“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”
– Thoreau, Walden
May 30, 1849: Henry David Thoreau self-published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, his first book that was about a boating trip he had taken with his brother, John. The trip had been 10 years earlier. They had gone from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and back.
I spent most of Memorial Day weekend in my garden. Sort of in nature but not the “wildness” Thoreau wrote about.
“Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
If you know Thoreau, it is probably for his book Walden. That comes later and in fact, it took him almost 10 years after his living-in-the-woods experiment to write that book. While he was in that little cabin by Walden Pond, he did the first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The journal he kept while in the woods would form the basis of the Walden book.
That is a book I believe I read – or was assigned to read – many years ago in college. I barely remember it, but I saw a blog post this week about it. Maybe I should give it another try.
John died of tetanus in 1842 and Thoreau wrote A Week… at least partly as a tribute to his brother. Some critics have thought that living alone in the woods was a way of reacting to losing John.
The brothers were quite different. Henry was introverted and studious. John was gregarious and fun-loving. But they were close; John helped pay Henry’s tuition to Harvard. John helped Henry open his own school when he got fired from his teaching job over his objection to corporal punishment.
It was only a few years after their boat trip that John died in his brother’s arms, unexpectedly, from tetanus.
His manuscript of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was initially rejected by publishers, so Thoreau was only able to publish it by paying for its printing. Four years later, after paying off the printing debt, Thoreau wrote in his journal that his publisher had delivered the remaining unsold copies to his home. He wrote, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes – over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”
, he imagines what Einstein may have been dreaming about in Bern, Switzerland before he published his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905. I have had a fascination with Einstein ever since I was a teenager. I first came to him because he seemed connected to an earlier fascination with the possibility of time travel.
describes the dreams which occur between April 14, 1905, and June 28, 1905. Of course, all of it is pure imagination. There is science in the imagined worlds. People’s lives are based on time being circular or flowing backward, or slowing down. The project Einstein was working on concerned electricity and magnetism, but the solution required a reconception of time. When the book opens, Einstein has finished with his new theory of time and, while he waits a few hours for a typist in his patent office, he thinks of his dreams.
. I probably read the Classics Illustrated comics version before I read the novel. I had boxes of discarded electronics and machines in my basement that I had culled on garbage collection days. I loved playing with the gears, knobs, and circuit boards. I learned some things along the way, got some nasty shocks, and burned myself on my soldering iron, but I never did get a working time machine. Many years later, watching the movie E.T., I watched that alien build his communicator using kids’ toys in that same ridiculously easy way I had hoped would work.
Weekends in Paradelle 