thoreau: raise the roof

…Thoreau began his work at the pond with a borrowed axe. It probably belonged to Bronson Alcott, although after its fame spread it was claimed by both Emerson and Channing. But from whoever he obtained it, he returned it later, he boasted, sharper than when he had borrowed it. He hewed the main timber he said, “six inches square, most of the studs on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much stronger than sawed ones.”

--- Still, although seldom mentioned without references to Gandhi or King, "Civil Disobedience" has more history than many suspect. In the 1940's it was read by the Danish resistance, in the 1950's it was cherished by those who opposed McCarthyism, in the 1960's it was influential in the struggle against South African apartheid, and in the 1970's it was discovered by a new generation of anti-war activists. The lesson learned from all this experience is that Thoreau's ideas really do work, just as he imagined they would.---Read More:http://frack.mixplex.com/biblio/author/293

— Still, although seldom mentioned without references to Gandhi or King, “Civil Disobedience” has more history than many suspect.
In the 1940′s it was read by the Danish resistance, in the 1950′s it was cherished by those who opposed McCarthyism, in the 1960′s it was influential in the struggle against South African apartheid, and in the 1970′s it was discovered by a new generation of anti-war activists. The lesson learned from all this experience is that Thoreau’s ideas really do work, just as he imagined they would.—Read More:http://frack.mixplex.com/biblio/author/293

By mid-April he had every plank mortized and tenoned and the house framed, ready for raising. Meanwhile, for $4.25, he purchased an old shanty from James Collins, an Irish laborer on the Fitchburg Railroad. In a few hours he dismantled the shack, spread out the boards in the sun to bleach them and warp them back into shape, and drew the nails. Those nails, however, disappeared into the capacious pockets of one neighbor Seeley, who helped himself when Thoreau’s back was turned.

It took Thoreau only two hours to dig a cellar hole six feet square and seven deep in the soft sandy soil, two hundred feet up a gentle slope from the shore of a cove on the north side of the pond, and in the shade of some small pines at the edge of a brier field. It was not a lonely spot. The well-traveled Concord-Lincoln road was within sight across the field; the Fitchburg railroad steamed regularly along the opposite shore of the pond; Concord village was less than two miles away; and the house where Thoreau’s parents lived was even closer along the railroad right of way.

In early May, adopting the old country custom, Thoreau invited some of his neighbors to help set up the frame of his house and raise the roof- both tasks that took more than one set of hands. His assistants were a distinguished crew; they included Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Ellery Channing, George William Curtis, and his brother Burrill, and Thoreau’s favorite Concord farmer, Edmund Hosmer, and Hosmer’s sons John, Edmund, and Andrew. ( to be continued)…

ADDENDUM:


(see link at end)…A biography of Thoreau worth reading, because it concerns itself with revealing the man from his own point of view and not with the biographer’s estimate of him, was done by a Frenchman, Leon Bazelgette. “The gods,” says Bazelgette, “have made a Henry who is all of a piece, and they have placed him on earth among objects and souls that are different and queer.” There you have it. What do we mean by “queer”? If all but one of us were color blind, that one would indeed seem queer to us; but how would our inability to distinguish colors appear to the gifted one? And so, as this country bumpkin went through Harvard in his stout green suit, while the fine young gentlemen were uniformed in traditional black, the incongruity which caused them to smile was as nothing to the oddity, as he saw it, of voluntarily squeezing one’s personality into a convention. Even in his teens he displays that “militant devotion to various axioms that he identifies with himself.” He could not be cast into a mold; he was not made of that stuff. Harvard had facilities which he could use to improve himself. It was a means; the end was a better Thoreau. It was not for the “old joke of a diploma” that he read enormously, far beyond the requirements of the curriculum, though outside of it. At 19 he wrote, “Learning is art’s creature, but it is not essential to the perfect man; it cannot educate.” Read More:http://mises.org/daily/5033

Related Posts

This entry was posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion and tagged , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>