Sunday, November 7, 2021

Kathleen Battle - 5 Japanese Love Songs





 

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Thursday, February 9, 2017

When Civil Disobedience and Resistance Are Justified (1849)

Henry David Thoreau on When Civil Disobedience and Resistance Are Justified (1849)

in Philosophy, Politics| November 15th, 2016 
thoreau-resistance
History is rife with examples of oppressive governments. The present is rife with examples of oppressive governments. You can name your own examples. The question that presents itself to any opposition is what is to be done? Go underground? Sabotage? Take up arms? The likelihood of success in such cases—depending on the belligerence of the opposition and the capabilities of the government—varies widely. But I see no moral reason to condemn people for fighting injustice, provided their cause itself is just. Neither, of course, did Henry David Thoreau, author of the 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” a document that every student of Political Philosophy 101 knows as an ur-text of modern democratic protest movements.
This is an essay we have become all-too familiar with by reputation rather than by reading. Thoreau’s political philosophy is not passive, as in the phrase “passive resistance.” It is not middle-of-the-road centrism disguised as radicalism. It lies instead at the watering hole where right libertarianism and left anarchism meet to have a drink. “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least,’” wrote Thoreau, and ultimately “’That government is best which governs not at all.’”
Like many utopian theorists of the 19th century, Thoreau saw this as the inevitable future: “when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government they will have.” Thoreau laments all restrictions on trade and regulations on commerce. He also denounces the use of a standing army by “a comparatively… few individuals.” And yet—despite these radical positions—Thoreau has been enshrined in the history of political thought both for his radical tactics and his defense of preserving government, for the present.
“To speak practically and as a citizen,” he wrote, “unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.” He does not go to great lengths, as classical philosophers were wont, to define the ideal government. It is radically democratic, that we know. But as to what constitutes injustice, Thoreau is clear:
When the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.
This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.
The figure he cites of “a sixth of the population” is not erroneous. As W.E.B. Du Bois showed in one of his revolutionary 1900 sociological visualizations, during the time of Thoreau’s essay, one-sixth of the country’s population was indeed comprised of people of African descent, most of them enslaved. Thoreau wrote during debates over the impeding Fugitive Slave Act, a law that put every person of color in the expanding country—free or escaped, in every state and territory—at risk of enslavement or imprisonment without any due process.
Thoreau found both this developing nightmare and the Mexican-American war too intolerably unjust for the country to bear. And he recognized the limitations of elections to resolve them: “All voting is a sort of gaming… with a slight moral tinge to it,” he wrote, then observed with devastating irony, given total disenfranchisement of people who were property, that “Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.”
“Unjust laws exist,” writes Thoreau, “I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.” Thoreau had put his dicta into practice already many years before. He had stopped paying his poll tax in 1842 to protest the war and the expansion of slavery. He was finally arrested and jailed for the offense in 1846. The incident hardly sparked a movement. He was bailed out, perhaps by his aunt, the following day. And as we well know, the Mexican-American war and the crisis of slavery were both resolved with… war.
But Thoreau used his experience as the basis for “Civil Disobedience,” which he wrote to a local audience in his home state of Massachusetts, and which went on to directly inspire the massively successful, national grassroots movements of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other non-violent Human Rights and Anti-War leaders around the world. So what did he recommend dissenters do? Here are the basics of his prescriptions, with his words in quotes:
“I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts.” Thoreau then goes on to describe his particular form of resistance, the non-payment of tax. His thesis here, however, allows for any just refusals to recognize government authority.
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison.” Thoreau himself suffered little, it’s true, but millions who came after him—dissidents on all continents save Antarctica—have endured imprisonment, beating, and death. “Suppose blood should flow,” writes Thoreau, “Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded?” As for the justness of disobedience, Thoreau makes a very logical case: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”  
Thoreau goes on to introduce a good deal of nuance into the argument, writing that community taxes supporting highways and schools are ethical, but those supporting unjust war and enslavement are not. He recommends discerning, thoughtful action. And he expected that the poor would undertake most of the resistance, because the burdens fell heaviest on them, and “because they who assert the purest right, and consequently are the most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property.” This has generally, throughout history, been true.
The best thing a person of means can do, he writes, is “to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor.” Or, presumably, if one has never been so, to follow the poors’ lead. The paradox of Thoreau’s assertion that the least powerful present the greatest threat to the State resolves in his recognition that the State’s power rests not in its appeal to “sense, intellectual or moral” but in its “superior physical strength.” By simply refusing to yield to threats, anyone—even ordinary, powerless people—can deny the government’s authority, “until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness 







