Further on Jon Shumaker’s question
What did Thoreau have to do with the 60sI had first encountered Thoreau during an earlier political era, reading Walden in the early sixties. As the political turmoil of the decade erupted, so did my adolescence. Thoreau’s message of steadfast individuality appealed to my fourteen-year-old mind. When I read him again as a freshman in college, the sixties had provided a rich personal and cultural mulch. The Civil Rights movement had reached its zenith; feminism simmered; environmentalism renewed its call; Vietnam War protests surged. An array of personal emancipations (sex, drugs, rock and roll) and social demographics (baby boomers entering adolescence) combined to create a climate where his ideas could flourish. Civil disobedience was the most obvious Thoreauvian lesson, but more profound, his celebration of individuality inspired a generation of American students. Some took this credo as a license for their own hedonism; others understood individuality to entail moral responsibility for one’s personal and political life.
[4] But how was Thoreau holding up in the nineties? Had Walden retained its power to transfix and transform the young? And what about me? Did the elixirs that had intoxicated me as a teenager now taste of snake oil?
[5] My students were intrigued by a personality so at odds with convention, a writer who could go from musings on a diving loon to the cost of building a house in a matter of sentences. An erudite laborer, a mystical pencil-maker, a poetic surveyor Thoreau both fascinated and baffled them. He described himself variously ח cultural historian, political commentator, Transcendentalist, teacher, nature writer but all subordinated to his self-image as prophet, awakening his fellow citizens from the slumber of complacency. To what end, though? By what means? And how did nature fit within this agenda?
from Thoreau as a mirror
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