…Meanwhile, Thoreau had not forgotten that one of his purposes in coming to Walden was to write another book, the account of his voyage on the Concord and Merrimack. Work on this, too, had progressed so rapidly that just a year from the time he moved to the pond the first draft was completed. Emerson immediately urged him to submit it to a publisher, but Thoreau insisted on taking further time to polish the manuscript. He spent a good many hours at the cabin reading various drafts aloud to such friends as Alcott and Emerson to get the benefit of their criticism. It was 1849 before the book was published. But the bulk of both it and Walden was written during his two years at the pond.
—Next to Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau’s (1817862) essay “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) is his most famous work. Its influence on later writers and reformers such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. has ensured that Thoreau’s views on social issues would be not only controversial but misunderstood. To some he is the patron saint of passive resistance, whereas to others he is an anarchist. The truth lies somewhere between those extremes.
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“Resistance to Civil Government” (often titled “Civil Disobedience”) was neither the first nor the last of Thoreau’s writings on social and political reform. These concerns occur throughout his writings and are rooted in the same transcendentalist self-culture that he espouses in Walden: an individual’s highest duty is to perfect the spiritual connection to God within. By striving for personal perfection, one leavens the whole loaf of humanity. To attempt to reform society without first perfecting oneself is to hack at the branches of evil while ignoring its roots. Paradoxically, Thoreau’s ideal program of social action requires no direct action on society.—Read More:http://www.enotes.com/resistance-civil-government-reference/resistance-civil-government
Thoreau still had time for strolling through the woods and fields of Concord or boating on its ponds and rivers. Evenings he often rowed out on the pond and played his flute or fished. He was, in his own words, “self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms…surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes.” He “looked after the wild stock of the town” and “had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm.” In the fall he often went graping to the river meadows or hunting for nuts in the chestnut groves of Lincoln. In the first winter he dragged home old logs and stumps to burn in his fireplace. ( to be continued)…
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