Phi Beta Kappa Society oration “The American Scholar” to the seniors at Harvard College (one of whom was in the process of changing his name from David Henry Thoreau to Henry David Thoreau, and was beginning a journal of sorts). Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1837 (æt. 20) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1838 (æt. 20-21) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1839 (æt. 21-22) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1840 (æt. 22-23) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1841 (æt. 23-24) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1842 (æt. 24-25) Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal Volume for 1845-1846 (æt. 27-29) Can you parse this? According to Anita Haya Patterson’s FROM EMERSON TO KING: DEMOCRACY, RACE, AND THE POLITICS OF PROTEST (NY: Oxford UP, 1997, page 120), during this year in which the Concord 2 Female Anti-Slavery Society was constituting itself, the husband of Mrs. Lidian Emerson, one of the women involved in that formation, in the writing of a lecture on “SOCIETY”, would alter his concept of the obligations that obtain among friends. He would come to place primary reliance upon a concept “kindness” that savored of proto-racialism: [H]e argues that political obligations associated with kindness can bind together not simply an intimate circle of friends, but also casual acquaintances and neighborhoods, whole towns, “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden: Waldo Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX RALPH WALDO EMERSON WALDO EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN countries, and even continents. The obligations that arise out of such kindness, in this account, are in every case involuntarily assumed. 2. Also involved in this new society were Abba Alcott and seven women residing at the Thoreau boardinghouse: Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau Helen Louisa Thoreau Aunt Maria Thoreau Aunt Jane Thoreau Miss Prudence Ward Miss Prudence’s mother. HDT WHAT? INDEX WALDO EMERSON RALPH WALDO EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX RALPH WALDO EMERSON WALDO EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN Jones Very referred to his dead father and his very lively mother as “blighted flowers” and mused upon the display in their lives of “some covenant broken with the Lord.” As the heritage of this union, he would need to atone in order to get out of the clutches of “some secret undefined power” which was tempting him toward “2 Vices.” As he hinted in his marginal jottings in his copy of Waldo Emerson’s NATURE, the 12th chapter of the Book of Revelations to Saint John on Patmos was going to become very relevant in his own life. Where Emerson spoke of infancy being “the perpetual Messiah, which come into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise” (NATURE, page 88), Very would cast himself in the role of the Queen’s male child of Revelations 12, who is “caught up unto God, and to His throne” while his mother, Queen Lydia Very the apostate of Salem MA, is forced to flee into the “wilderness.” JESUS CHRIST, AKA JONES VERY (After Satan’s revolt is broken, of course, this male child stands revealed as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, AKA “Jones Very.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX WALDO EMERSON RALPH WALDO EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK In Northern India a famine began, that would last through 1838. Horace Hayman Wilson became the director (long-term) of the Royal Asiatic Society, of which he had been a founding member. Henry Thomas Colebrooke’s final publication was Īśvara Kṛṣṇa’s SĀṀKHYA KĀRIKĀ in a commented 3 translation by Horace Hayman Wilson. THE SANKHYA KARIKA MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS BY H.T. COLEBROOKE, which contained an essay “On the Vedas” as well as 3. Henry Thoreau would study Vedantic philosophy in this edition: A WEEK: A Hindoo sage said, “As a dancer, having exhibited herself PEOPLE OF to the spectator, desists from the dance, so does Nature desist, A WEEK having manifested herself to soul —. Nothing, in my opinion, is more gentle than Nature; once aware of having been seen, she does not again expose herself to the gaze of soul.” HORACE HAYMAN WILSON HENRY THOMAS COLEBROOKE (He would bequeath this volume of his personal library to Waldo Emerson.) THE SANKHYA KARIKA HDT WHAT? INDEX RALPH WALDO EMERSON WALDO EMERSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 4 selections from the UPANISHADS, was published in 2 volumes in London by W.H. Allen and Company. WALDEN: That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? NARCOLEPSY In Chapter 2 of WALDEN, “Where I Lived, And What I Lived For,” there is a parable about the young person’s discovery of who one truly is. The Van Doren Stern commented edition of WALDEN says that the source of this parable is “not yet identified,” but R.K. Dhawan states categorically that it is part of the Vedantic philosophy contained in Īśvara Kṛṣṇa’s SĀṀKHYA KĀRIKĀ as translated and commented by Horace Hayman Wilson and published in London by Henry Thomas Colebrooke, which volume contains the central doctrines of the ancient Sánkhya or “discriminative wisdom” system of Indian philosophy and is said to have originated with the sage Kapila, who passed his wisdom on to his pupil Asuri who in turn passed it on to Panchashikha. Eventually Iswara Krsna condensed the teaching into the writing known as the SÁNKHYA KÁRIKÁ. Thoreau was reading this book in January 1850 and a reference in his journal indicates that he was re-consulting it in May 1851: 4. These volumes by Henry Thomas Colebrooke would become part of Henry Thoreau’s personal library. COLEBROOKE’S ESSAYS, I COLEBROOKE’S ESSAYS, II (He would bequeath these volumes also to Waldo Emerson.)