ABSTRACT
Thoreau, Henry David is undoubtedly available to broader variety of sensibility than Socrates: groundskeeper and Harvard man, confrere of Emerson who devised very good pencil—credentials, it seems, to the most contemporary embassies of speculative or applied reason. Writing, for Thoreau, enlarging the elements, was not a description of his encounter with the world; it was itself a moment in the encounter. In fact, of course, Thoreau takes time seriously—more seriously than those around him who approach it only to mark it or to pass it. To “spend a day deliberately as nature” could be wasteful only to someone for whom nothing is ever preserved—held in fief, perhaps, but not saved. Thoreau, pointing this moral, must surely be an annoyance to any state: no one, and bodies politic less so than most, cherishes reminders of mortality. But then it is true for all the efforts of the gadfly that irritation which follows its sting is symptomatic, and not only of healing.
