Book description
In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved from his parents' house in
Concord, Massachusetts, to a one-room cabin on land owned by his
mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. After 26 months he transformed his stay
in the woods into one of the most famous events in American history.
In Walden x 40, adopting Thoreau's own compositional method, Robert B.
Ray takes up several questions posed in Walden. Thoreau developed his
books from his lectures, and his lectures from his almost-daily
journal notations of the world around him, with its fluctuating
weather and appointed seasons, both forever familiar and suddenly
brand new. Ray derives his 40 brief essays from the details of Walden
itself, reading the book in the way that Thoreau proposed to explore
his own life-deliberately. Ray demonstrates that however accustomed we
have grown to its lessons, Walden continues to be as surprising as the
November snowfall that, Thoreau reports, "covered the ground...
and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter."
"The essays often return to the same quotations and ideas,
illuminating Walden's darker, more obscure passages from various
philosophical and theoretical perspectives-thought experiments that
read like a thick layering of superimposed snapshots that Ray has
taken from different angles of Walden's pages.... Ray's collection of
readings never resolve themselves into a single argument, always
teetering on the brink of explanation. Yet its evasive technique may
be Walden x 40's greatest charm, pointing the reader back to Walden
itself so that she might engage in her own interrogations."
-Times Literary Supplement
Robert B. Ray is Professor of English at the University of
Florida. He is author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema,
1930-1980; The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy; How a Film Theory Got
Lost (IUP, 2001); and The ABCs of Classic Hollywood.
