A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

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1. yesenadamFeb 2019
   The sequel, Lila, is also really great. He's worked out the structure of Quality, in detail, and it makes a lot of sense. p.s. If you love Pirsig, read Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) - the form is identical.
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2. ctrlpJun 2017
   I'm verklempt at the joy of having discovered Thoreau in mid-life. Like many American students, I read Civil Disobedience and Walden in high school and then forgot all about either. Maybe I even absorbed some of the atmospheric disregard for these works. In the past few years, I read all of Dickinson (what a genius), and then all of Emerson's published writing. And, then picked up Thoreau last year. And I haven't been able to put him aside. Walden, all his essays, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, his Cape Cod and Maine travelogues, now deep into his journals and letters. Thoreau -- Henry! -- is like this amazing friend. I can hardly imagine anyone who has dismissed him has spent any serious time with him. I have marked thousands of thoughts in his writings as beautiful, profound, puzzling, delightful, or surprising. He's much funnier than most people realize. He had a genius for "the examined life". I really cannot conceive who would be so arrogant as to judge such a person negatively. His prose _is_ American English at its best. I can't really care too much about the posted article but can't resist evangelizing my beautiful friend. If you love to read, read Thoreau.
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3. troutwineDec 2016
   I think "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" is both charming and funny. The book is a view into the very early industrialization of the United States, as framed by two brothers taking a boat trip. I also recommend "Civil Disobedience", an essay which proposes a program of peaceful, active resistance to unjust government. This essay inspired both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Choice quotes:

   > I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.

   > There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today?

   Walden is often recommended but can seem a little out of context in a world that has industrialized and tends toward bowling alone. Even so, it's worth understanding Walden for the perspective Thoreau puts forward concerning the usefulness of inventions and their reflection on and in communities.

   > As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey.

   A much shorter read in the same vein–and without all the digressions about the economics of farming beans–is "Life Without Principle". I recommend reading that first over Walden as something of a primer. By the time of Life Without Principle Thoreau was giving public lectures and had gotten better at shorter arguments (though he likely felt that to-the-point declarations were not the path to wisdom but that a round-about argument which required quiet contemplation while walking was).

   > Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free. We tax ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us which is not represented. It is taxation without representation. We quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. We quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter's substance.

   Thoreau was eccentric but purposefully. He's one of America's great philosophers and well worth reading.

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4. cafardApr 2024
   No one bought books. If one can believe Edward Dahberg, the first run of Thus Spake Zarathusra sold ten copies, the first run of Stendhal's On Love, seventeen copies. That considered, Thoreau selling just more than 200 of the first printing of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers appears as a raging success--but he had many literate friends.

   Simon Leys, in the essay "Readers' Rewards and Writers' Rewards", quotes the French writer, and sometime publisher, Jacques Chardonne as saying that "Any good book will find 3,000 readers, no more no less." Leys goes on to say the number hasn't varied significantly in last 400 years. (Collected in The Hall of Uselessness)

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5. yesenadamNov 2018
   It's a short excerpt from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

   I clicked the link thinking it wasn't that. Because I know and love that book. For those that haven't read the sequel Lila, I highly recommend it also. It goes into what Quality actually is in enormous detail, how it works, the different types and levels. While ZAMM is typically concerned with relatively simple systems (like a motorbike) and how humans interact with them, Lila is more the biological, social, societal systems humans are a part of, anthropology/anthropologists trying to study them, and how those systems work, how each has its own Quality.. (long story!)

   A few years ago I read Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and was immediately struck by, well, the form is exactly the same as Pirsig's books - nature/observation writing interspersed with slabs of philosophical/theoretical. Lila is even mostly set on a boat going down a river also. Thoreau probably does both styles better, but Pirsig has a focused theme - 'has something to say'. So if you like Pirsig, you'll love Thoreau's travel books.

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6. qnttyNov 2016
   It would probably be fair to call Henry “aimless.” After he graduated from Harvard, he moved back in with his parents, a boomerang kid straight out of a trend piece about the travails of young adults.

   Despite graduating into a recession, Henry managed to land a teaching job, but two weeks in, he decided it wasn’t for him and quit. It took him a while to find his calling—he worked in his father’s pencil factory, as a door-to-door magazine salesman, took on other teaching and tutoring gigs, and even spent a brief stint shoveling manure before finding some success with his true passion: writing.

   Henry published his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, when he was 31 years old, after 12 years of changing jobs and bouncing back and forth between his parents’ home, living on his own, and crashing with a buddy, who believed in his potential. “[He] is a scholar & a poet & as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree,” his friend wrote, and eventually was proven right. He may have floundered during young adulthood, but Henry David Thoreau turned out pretty okay. (The buddy he crashed with, for the record, was Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

   http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/when-are-y...

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