Walden

5. It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

This statement from the “Conclusion” of Walden illustrates another debt on Thoreau’s part to the American Transcendentalist school of his philosophical mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Emerson’s influential essay “Self-Reliance,” which Thoreau’s Walden project could be said to put into practice, Emerson makes the assertion that “travel is a fool’s paradise,” and that it is far more useful to change one’s soul than to change one’s landscape.

The Custom-House  海關

veto 否決權(美國總統制，總統才能做的)

liquid paper 立可白

bleach 漂白水

American Literature 1820-1865

Ironically, in Nature, “The American Scholar,” and his other writings of the time, Emerson drew on major philosophical and aesthetic ideas circulating in Europe to write as a literary reformer exhorting Americans to break their dependency on the “courtly muses of Europe.”  想完全離開歐洲文化很難也很諷刺，跟現在台灣文學處境很像，常被拿來比較

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Ralph Waldo Emerson is arguably the most influential American writer of the nineteenth century- the writer whom numerous other significant writers of the time sought to come to terms. Without Emerson’s inspirational essays on nonconformity, self-reliance, and anti-institutionalism, Henry David Thoreau’s and Margaret Fuller’s careers may have followed different paths. (原本是Unitarian牧師) Edgar Allan Poe 和 Walt Whitman 皆受他影響

Nature: "Nature" is an essay written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and published by James Munroe and Company in 1836. In this essay Emerson put forth the foundation of transcendentalism, a belief system that espouses a non-traditional appreciation of nature. Transcendentalism suggests that the divine, or God, suffuses nature, and suggests that reality can be understood by studying nature.

Precisely because he so valued individual self-culture, Emerson was skeptical of social reforms that required group participation.

Nature 的引言:

“Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.” –Plotinus 要揚棄歐洲，先要有所本。

Emerson transcendentalism is based upon several fundamental intuitions. Intuitions, in fact, “transcend” sense knowledge, according to Emerson, for the reason that intuitions arise from a higher faculty within man because of which he can know ultimate truth.

Chapter I

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.”

“Which is the bliss of solitude” from I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.

Chapter IV. Language

A third use which Nature subserves to man is that of Language. Nature is the vehicle of thought, and in a simple, double, and threefold degree.

1. Words are signs of natural facts.

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.

Chapter V. Discipline

Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited.

標題記下來

Chapter VI. Idealism, Chapter VII. Spirit, Chapter VIII. Prospects,

The American Scholar : "The American Scholar" was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity. 被視為美國文化獨立宣言，文中重複出現man→ 身為一個文人(知識份子)，作為自立者去影響他人(社會責任)

Influences:

I. nature

II. Books

III. man thinking

The mentor said, “Traveling is a fool’s paradise.” ; the wise man stays home.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer. American genius.

The Scarlet Letter: The Scarlet Letter is an 1850 romantic work of fiction in a historical setting, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and is considered to be his magnum opus. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt. This is a book, incidentally, which carries clear echoes of the author’s inner quarrel: it was meant to be a sympathetic study of Hester Prynne, a gentle rebel against Puritan sex-inhibitions, but its real impact is what it suggests of guilt and moral corrosion.

Arthur Dimmesdale為情夫名，紅字男主角名

Hester Prynne　女主角名

He used the setting to explore matters of sexuality, gender, and psychology in their historical complexity.

My Kinsman, Major Molineux 政治寓言，找親戚

“I pray you to tell me whereabouts is the dwelling of my kinsman, Major Molineux?”

最終不再尋找親戚　Will you show me the way to the Ferry?