Objective: Students will continue their discussion of Walden, enriching the conversation through their reading of Rebecca Solnit's essay The Thoreau Problem. Students will contemplate Thoreau as an American character and ruminate on what his writing means to us today.
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| We eat bread made from mountain blueberries while we discuss Walden |
"Th[e] compartmentalizing of Thoreau is a microcosm of a larger partition in American thought, a fence built in the belief that places in the imagination can be contained. Those who deny that nature and culture, landscape and politics, the city and the country are inextricably interfused have undermined the connections for all of us (so few have been able to find Thoreau’s short, direct route between them since). This makes politics dreary and landscape trivial, a vacation site. It banishes certain thoughts, including the thought that much of what the environmental movement dubbed wilderness was or is indigenous homeland—a very social and political space indeed, then and now—and especially the thought that Thoreau in jail must have contemplated the following day’s huckleberry party, and Thoreau among the huckleberries must have ruminated on his stay in jail."-Rebecca Solnit, The Thoreau Problem
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