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Sunday, January 5, 2014

'Walden' Quotes


Henry David Thoreau's Famous Nonfiction Classic

Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems
Library of America

Henry David Thoreau's Walden was published in 1854. The essay details the experiment in personal independence and self-reliance that Thoreau underwent, starting on July 4, 1845. Here are a few famous quotations from the essay:
  • "Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world." - Henry David Thoreau, 1. Economy, Walden
  • "I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust." - Henry David Thoreau, 1. Economy, Walden
  • "In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line." - Henry David Thoreau, 1. Economy, Walden
  • "I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion." - Henry David Thoreau, 1. Economy, Walden
  • "To be awake is to be alive." - Henry David Thoreau, 2. Where I Lived and What I Lived For, Walden
  • "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." - Henry David Thoreau, 2. Where I Lived and What I Lived For, Walden
  • "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born." - Henry David Thoreau, 2. Where I Lived and What I Lived For, Walden
  • I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls." - Henry David Thoreau, 5. Solitude, Walden
  • "A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." - Henry David Thoreau, 9. The Ponds, Walden
  • "You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns." - Henry David Thoreau, 12. Brute Neighbors, Walden
  • "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." - Henry David Thoreau, 18. Conclusion, Walden
  • "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau, 18. Conclusion, Walden
  • "However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names." - Henry David Thoreau, 18. Conclusion, Walden


Link:  http://classiclit.about.com/od/waldenhdthoreau/a/aa_waldenquote.htm


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Walden' Review

 

Walden was published around 1854, during the reign of the transcendentalists; in fact, Henry David Thoreau, the book's author, was a member of the movement. If transcendentalism were around today, we would probably call its followers: new-age folk, hippies, or nonconformists.

In fact, much of what transcendentalism stood for back then is still alive and well today.

Many people know Thoreau from his 1849 essay "Resistance to Civil Government," better known as "Civil Disobedience." During the 1840s, Thoreau was imprisoned for refusing to pay taxes for a cause he didn’t agree with. (In those days, taxes were collected separately by tax collectors who came to your door, as opposed to the modern income tax.) Although a friend of his paid the tax for him, enabling him to be released from jail, Thoreau maintained in his essay that he had no obligation to support an action of government that he did not agree with.

Walden is written in much the same spirit. Thoreau cared as little for society's ills as he did for the government. He firmly believed that most of life's expenses were unnecessary, and therefore so too was the labor a man put into earning enough money to buy them. In order to prove his claims, he "went into the woods" and lived as simply and as inexpensively as he encouraged others to do. Walden is the written record of his experiment.

The Experiment: Walden

The first several chapters of Walden are the most interesting, as it is in these that Thoreau lays out his case. His sarcasm and wit amuses the reader as he rails against the frivolity of new clothes, expensive houses, polite company, and meaty diets.

One of Thoreau's chief arguments in Walden is that men wouldn't have to work for a living (and Thoreau clearly detests work) if they lived more simply. To that end, Thoreau built a house for under thirty dollars during a time when the average house (according to the first chapter of Walden) cost around $800, bought one cheap suit of clothes, and planted a crop of beans.

For two years Thoreau lived in that house. He spend time cultivating his beans and other crops, making bread, and fishing. With his house paid for and his food in good supply, he swam in Walden Pond, walked in the adjoining woods, wrote, daydreamed, reflected, and – rarely – visited the town.

The Real Story: Walden

Of course, Thoreau fails to point out an important element of his situation. He moved to Walden Pond because Ralph Waldo Emerson (one of his good friends and fellow transcendentalist writers) owned Walden Pond and the surrounding land. In a different situation, Thoreau's experiment might have been cut short.

Even so, Walden is a valuable lesson for readers. If you are anything like me, you'll read the book while sitting in a comfortable chair, and wearing fashionable clothes. You probably have a job to pay for all these things, and you may even complain about said job from time to time. If that sounds like you, you'll probably drink up Thoreau's words. You may wish that you could free yourself from society's constraints.


Study Guide
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Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Henry David Thoreau Quotes: Read The Best


Henry David Thoreau Quotes

zen sayings
If you already meditate or plan to try the easy meditation techniques you'll find these Henry David Thoreau Quotes a real help.
He lived in the late nineteenth century. And became a well-know philosopher, environmentalist and meditator.
He's inspired Ghandi, Tolstoy - modern meditation teachers like Jon Kabat-Zinn.... and maybe You.
But what was his message?
Can he show you ways to deal with stress in your life?
Find out here.. (click to scroll down page).

Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Live simply

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify
I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand. Instead of a million count half a dozen.
In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the thousand and one items to be allowed for, a man who survives must indeed be a great calculator.
Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes , five and reduce other things in proportion.
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Live in the present moment

Only the day dawns to which we are awake
In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all ages.

Don't rush

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence. That petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine tomorrow.

How to Live

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation.
If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings why should we run?
Be it life or death we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities. If we are alive let us go about our business.
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts.

