Monday

Chapter 3 READING

Reading literature is the closest thing to live.

Reading great books requires training such training as athletes undergo.

Nothing truly can be translated.

"Most men have learned to read to serve paltry convenience, as they learned to ciper in order to keep accounts... but reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a higher sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury .. but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to."

"The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers."

"I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannont read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects."

"We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment."

Chapter 4 - "Sounds"

This is a strange, but poetic chapter that focuses on the sounds that Thoreau hears when living at Walden (and how the sounds make him feel).  There is this idea of Thoreau's that most of humanity doesn't quite listen to its soundings.  To be in-tune with the place you live is - in part - to listen closely to it, to hear it, and perhaps to respond to what you hear.

Micah has too really good dialectical journals on this chapter:

#16: "Much is published, but little is printed" p. 108

By published, Thoreau means made public, as in, anyone can observe/hear. There are so many sounds and things of that nature that are able to be observed, each with their own meaning and cause, but very few care to listen, and fewer still, care to write them down. This continues the thought that man uses nature only for what it can get out of it, and tries its best to remove itself from it. Mankind in general doesn't care about the chirping of a bird, or the chirping of crickets. When they do care, it is as an annoyance, a reminder of the world they seek to leave behind by becoming civilized.

#17: The train

In the 'Sounds' chapter, Thoreau goes to great lengths to personify the train that he talks about. How it perspires steam, how it must put on snow shoes, etc. This is done because in a way, the train represents a concentration of what makes humans terrible, at least to Thoreau. They are cold, calculated, used to transport things from one end of the world to another, all the while cutting surgically precise lines through the wilderness that Thoreau believes greater than man. It is a machine made for business, and the making of money on the backs of those who are too lazy and too luxurious to get what they need from the land around them.

"I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe." (116)

"Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling.   I am more alone than ever.  For the rest of the afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway."  (119)