HD THOREAU. Quotes and comments about Holland Cotter


Holland Cotter, in  “Lessons in Constructive Solitude" observes that  Thoreau used his self-quarantine at Walden, to pursue an intensive course in self education.  In the present pandemic moment, there’s plenty to learn from standing still.” //

An intensive course in self education:  “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”  The list he compiled was long, ambitious and culturally far – readhing, stretching from Classical Greece to Vedic India”…I would add, China. Many studies have been done on Thoreau in China…I traced his Chinese references while living there.

  “In a letter to a friend he wrote: “The Yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things.  To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.”  He made his life at Walden one of those intervals.”  

Cotter goes on to say, “(Interestingly, during the present lockdown, several of my friends have returned to a practice of meditation that their prepandemic lives left little time for).  …immersion with animals, Nature…for “Thoreau, Nature was a communicating consciousness, and he wanted to make himself available to it, antennas raised.  Full receptivity required removal from ego-driven clamor, which was how, in his most stressed moments, he viewed human discourse.”

Cotter observes, “He (Thoreau)knew what his view was up against; among other things, America’s antsy addiction to distraction and its led by the nose corporation fed faith in utopian technology.  “  He quotes Thoreau, “We must first succeed alone, that we may enjoy our success together….

”Civil Disobedience”…”I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.  Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to life, and could not spare any more time for that one.” 

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