The Value of Meditation

Direct your eye right inward and you'll find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. Travel them a be an expert in home cosmography

Nature, Solitude and Happiness

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature, and has his senses still
I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature. In the very pattering of the drops. In very sound and sight around my house, an infinite an unaccountable friendliness all at once like at atmosphere sustaining me.
Meditation Tip: Try going out in nature. To your local park or wood - whatever's nearby. Then allow yourself to stop. Listen, Look at what's around you. Next bring your attention to your breathing, body or to walking itself.
I've explained how to do this in these free guided meditation scripts...

Thoreau's Final Words

On his death-bed Thoreau was asked by friends if he had made his peace with God. He replied…
"I did not know we had ever quarrelled."

Enjoy the Henry David Thoreau Quotes?

...Read more inspirational quotes on meditation
Or why not share YOUR Favourite Meditation Quote or story.

Return from Henry David Thoreau Quotes to Meditation Quotes Return from Henry David Thoreau Quotes to Learning Modern Meditation Home
Where to Find out More About Thoreau...
You can read about Thoreau's 2 year retreat to the countryside in Walden: A Life in the Woods. Dover Publications.
Photo at top of page by nicholas_t


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Henry David Thoreau Quotes: Read The Best



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Walden by Henry David Thoreau: Chapter 18 - The Literature Page


To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail fences are pulled down, and stone walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is wider than our views of it.

Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one's self.--

"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
            A thousand regions in your mind
            Yet undiscovered.  Travel them, and be
            Expert in home-cosmography."





Walden by Henry David Thoreau: Chapter 18 - The Literature Page
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Walden by Henry David Thoreau CliffsNotes - Study Guide and Help

 

 

Walden By Henry David Thoreau About Walden

 
In some editions of Walden, there is included an inscription page which precedes the first chapter. On this page, the narrator of Walden declares:


I DO NOT PROPOSE TO WRITE AN ODE TO DEJECTION, BUT TO BRAG AS LUSTILY AS CHANTICLEER IN THE MORNING, STANDING ON HIS ROOST, IF ONLY TO WAKE MY NEIGHBORS UP.

The reader attempting to approach an understanding and appreciation of Walden should immediately note that here, in this inscription, the germ of the book may be found.

The tone is one of great confidence and joy; the pages to follow will be the narrator's optimistic proclamation of the richness and fullness of his life at Walden Pond.

He will brag lustily, with a full-throated voice, that he, like the rooster that greets the dawn, has successfully created a way of living that has enabled him to find a "new day" in his life.

It is a new world and a new self that he has discovered through his thought and activity at his woodland retreat. He feels as though he has been reborn into a fresh and new, more satisfying life; he celebrates the feeling of having left behind his old self, the spiritually asleep creature made lifeless by "the dead dry life of society," for the sake of a new and ecstatic spiritual life.
In light of what has been said about Thoreau's transcendentalism, one might rightly expect Walden to begin on just such a note of buoyancy and high-spiritedness.

This is a fitting way to begin the artistic depiction of how one man moved away from the state of being a "god in ruins" and moved toward a god-like state of fulfillment.

Thus commences one of the most sophisticated and artistic "brags" in the history of American literature. And before the student decides to term the book the work of a rabid egomaniac, a further word about the nature of this "brag" should be offered.

In "The American Scholar," Emerson described the three basic stages of a transcendentalist's life: first, he learns all that is of merit in the wisdom of the past; second, he establishes a harmonious relationship with nature through which he is able to discover ethical truths and communicate with the divine.

With these two stages, the transcendentalist has developed his higher faculties; he has cultivated his life and "spiritualized" it. (We see the narrator of Walden go through these two stages in his progress toward spiritual rebirth.) After thus cultivating his own spirit, the transcendentalist does not selfishly remain content with himself.

The third stage he must attempt, after self-renewal, is the renewal of society-at-large. After being nurtured by books and nature, he must attempt to share his spiritual gains with other men who have not yet achieved their perfect spiritual states.
Walden may be viewed as Thoreau's attempt at this third stage in the transcendental life. In it, we hear the "bragging" narrator reiterating the firm conviction that all men may achieve the exhilaration that he feels. He vividly shows us his life; he "brags" of his achievement; and he tries by his example to renew "the dead dry life of society."

Thus, when the narrator "brags," it is not only for himself but for all humanity's potential for greatness.

Like the other transcendentalists, Thoreau was a strong moralist, and one of the most distinctive characteristics of Walden is that the narrator consistently tries to alert his readers to their potential for spiritual growth.

So, while the narrator may crow loudly, sometimes proudly strutting about, and may boast of his "clear flame" with a degree of pride approaching hubris, it should not be forgotten that his self-pride is to be shared by his readers.

