Transcendentalism, the American philosophy that championed the individual, emerged from an exceptionally tight-knit community.
...a new vision of Thoreau has taken shape. He is the townsman who turned his withdrawal into a conspicuously individual performance—"his well-built house" by Walden Pond "readily visible to passersby on the carriage road"—in order to take his neighbors and family along on his journey. Thoreau and his family were ardent abolitionists (his sister Helen was a friend of Frederick Douglass's), and he continued to hide enslaved people on their flight to Canada even while living at the pond.
The famous early chapters of Walden—which seem so brutally insulting toward greedy, wasteful, acquisitive farmers and townsfolk—turn out to have been delivered, face-to-face, as lectures to his neighbors in the Concord Lyceum in 1847, by a self-revealing Thoreau under the title "History of Himself." Such chastisement was in the old New England spirit of calls to the congregation. "Thoreau never sloughed off the heritage of Ezra Ripley and the message of community," Gross writes. "In his mind he was never alone. The community came with him."
...a new vision of Thoreau has taken shape. He is the townsman who turned his withdrawal into a conspicuously individual performance—"his well-built house" by Walden Pond "readily visible to passersby on the carriage road"—in order to take his neighbors and family along on his journey. Thoreau and his family were ardent abolitionists (his sister Helen was a friend of Frederick Douglass's), and he continued to hide enslaved people on their flight to Canada even while living at the pond.
The famous early chapters of Walden—which seem so brutally insulting toward greedy, wasteful, acquisitive farmers and townsfolk—turn out to have been delivered, face-to-face, as lectures to his neighbors in the Concord Lyceum in 1847, by a self-revealing Thoreau under the title "History of Himself." Such chastisement was in the old New England spirit of calls to the congregation. "Thoreau never sloughed off the heritage of Ezra Ripley and the message of community," Gross writes. "In his mind he was never alone. The community came with him."
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