A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Paperback)

Paperback. Thoreau's Week shared many themes with his classic Walden- self-renewal in nature, the spiritual meanings of perception, and the shallowness of contemporary culture, religion, and politics. But while Walden portrays a pastoral life essentially impervious to time, A Week dramatizes change and the inevitability of loss. The loss that implicitly informs the narrative, deepening its elegiac treatment of New England's past, is the tragic death of Thoreau's brother, John, only three years after the journey. Yet, through the classic structure of departure and return, Thoreau imaginatively redeems both his personal and historical losses, as he voyages upon the stream of time. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an account of a boat trip Thoreau took in 1839, is a finely crafted tapestry of travel writing, essays, and lyrical poetry. Alternating between observation and reflection, Thoreau interweaves day-by-day descriptions of natural phenomenon, the rural landscape, and local characters with digressions on literature and philosophy, the Native American and Puritan histories of New England, the Bhagavad-Gita, the imperfections of Christianity, and many other subjects. An invaluable companion to Walden, it stands alone as one of the most remarkable literary achievements of the nineteenth century. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…