It also appeals to anybody with an ounce of contrarianism,” said Buell, who loves Thoreau’s line: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”īuell’s first encounter with Thoreau marked the beginning of a lifelong interest in the naturalist writer and in Transcendentalism, the philosophical and social movement that promoted “the notion of the god within, or the unlimited power of the individual.” “Thoreau’s outspokenness appeals to the adolescent mind. Standing in a small hillside clearing near the railroad tracks that still hum with trains, with a view through the trees of the famous kettle pond immortalized by the book that bears its name, Buell recalled how Thoreau’s personal narrative, his love of the landscape, and his trademark candor and wit struck a deep chord. “I was a country boy growing up in a place west of Philadelphia that was becoming engulfed by suburbia,” said Buell during a visit to the famous pond and woods where Thoreau lived in a rough cabin for two years in the 1840s and where “Walden” took shape. Buell was 17 and on the edge of manhood, challenging assumptions, questioning authority, and watching with dismay - as Thoreau did in his beloved Concord - as the modern world encroached on his home. Lawrence Buell was a teenager when he first read “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau’s homage to simple living and the wonders of nature.
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