Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of July 12th
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It is the 193rd day of the year, leaving 172 days remaining in 2022.
He told his stories after careful thought and study, spending years living, thinking, and observing life and nature. He spent two years living in a cabin in the woods at Walden Pond in preparation for his best known work, Walden, in which he pondered a simple, unadorned life.
He also wrote Resistance to Civil Government, a pamphlet expressing his belief that citizens have a duty to resist governments that overstep their authority and intrude on issues dealing with personal conscience. It was partially based on his lifelong opposition to slavery and his objection to the government's action involving the Mexican War.
Along with a contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau was one of the founders of transcendentalism, a literary movement and philosophy of the 19th Century. It celebrated the individual over the group, emotion over reason, and nature over man. Its essence may be summed up by this line from 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.
Thoreau's ideas were not universally accepted when he proposed them some 170 years ago, yet they remain debated, beloved and ridiculed today.
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