美国国家公共电台 NPR If Thoreau Were Alive, He'd Be 'Shouting From The Rafters,' Biographer Says

 

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Perhaps no American writer is more associated with a place than Henry David Thoreau. And that, by the way, is the family pronunciation. In 1845, Thoreau went into the woods near Concord¹, Mass., at Walden Pond. He built a small cabin and lived a simple, solitary² life. It's also where he wrote his best-known works, "Walden" and "Civil Disobedience." Thoreau was born 200 years ago today. Reporter Tom Vitale marked the anniversary with a trip to Walden Pond.

TOM VITALE, BYLINE³: It's a sweltering morning as Notre Dame⁴ professor Laura Dassow Walls leads the way through the tall pines on the trail that hugs the shoreline of the 60-acre Walden Pond. Wall says Thoreau spent hours hiking in these woods every day.

LAURA DASSOW WALLS: His writing became uniquely his own style and his own thinking when he figured out that the way to break through into his own way of doing things was to think as he walked. And he started writing down his thoughts as he walked.

VITALE: Walls has spent her lifetime studying Thoreau. Her new 615-page biography is out today to coincide with his 200th birthday. She says he scribbled⁵ notes in pencil on scraps⁶ of paper, descriptions of the sights, sounds, smells and feel of the things around him.

WALLS: To do that is to break the wall between ourselves and nature and to understand that we're always a part of nature and nature's always a part of us. So to be here and to be wholly immersed, to be hot when it's hot and cold when it's cold, to be hearing the birds and feeding the little mouse that lives under his cabin is to completely demolish⁷ that barrier and understand something really fundamental about what it is to be human.

VITALE: A quarter mile down the path, we arrive at a clearing where Thoreau built his 10-by-15-foot cabin. He moved in on Independence Day 1845.

DON HENLEY: Thoreau, when he moved to his little cabin at the pond, you know, he was on a quest for self-discovery, I think. He was declaring his own independence.

VITALE: Don Henley, singer, songwriter and drummer for the rock band The Eagles, says he discovered Thoreau when he was 22 years old in 1969.

HENLEY: And people who were my age in the '60s were on the same quest. "Walden" was a very popular book back then. So I was just seeking spiritually, as Thoreau was, for something to ground me.

VITALE: In 1990, Henley founded the Walden Woods Project. He raised $20 million to purchase 200 acres of wooded land adjacent to Walden Pond so that it couldn't fall into the hands of real estate developers.

HENLEY: In Thoreau's time, he was looking at the Industrial Revolution. And he stood up in the face of the Industrial Revolution and said, wait a minute. We have to slow down. We have to take a look around us and not destroy what's left. You know, his famous quote was, in wildness is the preservation⁸ of the world. You know, it's difficult to be 150 years ahead of your time, but he was.

VITALE: Thoreau was 27 when he moved to Walden Pond to think through his life and also, says biographer Laura Walls, the life of the nation.

WALLS: He thinks something is going deeply wrong with America. And he's trying to figure out, what is the foundational problem that gives rise to such destructive habits and patterns of life that we could imagine it's OK to enslave people?

CHRISTINE NELSON: As we go through Thoreau's journal, he'll be writing about nature. But now and then, he bursts out with an entry full of rage.

VITALE: Christine Nelson is curator of a Thoreau bicentenary exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York City.

NELSON: And, you know, we're looking at one right here from 1851. And he exploded in his journal. Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of prejudice?

VITALE: The Morgan exhibition includes of the author's handwritten journals along with artifacts from his life.

NELSON: Yeah. We're actually looking, amazingly enough, at the very lock from the jail cell where Thoreau was confined for a night.

VITALE: For refusing to pay his taxes to a government that sanctioned slavery and waged what he considered an illegal war against Mexico. The experience inspired his essay "Civil Disobedience." It's a tract⁹ urging nonviolent resistance to unjust laws that later influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Kevin Dann is author of another new Thoreau biography called "Expect Great Things." Dan says Thoreau's overriding¹⁰ theme of the sovereignty of the individual is why he's more relevant now than ever.

KEVIN DANN: You know, the brutality¹¹ of the police in this country and the surveillance systems - everybody in this country is afraid. If he were alive today, he would have been out there, shouting from the rafters. People, go into the streets. You have no sovereignty anymore. It's gone. It is gone.

VITALE: Back at Walden Pond, Notre Dame professor Laura Dassow Walls points to a sign next to the site where Thoreau built this cabin.

WALLS: And it reads, I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately¹², 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.

VITALE: Henry David Thoreau died from tuberculosis¹³ in 1862. He was just 44 years old. For NPR News, I'm Tom Vitale.

1 concord   

n.和谐；协调

参考例句：

• These states had lived in concord for centuries.这些国家几个世纪以来一直和睦相处。
• His speech did nothing for racial concord.他的讲话对种族和谐没有作用。

2 solitary   

adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士

参考例句：

• I am rather fond of a solitary stroll in the country.我颇喜欢在乡间独自徜徉。
• The castle rises in solitary splendour on the fringe of the desert.这座城堡巍然耸立在沙漠的边际，显得十分壮美。

3 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

4 dame   

n.女士

参考例句：

• The dame tell of her experience as a wife and mother.这位年长妇女讲了她作妻子和母亲的经验。
• If you stick around,you'll have to marry that dame.如果再逗留多一会，你就要跟那个夫人结婚。

5 scribbled   

v.潦草的书写( scribble的过去式和过去分词 )；乱画；草草地写；匆匆记下

参考例句：

• She scribbled his phone number on a scrap of paper. 她把他的电话号码匆匆写在一张小纸片上。
• He scribbled a note to his sister before leaving. 临行前，他给妹妹草草写了一封短信。

6 scraps   

油渣

参考例句：

• Don't litter up the floor with scraps of paper. 不要在地板上乱扔纸屑。
• A patchwork quilt is a good way of using up scraps of material. 做杂拼花布棉被是利用零碎布料的好办法。

7 demolish   

v.拆毁(建筑物等)，推翻(计划、制度等)

参考例句：

• They're going to demolish that old building.他们将拆毁那座旧建筑物。
• He was helping to demolish an underground garage when part of the roof collapsed.他当时正在帮忙拆除一个地下汽车库，屋顶的一部份突然倒塌。

8 preservation   

n.保护，维护，保存，保留，保持

参考例句：

• The police are responsible for the preservation of law and order.警察负责维持法律与秩序。
• The picture is in an excellent state of preservation.这幅画保存得极为完好。

9 tract   

n.传单，小册子，大片(土地或森林)

参考例句：

• He owns a large tract of forest.他拥有一大片森林。
• He wrote a tract on this subject.他曾对此写了一篇短文。

10 overriding   

a.最主要的

参考例句：

• Development is of overriding importance. 发展是硬道理
• My overriding concern is to raise the standards of state education. 我最关心的是提高国民教育水平。

11 brutality   

n.野蛮的行为，残忍，野蛮

参考例句：

• The brutality of the crime has appalled the public. 罪行之残暴使公众大为震惊。
• a general who was infamous for his brutality 因残忍而恶名昭彰的将军

12 deliberately   

adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地

参考例句：

• The girl gave the show away deliberately.女孩故意泄露秘密。
• They deliberately shifted off the argument.他们故意回避这个论点。

13 tuberculosis   

n.结核病，肺结核

参考例句：

• People used to go to special health spring to recover from tuberculosis.人们常去温泉疗养胜地治疗肺结核。
• Tuberculosis is a curable disease.肺结核是一种可治愈的病。