亨利·戴维·梭罗

　　亨利·戴维·梭罗（Henry David Thoreau，1817-1862），美国Late years: 1851-1862
　　（Henry David Thoreau, photograph published circa 1879）
　　In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and travel/expedition narratives. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his Journal. He greatly admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to “anticipate” the seasons of nature, in his words.
　　He became a land surveyor, and continued to write increasingly detailed natural history observations about the 26 mile² (67 km²) township in his Journal, a two-million word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of separate notebooks, and these observations became the source for Thoreau's late natural history writings, such as Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild Apples, an essay bemoaning the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.
　　Until the 1970s, Thoreau’s late pursuits were dismissed by literary critics as amateur science and philosophy. With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism, several new readings of this matter began to emerge, showing Thoreau to be both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance, his late essay, "The Succession of Forest Trees," shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through dispersal by seed-bearing winds or animals.
　　He traveled to Quebec once, Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times; these landscapes inspired his "excursion" books, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854, and west across the Great Lakes region in 1861, visiting Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Mackinac Island.[25]
　　After John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown, or damned him with faint praise. Thoreau was disgusted by this, and composed a speech — A Plea for Captain John Brown — which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau’s speech proved persuasive: first the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North would literally be singing Brown’s praises. As a contemporary biographer of John Brown put it: “If, as Alfred Kazin suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact.”[26]
Death
　　（Thoreau family graves at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery）
　　Thoreau first contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically over his life. In 1859, following a late night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rain storm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined over three years with brief periods of remission, until he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden. He also wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded quite simply: “I did not know we had ever quarreled.” He died on 6 May 1862 at the age of 44.
　　Originally buried in the Dunbar family plot, he and members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral. Thoreau’s friend Ellery Channing published his first biography, Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, in 1873, and Channing and another friend Harrison Blake edited some poems, essays, and journal entries for posthumous publication in the 1890s. Thoreau’s Journal, often mined but largely unpublished at his death, first appeared in 1906 and helped to build his modern reputation. A new and greatly expanded edition of the Journal is underway, published by Princeton University Press. Today, Thoreau is regarded as one of the foremost American writers, both for the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience of his views on nature and politics. His memory is honored by the international Thoreau Society, the oldest and largest society devoted to an American author.
Beliefs
　　（Thoreau memorial at Library Way, New York City.）Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. Thoreau was also one of the first American supporters of Darwin's theory of evolution. He was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet[27] and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. He wrote in Walden: "The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth."[28]
　　Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates both nature and culture. The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest, and he preferred “partially cultivated country.” His idea of being “far in the recesses of the wilderness” of Maine was to “travel the logger’s path and the Indian trail,” but he also hiked on pristine untouched land. In the essay "Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher" Roderick Nash writes: "Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine. His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord. Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance."[29]
　　On alcohol, Thoreau wrote: "I would fain keep sober always... I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor... Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?"[28]
Influence
　　（A bust of Thoreau from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at the Bronx Community College.）
　　Thoreau’s writings had far reaching influences on many public figures. Political leaders and reformers like Mahatma Gandhi, President John F. Kennedy, civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of being strongly affected by Thoreau’s work, particularly Civil Disobedience. So did many artists and authors including Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, E. B. White, and Frank Lloyd Wright and naturalists like John Burroughs, John Muir, E.O. Wilson, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch , B.F Skinner, and David Brower.[30] Anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman also appreciated Thoreau, and referred to him as “the greatest American anarchist”.
　　Mahatma Gandhi first read Walden in 1906 while working as a civil rights activist in Johannesburg, South Africa. He told American reporter Webb Miller, "[Thoreau's] ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all of my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence. Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau's essay 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,' written about 80 years ago."[31]
　　Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in his Autobiography that his first encounter with the idea of non-violent resistance was reading "On Civil Disobedience" in 1944 while attending Morehouse College. He wrote in his autobiography that it was
　　Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.
　　I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.[32]
　　The University of Michigan's New England Literature Program is an experiential literature and writing program run through the university's Department of English Language and Literature which was started in the 1970's by professors Alan Howes and Walter Clark. Howes and Clark called upon Thoreauvian ideals of nature, independence and community to create an academic program modeled after Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond. Today, students at NELP study Thoreau's work — as well as that of several other New England writers from the 19th and 20th centuries — in relative isolation on Sebago Lake in Raymond, Maine.
　　American Psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Thoreau's Walden with him in his youth[33] and, in 1945, wrote Walden Two, a fictional utopia about 1,000 members of a community living together inspired by the life of Thoreau.[34]
Criticism
　　Thoreau was not without his critics. Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau’s endorsement of living alone in natural simplicity, apart from modern society, to be a mark of effeminacy:
　　…Thoreau’s content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences.[35]
　　However, English novelist George Eliot, writing in the Westminster Review, characterized such critics as uninspired and narrow-minded:
　　People — very wise in their own eyes — who would have every man’s life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them, may pooh-pooh Mr. Thoreau and this episode in his history, as unpractical and dreamy.
See also
　　* The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, a project that aims to provide accurate texts of Thoreau's works
　　* Concord Museum, which contains many of Thoreau's possessions
　　* The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, a two-act play by Robert Edwin Lee and Jerome Lawrence.
References
　　1. Biography of Henry David Thoreau, American Poems (2000-2007 Gunnar Bengtsson).
　　2. Johnson, Ellwood. The Goodly Word: The Puritan Influence in America Literature, Clements Publishing, 2005, p. 138.
　　3. Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, edited by Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, Alvin Saunders Johnson, 1937, p. 12.
