...in 1846, Henry David Thoreau left his cabin at Walden Pond for
a brief walk into town and ended up in the Concord jail for refusing to
pay his poll tax. A fervent abolitionist, Thoreau explained, "I cannot
for an instant recognize . . . as my government [that] which is the slave's
government also." The next morning, he learned that someone had paid
the tax. He never knew who. Although Thoreau objected, the constable
insisted on releasing him. This experience led him to write a powerful
lecture on the "relation of the individual to the State." The lecture
was published in 1849 as "Resistance to Civil Government," and is now
known as "Civil Disobedience." This masterful essay has influenced
generations of activists, including Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr.
Henry David Thoreau was on an errand in town when he encountered Sam
Staples, the Concord constable, tax collector, and jailer. Staples took
the opportunity to ask Thoreau to pay his back taxes. The
independent-minded, highly principled naturalist refused, and Staples
politely escorted him to jail.
"The best
place for each is where he stands," Thoreau once wrote. When he found
himself incarcerated, he took full advantage of the new experience.
Fascinated, he "pumped" his cellmate for "the history of the various
occupants of that room [and] found that even here there was a history
and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail." The
next morning, his fellow-prisoner was sent "to work at haying in a
neighboring field," while Thoreau was told he must leave the jail.
It
was not the brevity of his stay that angered him but the interference
with his act of conscience and the fuss it caused. For the past six
years, he had refused to pay the poll tax (imposed on all males 20 to 70
years old) to protest the institution of slavery. To his great
annoyance during his short stay in jail, someone paid it for him.
His
mother and sisters were active in the Women's Anti-Slavery Society of
Concord, founded in 1837, and he had long been involved in the
anti-slavery movement, but he preferred to protest through individual
action. His family sheltered a number of fugitive slaves, and he would
escort them to the next safe house or to an out-of-the-way train
station. He delivered powerful lectures against slavery. And he withheld
his taxes.
As he later wrote in "Civil
Disobedience," he believed "it is not a man's duty, as a matter of
course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most
enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him;
but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and . . . not to
give it practically his support."
Henry
David Thoreau always had "other concerns to engage him." Born in Concord
on July 12, 1817, he attended school there, and except for short trips,
primarily in New England, rarely left the town he described as "the
most estimable place in all the world." After graduating from Harvard in
1837, he taught school for three years and then joined his father at
the family pencil factory.
Exceptionally practical
and resourceful, Thoreau improved pencil lead by baking the graphite
mixture into cylinders and invented a machine that drilled a hole in the
wood so the lead cylinder could simply be slipped in. John Thoreau
& Company pencils were considered the best on the market. But once
Henry had mastered the problem, he moved on. Life, he declared, "is too
valuable to put into lead-pencils."
Having never married, Henry
Thoreau could choose not "to keep pace with his companions," and,
indeed, he heeded "a different drummer." He kept his needs simple. Other
than a rowboat and his books, he owned almost nothing. He boarded
mostly with his family, and on several occasions, with the Emersons.
When he ran out of money, he took a paid job until he was flush again.
He could always find work as a surveyor, and he was a skilled carpenter.
"He chose to be rich," wrote his friend
Emerson, "by making his wants few and supplying them himself."
On
July 4, 1845, Thoreau moved into the one-room cabin he had built on
land Emerson owned on the shores of Walden Pond. "I went to the woods,"
he wrote, "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."
In
the months that followed, he worked in his two-and-a-half-acre
vegetable garden, rowed his boat, and observed the smallest details of
nature around him. He read, walked, and wrote
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and the first of seven drafts of
Walden.
He received visitors often and was himself a frequent dinner guest at
his parents' or friends' homes. Besides his one-night stay in jail, his
time at Walden was interrupted by a trip north into the Maine forests.
Then
two years, two months, and two days after he had moved to Walden,
Thoreau "left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it
seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare
any more time for that one."
Walden, or, Life in the Woods was published on August 9, 1854. Unlike his first book,
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which sold poorly, sales of
Walden
were strong from the start. With the exception of a three-year period
(1859-1862), the book has never been out of print. It has been
translated into almost every language and has sold tens of millions of
copies.
Henry David Thoreau was an original thinker and a
gifted writer, who produced an extraordinary body of work — journals,
essays, poetry, and books. He was also a magnificent naturalist. Taking a
walk with him, Emerson remembered, was like walking with an
encyclopedia. Thoreau recognized every animal track, every wildflower,
and every bird call. He died of tuberculosis in 1862 at the age of 44
and is buried on Authors' Ridge at Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
Sources
The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau,ed. by Joel Myerson (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Concord: Stories to Be Told, by Liz Nelson (Commonwealth Editions, 2002).
The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography, by Walter Harding (Princeton University Press, 1982).
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau with Biographical Sketch, by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Houghton
KORCE-
Sezoni turistik i verës në qytetin e Korçës ka vijuar me festën e
lakrorit duke tërhequr vëmendjen e qindra turistëve. Për të pestin vit
me radhë festa e lakrorit me dy petë dhe e pjekur në saç është zhvilluar
në Korçë për të ekspozuar traditën e hershme të qytetit juglindor,
ndërsa e ka kthyer Korçën në një arenë të madhe festive. Kështu, mbrëmja
e së shtunës, e nisur pikërisht në orën 19:00, mblodhi në ambientet e
parkut "Rinia" të qytetit të Korçës qindra banorë, vizitorë, por edhe
turistë të huaj.
A
youth was hunting in the mountains. An eagle flying above him set down
on top of a crag. The eagle was especially large and had a snake in its beak. After a while, the eagle flew away from the crag where it had its
nest. The youth then climbed to the top of the crag where he saw, in
the nest, an eaglet playing with the dead snake. But the snake wasn't
really dead! Suddenly it stirred, revealed its fangs and was ready to
pierce the eaglet with its deadly venom. Quickly, the youth took out his
bow and arrow and killed the snake. Then he took the eaglet and started
for his home. Suddenly the youth heard above him the loud whirring
sound of the large eagle's wings.
Kevin
Walsh, a native of county Meath, arrived in Boston excited to search
for his “dream job” on the IIIC J-1 IWT visa program. He had a Masters
Degree in International Trade and Finance from Leeds Metropolitan
University. 
We are delighted to welcome new 
This
year's Excellence Awards were presented as part of 2012 Nonprofit
Awareness Day, organized by the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network to
celebrate the critical work of the nonprofit sector across the
commonwealth.
