![]() ![]() ![]() The actions of his life, though not apparently earth-shaking, reflect Thoreau’s self-integrity. He expressed these views both lyrically and plainly in the two books published during his lifetime-A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1848) and Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)-in the lectures he gave from Boston to Bangor, Maine in his published essays, including “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) (later retitled “Civil Disobedience”) and in the personal journals he started at Emerson’s urging, kept throughout his life, and that filled twenty volumes when published after his death. ![]() Thoreau distills philosophical thought-such as Transcendentalism- and objective, sensory, scientific collection of concrete facts-such as Darwin claimed as his methodology-into a unique expression of integration: of self with nature, of self with culture, of culture with nature. When such external institutions as the church and the government divert the individual from the overarching unity of themselves and nature, then Thoreau thought the individual should prefer integrity over conformity. For Thoreau, nature has subjective value and meaning and shapes not only the body but also the mind and spirit. ![]() By realizing self-unity and being true to his individual self, he sought to realize his true selfhood as an organically-rendered microcosm of the macrocosm that is the world in nature. Henry David Thoreau sought to live an essentialist life, one devoid of the unnatural excrescences loaded upon individuals by society and societal institutions. ![]()
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