Jottings - Slice of life - 140 ( “Walden”, by Thoreau - pronounced as “thurrow” - 1817-1862 )
Jottings - Slice of life - 140 ( “Walden”, by Thoreau - pronounced as “thurrow” - 1817-1862 ) At the dawn of American history, in early 19th century, two important men chartered the course of American soul, as it were : Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. While Emerson went beyond the pulpit and raised the American mind to a new form of transcendental individualism in which the Christian god of Pilgrim fathers gave way to a subtler and more eastern spirit of universalism ; Thoreau was the ever practical and enterprise driven American soul who was quickly disillusioned at the direction his fellow citizens were embarking upon in the new found freedom of this great nation. Emerson, left his vocation as a stirring pastor, converted his lectures to full length essays in sublime prose, which reverberate even today in university halls and intellectual podiums as living testimony to courageous, free thinking and self reliant man ; Thoreau, on the other hand - a Harvard graduate, a