Literature of Place

Essays by Thoreau and Emerson
Thoreau and Emerson Links
Transcendentalism Defined
Excerpts from Thoreau’s 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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.


Walden Pond State Reservation
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Model of Thoreau's Cabin

Walden e-text and Various Thoreau Links

Annie Dillard - Living Like Weasels and Write Till You Drop


Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It
A Literature of Place - Barry Lopez
Nature writing is not about nature, says the author--it is about the removal of nature from our lives and communities, it is about morality, it is about the immense power of place in forming character and hope.
Engagement - Terry Tempest Williams
With a foreign policy run amok, the coming election offers a chance to question the simplistic view that what is good for business is good for humanity.
Top Ten Reasons: Why we'll always need a good story - Scott Russell Sanders
We have been telling stories to one another for a long time, perhaps for as long as we have been using language, and we have been using language, I suspect, for as long as we have been human. In all its guises, from words spoken and written to pictures and musical notes and mathematical symbols, language is our distinguishing gift, our hallmark as a species.
Our Land, Our Literature: Literature - Scott Russell Sanders
And then there's Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire, a video clip, and