If the narrator sometimes seems smug and self-righteous, it must be recalled that he is crowing "to wake his neighbors up" to their own greatness, not just his own.
The narrator's celebration of life and his call for all men to recognize the potential magnificence of life form the core idea, or unifying theme, of Walden. This point cannot be stressed too strongly because, for over a century, many individuals — sometimes very intelligent ones — have tended to ignore this centrally significant fact and have chosen to view Walden in other ways.

While one considers the different aspects of Walden, these aspects should not obscure the essential core of the book: the process by which the narrator moves toward spiritual fulfillment.
The way in which the reader can keep this core foremost in his mind is to approach Walden as what it primarily is: a carefully contrived, closely-knit work of art with a poetic structure designed to support and restate the core idea.

 This may easily be done if the reader predisposes himself to two facts. The first is that, before anything else, Thoreau was an artist — an artist above and beyond being a devotee of nature, a naturalist, an economist, an anarchist, an abolitionist, or a philosopher. Since the 1930s, this is the key fact about Thoreau that has been established by scholars, and it has been the key factor in Thoreau's rise to prominence in American letters.

Walden is the product of a man possessed with the idea of creating a great book. The second fact is that Walden was Thoreau's most successful attempt at creating art, to the degree that Walden exhibits the qualities of a great poem.

If one traces the process by which Thoreau transformed his first version of Walden into the final version (this may be done by consulting J. Lyndon Shanley's The Making of Walden), he can see the work being changed from a rough report on pond-side living to a highly compressed, complex, and symbolic work of art.
Of course, one can grasp the central theme of Walden without taking too much note of the poetic structure of the work. If one takes the attitude that one critic has — that "Walden is a collection of eighteen essays recounting Thoreau's experience at Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, from July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847" — it would still be possible to come to the theme of Walden.

But to view the work as merely a collection of essays is to miss the rich texture that Thoreau gave the work as a whole. The organic, poetic unity, and the rich symbolic structure which Thoreau created in Walden is what makes it a work far superior to his other works which present almost identical themes.

And it is only by being aware of the symbolic structure that one can discover how the fiction of Thoreau's Walden is ultimately autobiographical. It is through the symbolism that one comes to see that Walden is Thoreau's artistic projection of his most deeply felt shortcomings and needs — psychological needs that are fulfilled in the fiction that Thoreau's narrator lives.
The term "fiction" is used here to describe the narrator's record of what happened to him at Walden Pond. Both the "I" voice of the narrator and the world he describes must be distinguished from the real Thoreau and the world that he inhabited while writing Walden. Walden is a fiction, an imaginative creation; it is not a strict "autobiography" in the sense that we usually assign to that word.

The "I" voice we hear bragging "as lustily as chanticleer in the morning" is Thoreau's representation of himself in 1854, as he would like to be, as he hopes to be someday.

Or, it is an older Thoreau's representation of the ecstasy that he felt when he was younger. In writing Walden, he is seeking to assert and perhaps recapture his former happiness.

It should never be forgotten that seven years separated the actual experience at Walden Pond and the publication of Walden. As many critics have contended, those seven years witnessed Thoreau's loss of the intense inspiration and the ecstasy in nature that characterized his youth.

In 1854, Thoreau was looking backward to his years of spiritual fulfillment before his highly subjective idealism had begun to wane. And he is hopefully looking forward to regaining it.
In short, Walden is a kind of wish book. With the "I" voice of Walden, Thoreau fabricates an ideal alter-ego, a wish-fulfillment figure, a character who is able to say the things about himself that Thoreau would like to be able to claim.

In his youth, Thoreau felt a terrific sense of inspiration and wholeness whenever he was in the presence of nature. He believed that he had empirically proven the tenet of Emersonian idealism that the divine may be experienced through the medium of nature.

In fact, Thoreau was so excited, so exhilarated by his sensual and spiritual experience of nature that he seriously entertained the idea that nature is actually God.

He went past Emerson, who declared that nature is the symbol of the spiritual, and proposed that it is more than a mere symbol. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau's idealism surpassed Emerson's when he wrote:
May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?
Statements such as this caused Reverend George Ripley to denounce Thoreau's "pantheism." Nature fulfilled him to such a degree that he had to celebrate it as divine; so great was the physical and spiritual harmony between him and nature that he felt he was experiencing divinity. And it was to this state that he wanted to return in 1854.

Hence, at the climax of the narrator's quest for harmony with nature in the "Spring" chapter, we find the "I" voice experiencing nature's expression of the divine.

The ecstasy that the "I" voice brags of in this chapter is the ecstasy that Thoreau longs for. The spiritual rebirth that the narrator achieves in Walden is the goal toward which Thoreau was attempting to design his life in 1854.









Source:
Walden by Henry David Thoreau CliffsNotes - Study Guide and Help

 http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/walden/about.html


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