　　4. a b Thoreau, H. D. Resistance to Civil Government
　　5. Ancestors of Mary Ann Gillam and Stephen Old
　　6. History of the Fraternity System
　　7. Trivia-Library
　　8. Henry David Thoreau, Meet the Writers, Barnes & Noble.com
　　9. Biography of Henry David Thoreau, American Poems (2000-2007 Gunnar Bengtsson)
　　10. THUR-oh or Thor-OH? And How Do We Know? Thoreau Reader
　　11. Thoreau, H.D. Cape Cod
　　12. American Notebooks Nathaniel Hawthorne
　　13. Colman, William, et al, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson 16 vols. (Cambridge, Mass 1960-)
　　14. "Thoreau's Diploma". American Literature Vol. 17, May 1945. 174-175.
　　15. Dean, Bradley P. "A Thoreau Chronology".
　　16. Cheevers, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 90. ISBN 078629521X.
　　17. Conrad, Randall. (Fall 2005). "The Machine in the Wetland: Re-imagining Thoreau's Plumbago-Grinder". Thoreau Society Bulletin (253).
　　18. A Chronology of Thoreau's Life, with Events of the Times, The Thoreau Project, Calliope Film Resources, accessed 11th June 2007
　　19. Rosenwald, Lawrence. "The Theory, Practice & Influence of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience". William Cain, ed. A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2006.
　　20. Thoreau, H. D. letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson 23 February 1848
　　21. Alcott, Bronson. Journals. Boston: Little, Brown, 1938.
　　22. Thoreau's Civil Disobedience - 2
　　23. Cheevers, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 234. ISBN 078629521X.
　　24. Cheevers, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 244. ISBN 078629521X.
　　25. Henry David Thoreau, The Annotated Walden (1970), Philip Van Doren Stern, ed., pp. 96, 132
　　26. Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist Knopf (2005), p. 4
　　27. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Flowering of New England. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc., 1952. p. 310
　　28. a b Cheevers, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 241. ISBN 078629521X.
　　29. http://www.wsu.edu/~hughesc/thoreau.htm"Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher" by Roderick Nash
　　30. Kifer, Ken Analysis and Notes on Walden: Henry Thoreau’s Text with Adjacent Thoreauvian Commentary
　　31. Miller, Webb. I Found No Peace. Garden City, 1938. 238-239
　　32. King, M.L. Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. chapter two
　　33. Skinner, B. F. A Matter of Consequences
　　34. Skinner, B. F. Walden Two (1948)
　　35. Stevenson, Robert Louis. "Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions". Cornhill Magazine. June 1880.
　　[edit] Further reading
　　* Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod (Robert F. Sayre, ed.) (Library of America, 1985) ISBN 978-0-94045027-1
　　* Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems (Elizabeth Hall Witherell, ed.) (Library of America, 2001) ISBN 978-1-88301195-6
　　* Henry David Thoreau: The Price of Freedom: Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journals ISBN 978-1434805522
　　* Bode, Carl. Best of Thoreau's Journals. Southern Illinois University Press. 1967.
　　* Botkin, Daniel. No Man's Garden.
　　* Dassow Walls, Laura. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and 19th Century Science. University of Wisconsin Press. 1995. ISBN 978-0-29914740-2
　　* Dean, Bradley P. ed., Letters to a Spiritual Seeker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
　　* Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau. Princeton University Press, 1982.
　　* Hendrix, George. "The Influence of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" on Gandhi's Satyagraha". The New England Quarterly. 1956.
　　* Howarth, William. The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life as a Writer. Viking Press, 1982.
　　* Meyerson, Joel et al. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge University Press. 1995.
　　* Nash, Roderick. Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher.
　　* Parrington, Vernon. Main Current in American Thought. V 2 online. 1927.
　　* Petroski, Henry. H. D. Thoreau, Engineer. American Heritage of Invention and Technology, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 8-16.
External links
　　Texts
　　* The Thoreau Reader. The annotated works of Henry David Thoreau.
　　* Thoreau's Life & Writings, at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods.
　　* Works by Henry David Thoreau at Project Gutenberg. Text and HTML.
　　* Works by Henry David Thoreau at Internet Archive. Scanned books.
　　* Works by Henry David Thoreau at Google Books. Scanned books.
　　* Thoreau's Journal Drippings; a Monthly Digest of Excerpts from Thoreau's Journal
　　* Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journals (relating to political philosophy)
　　* Poems of Thoreau
　　Other
　　* This Date From Henry David Thoreau's Journal
　　* Who He Was & Why He Matters — by Randall Conrad
　　* http://hdthoreau.com
　　* The Birthplace of Thoreau
　　* The Blog of Henry David Thoreau
　　* The Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods
　　* World Wide Waldens at The Walden Woods Project
　　* Henry David Thoreau Online The Works and Life of Henry D. Thoreau
　　* Henry David Thoreau (“The Transcendentalists”)
　　* The American Transcendentalist Web
　　* Thoreau Project at Calliope
　　* The Thoreau Society
　　* The Thoreau Edition
　　* Concordance to works of Thoreau at Victorian Literary Studies Archive
　　* John Updike, “A Sage for All Seasons” — courtesy of the UK Guardian, an edited extract from the introduction to Updike’s new edition of Walden
　　* Henry David Thoreau entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Rick Anthony Furtak, 2005-06-30
　　* Henry Thoreau: Transcendental Economist from Vernon L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought
　　* Stephen Ells’s Thoreau research page
　　* The European Thoreau web page: multilingual resources for Thoreauvians
　　* Thoreau's trails
　　* Strike The Root, a website that draws its inspiration from Henry D. Thoreau.