The Senses of Walden Quotes

“We do not see our hand in what happens, so we call certain events melancholy accidents when they are the inevitabilities of our projects, and we call other events necessities merely because we will not change our minds.”
― Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden

“What we know as self-consciousness is only our opinion of ourselves, and like any other opinion it comes from outside; it is hearsay, our contribution to public opinion. We must become disobedient to it, resist it, no longer listen to it.”
― Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden

“What we call the Protestant Ethic, the use of worldly loss and gain to symbolize heavenly standing, appears in Walden as some last suffocation of the soul. America and its Christianity have become perfect, dreamlike liberalizations or parodies of themselves.”
― Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden

“Of the events which keep burning on the Continent, the writer of Walden is apparently dismissive: “If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted” (II, 19). Marx, at about the same time, puts the point a little differently in his Eighteenth Brumaire, suggesting that it is only if you think like a newspaper that you will take the events of 1848 (or 1830) as front-page history; they belong on the theater page, or in the obituaries. But in Walden’s way of speaking, its remark also means that the French Revolution was not new. For example, the revolution we had here at home happened first, the one that began “two miles south” of where the writer is now sitting, on “our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground” (II, 10). For an American poet, placed in that historical locale, the American Revolution is more apt to constitute the absorbing epic event. Only it has two drawbacks: first, it is overshadowed by the epic event of America itself; second, America’s revolution never happened. The colonists fought a war against England all right, and they won it. But it was not a war of independence that was won, because we are not free; nor was even secession the outcome, because we have not departed from the conditions England lives under, either in our literature or in our political and economic lives.”
― Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition