The Daily Henry David Thoreau: A Year of Quotes from the Man Who Lived in Season

Henry David Thoreau

sept 2020 · University of Chicago Press

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“The sage of Walden Pond is himself in the mix with a quote-a-day compendium from Thoreau biographer Laura Dassow Walls of some of his best observations.” —Wall Street Journal

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of each.”

Modernity rules our lives by clock and calendar, dividing the stream of time into units. Henry David Thoreau subverted both clock and calendar, using them not to regulate time’s passing but to open up and explore its presence. This volume embodies Thoreau’s own ambition to “live in season” —to turn with the living sundial of the world, and, by attuning ourselves to nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson noted with awe that from flowers alone, Thoreau could tell the calendar date within two days; children remembered long into adulthood how Thoreau showed them white waterlilies awakening not by the face of a clock but at the first touch of the sun. As Thoreau wrote in Walden, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.”

Drawn from the full range of Thoreau’s journals and published writings, and arranged according to season, The Daily Henry David Thoreau allows us to discover the endless variation to be found in the repetitions of mundane cycles. Thoreau saw in the kernel of each day an earth enchanted, one he honed into sentences tuned with an artist’s eye and a musician’s ear. Thoreau’s world lives on in his writing so that we, too, may discover, even in a fallen world, a beauty worth defending.

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Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) was an essayist, poet, and philosopher best known for his book Walden. Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author, most recently, of Henry David Thoreau: A Life, also published by the University of Chicago Press.