 “And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience.” ~Jon Krakauer, Author’s Note of Into the Wild

Who Were the New England Transcendentalists? ( )

Who were the Transcendentalists?  Transcendentalism was a 19 th Century literary, philosophical, and social movement—an offshoot from Romanticism.  It began as a Boston discussion club—a group of thinkers sharing ideas.

Who were the Transcendentalists?  radical scholars and writers  believed in the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition.

Who were the Transcendentalists? a generation of people struggling to define spirituality and religion in a way that took into account the new understandings their age made possible.

Ralph Waldo Emerson  summed up the beliefs of Transcendentalism when he wrote: Philosopher/poet/writer who got the Transcendental ball rolling

The Over-Soul Emerson believed in a unifying soul--kind of a common heart--in which every person’s particular being is contained and made one with all others. His belief has much in common with Hinduism.

Emerson’s famous 1836 essay “Nature” advocates that we should engage in an intense, non-traditional appreciation of nature suggests divinity (God) permeates all of nature claims we can only understand reality through studying nature

An allusion to Emerson that we encountered in Ch. 4 “After piloting [his Datsun] west out of Atlanta, [McCandless] arrived in Lake Mead National Recreation Area on July 6, riding a giddy Emersonian high” (Krakauer 27).

Henry David Thoreau At 28, considered a failure Quit teaching because he refused to whip children Lectures were uninspiring A woman turned down his marriage proposal Some friends found him “tedious and tiresome”

Henry David Thoreau - Rebel While a student at Harvard, there was a tradition and rule that required all students to wear a black coat to chapel. Purposely, he rebelled from this custom by wearing a green jacket.

Thoreau - REBEL In an act of civil disobedience, he protested the Mexican War ( ) by not paying taxes that would help fund the conflict. He felt the goal of the war was to expand slaveholding territory, and he believed slavery was wrong. He spent a night in jail and wrote “Civil Disobedience or Resistance to Civil Government” This essay inspired other rebels—such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thoreau’s experiment wanted to experiment with living a simple, self- sufficient life, where he would be surrounded by the beauty of nature thought his fellow citizens were so caught up in making a living and acquiring possessions that their lives had become one-dimensional

Thoreau’s experiment In 1845, he moved to a small plot just outside Concord, Massachusetts on Walden Pond— land owned by fellow Transcendentalist writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Re-creation of Thoreau’s Cabin On a very small budget, he built himself a tiny cabin to live in and stayed for two years.

Re-creation of Thoreau’s Cabin

Thoreau’s experiment He attempted to live off of food that he farmed himself—which mainly consisted of a LOT of beans. In fact, he said he was determined to “know beans,” giving birth to the idiom “you don’t know beans.”

Thoreau’s experiment He did purchase some items in town that he could not do without—namely, molasses and rice. He grew twelve bushels of beans and eighteen bushels of potatoes his first year and sold most of it. His whole income from his farm (as he called it) was $23.44.

Thoreau’s experiment He was not a hermit. He had people over and did go into town to eat with friends. And it was rumored that he sometimes stole pies from his neighbors’ window sills. Do I smell pie?

Walden Pond - map drawn and scaled by Thoreau in 1846

Walden Pond

Thoreau’s Influence

Modern movements modeled after Thoreau’s Walden

Some Excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Some Excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden  Still we live meanly, like ants…  Our life is frittered away by detail…  Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! 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, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail…  Simplify, simplify…  Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?

Transcendentalist Principles Believed that divinity was present in both nature and the human soul

Transcendentalist Principles We can find God directly—not second hand— when spending time in nature.

Transcendentalist Principles Society, conformity, and tradition often prevents people from reaching a higher spiritual level.

Transcendentalist Principles The structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the individual self. All knowledge, therefore, begins with self- knowledge. This is similar to the Ancient Greek aphorism: "know thyself."

The Transcendentalists… argued fiercely for the end of slavery sought to improve public education, women’s rights, and help for the mentally ill

The Transcendentalists…were IDEALISTS formed experimental utopian groups— such as Brook farm—with the hope of creating a more perfect society. Brook Farm--home to a utopian community in Boston

The Transcendentalists…were IDEALISTS