His inquisitiveness into the ways of the wild creatures carried with it no desire to shoot them, and to his mind the killing of game for mere sport was akin to butchery. There is never any doubt about his genuineness, or that what he states is free from bias and romantic exaggeration. The play of his imagination is keen and nimble, yet his fancy is so well balanced by his native common sense that it does not run away with him. He was a careful and accurate observer, more at home in the fields and woods than in village and town, and with a gift of piquant originality in recording his impressions. Thoreau was one of the world’s greatest nature writers, and as the years pass, his fame steadily increases. His home was in an Indian village on an island in the Penobscot River at Oldtown, a few miles above Bangor. The Indian retained many of his aboriginal instincts and ways, though his tribe was in most respects civilized. He liked especially the companionship of men who were in close contact with nature, and in this book we find him deeply interested in his Indian guide and lingering fondly over the man’s characteristics and casual remarks. For though he was a person of culture and refinement, with a college education, and had for an intimate friend so rare a man as Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was half wild in many of his tastes and impatient of the restraints and artificiality of the ordinary social life of the towns and cities. No one could have been better fitted than Thoreau to enjoy such a region and to transmit his enjoyment of it to others. Here was a vast tract of almost virgin woodland, peopled only with a few loggers and pioneer farmers, Indians, and wild animals. The chief attraction that inspired Thoreau to make the trip was the primitiveness of the region. It is particularly charming in its blending of meditative and poetic fancies with the minute description of the voyager’s experiences.
The record of the journey is the latter half of his The Maine Woods, which is perhaps the finest idyl of the forest ever written. Thoreau was born at Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and at the time he made this wilderness canoe trip he was forty years old. TOKYO ∙ SYDNEY ∙ CAPE TOWN ∙ AUCKLAND ∙ BEIJING PARIS ∙ MADRID ∙ BERLIN ∙ ROME ∙ MEXICO CITY ∙ MUMBAI ∙ SEOUL ∙ DOHA LONDON ∙ NEW YORK ∙ TORONTO ∙ SAO PAULO ∙ MOSCOW
Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau Canoeing in the wilderness
0 kommentar(er)
