Thoreau

Question 1

Walden: history, memory, time

Answer 1

“Deep Time”: Wai Chee Dimmick. Temporal touchstones: Bhagavad Gita>Ganges>Ghandi but the directionality is two-way

Question 2

Walden: watching, imperial vantage

Answer 2

Overlaying his schemas onto the ants and onto the “Trojan” weeds; cf. Puritans overlaying Biblical schemas on the landscape

Question 3

Walden: texts, textuality, representation

Answer 3

Knows it will be an important text for others to read. Cf. Puritan awareness that this experience is to become a text for the world

Question 4

Walden: commerce

Answer 4

Converting experience into a commodity

Question 5

Speaking of Walden as the winter changes to spring, Theoreau says “The earth is all alive and covered with papillae.”

Answer 5

The pond is cultivated as a symbol of mystery and depth. Yet it is also discussed as an entity of its own. The language has the amiable, even humorous, but also meditative and suggestive tone of Ishmael in MD. The pond is a kind of white whale.

Question 6

In his discussion of lobes, leaves, globes, and lumpish grubs, Thoreau demonstrates

Answer 6

Emerson’s assertion that all words can be traced back to a sensuous connection to the matter they represent. In having the earth express its inner matter into more ethereal forms, moving toward transcendence, Thoreau suggests another of Emerson’s language theories–that parts of nature of signs of spirit. As if they were spirit in embryo.

Question 7

“We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”

Answer 7

Thoreau, Walden, “Spring” (ch. 17)

Question 8

Thoreau leaves Walden in

Answer 8

1847