Henry David Thoreau & M&D

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

I spoke v. briefly off list, I think to Andrew, about Thoreau
last week, the essay on Slavery in Massachusetts, but it brought 
me back to read "Civil Disobedience" and "Walking" again. I think
his essay "Walking" very interesting. Thoreau was also a profoundly
ambivalent  surveyour, 'course. If anyone hasn't read "Walking",
or not lately----only 30 pages after all---and is reading M & D,
have a look, tell me what you think. 
His Selected Essays is widely available for only £1 in GB,
Dover Editions.

Here's a teaser:

"Nowadays  almost all man's improvments, so called, as the
building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of
all the large trees simply deform the landscape, and make it more
and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning 
the fences and let the forest stand! |I saw the fences half 
consumed,  their ends lost in the middle of the prarie,  and 
some worldly meiser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, 
while heaven had taken place all round him, and he did not see the
angles going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole 
in the middle of a paradise. i looked again, and saw him standing in
the middle of a boggy, sygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he 
had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a 
stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw the Prince
of Darkness was his surveyor."

Real Fathers, and Literary fathers for our TRP. 

Eric Alan Weinstein
University of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk