Meredith's review
Walden and Resistance to Civil Government (Norton Critical Editions)
by Henry David Thoreau
Meredith's review
Walden and Resistance to Civil Government (Norton Critical Editions) by Henry David Thoreau
Meredith's review
rating:
bookshelves:
qualifying-exam
This book makes it onto the short list of works that changed my life. I read it for the first time ten years ago, and it bolstered me through the tumultuous passions, the ecstasies and despairs, of middle school. Now coming back to the work, I'm delighted to think what a different, richer reader (and person) I am now.
What struck me about Walden this time around was Thoreau's very modern, even experimental, prose style. He doesn't shy away from weird mixed metaphors, punchy sentence fragments, dialogue rendered within the paragraph without quotation marks, and so on. He is not a backward woodsman; his style marks him as distinctly intellectual, globally-inflected, and crisply, unapologetically modern.
Thoreau urges us, "Set about being good" (49). One follows his advice just by the very act of attentively reading _Walden_. What is remarkable to me is the profound, non-dogmatic, moral consciousness of the work. This true for the aphorisms ("He who distinguish...more
What struck me about Walden this time around was Thoreau's very modern, even experimental, prose style. He doesn't shy away from weird mixed metaphors, punchy sentence fragments, dialogue rendered within the paragraph without quotation marks, and so on. He is not a backward woodsman; his style marks him as distinctly intellectual, globally-inflected, and crisply, unapologetically modern.
Thoreau urges us, "Set about being good" (49). One follows his advice just by the very act of attentively reading _Walden_. What is remarkable to me is the profound, non-dogmatic, moral consciousness of the work. This true for the aphorisms ("He who distinguish...more
