Cape Cod Henry David Thoreau

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.Table of ContentsTitle PageCopyright PageIntroductionI - THE SHIPWRECKII - STAGE-COACH VIEWSIII - THE PLAINS OF NAUSETIV - THE BEACHV - THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMANVI - THE BEACH AGAINVII - ACROSS THE CAPEVIII - THE HIGHLAND LIGHTIX - THE SEA AND THE DESERTX - PROVINCETOWNPENGUIN NATURE CLASSICS Series Editor: Edward HoaglandCAPE CODHenry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817.He graduated from Harvard in 1837, the same year he began his lifelong Journal.Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau became a key member of the Transcendentalist movement that included Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott.The Transcendentalists’ faith in nature was tested by Thoreau between 1845 and 1847, when he lived for twenty-six months in a home-made hut at Walden Pond.While living at Walden, Thoreau worked on the two books published during his lifetime: Walden (1854) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).Several of his other works, including The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and Excursions, were published posthumously.Thoreau died in Concord, at the age of forty-four, in 1862.Paul Theroux’s books include Saint Jack, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia, Picture Palace, and The Mosquito Coast.PENGUIN BOOKSPublished by the Penguin GroupPenguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, EnglandPenguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,New Delhi — 110 017, IndiaPenguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South AfricaPenguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, EnglandFirst published in the United States of America 1865This edition with an introduction by Paul Theroux firstpublished in Penguin Books 1987Published simultaneously in CanadaIntroduction copyright © Paul Theroux, 1987 All rights reservedLIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATAThoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862.Cape Cod.(The Penguin nature classics)1.Cape Cod (Mass.) — Description and travel.2.Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 — Journeys —Massachusetts — Cape Cod.I.Title.II.Series.F72.C3T.44’92 86-18636eISBN : 978-1-101-17401-2The scanning, uploading and distribution of thisbook via the Internet or via any other means withoutthe permission of the publisher is illegal andpunishable by law.Please purchase only authorizedelectronic editions, and do not participate in or encourageelectronic piracy of copyrighted materials.Yoursupport of the author’s rights is appreciated.http://us.penguingroup.comNature is our widest home.It includes the oceans that provide our rain, the trees that give us air to breathe, the ancestral habitats we shared with countless kinds of animals that now exist only by our sufferance or under our heel.Until quite recently, indeed (as such things go), the whole world was a wilderness in which mankind lived as cannily as deer, overmastering with spears or snares even their woodsmanship and that of other creatures, finding a path wherever wildlife could go.Nature was the central theater of life for everybody’s ancestors, not a hideaway where people went to rest and recharge after a hard stint in an urban or suburban arena.Many of us still do hike, swim, fish, birdwatch, sleep on the ground or paddle a boat on vacation, and will loll like a lizard in the sun any other chance we have.We can’t help grinning for at least a moment at the sight of surf, or sunlight on a river meadow, as if remembering in our mind’s eye paleolithic pleasures in a home before memories officially began.It is a thoughtless grin because nature predates “thought.” Aristotle was a naturalist, and nearer to our own time, Darwin made of the close observation of bits of nature a lever to examine life in many ways on a large scale.Yet nature writing, despite its basis in science, usually rings with rhapsody as well — a belief that nature is an expression of God.In this series we are presenting some nature writers of the past century or so, though leaving out great novelists like Turgenev, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner, who were masters of natural description, and poets, beginning with Homer (who was perhaps the first nature writer, once his words had been transcribed).Nature writing now combines rhapsody with science and connects science with rhapsody, and for that reason it is a very special and a nourishing genre.Edward HoaglandINTRODUCTIONWe are constantly told how normal and honorable Thoreau was, and yet it seems to me that we would get much further in understanding him if we began by conceding that he was an odd fish, full of peculiar conceits.He was a loner, and like many loners he was capable of a kind of horrid humor.I think Henry James was mistaken when he described Thoreau as “imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial — he was parochial.” But the judgment contains a grain of truth.With his irritating self-assurance, no sooner has Thoreau intimated that he is down-to-earth and interested only in the habits of woodchucks than he begins to quote Homer, in Greek, and sometimes at great length (eight Homeric excursions in this little Cape Cod book, for example).He frequently talks of country matters in a way that makes him sound pedantic.Few of his jokes are truly witty.He affects not to like other people or human settlements and can, in saying so, sound misogynistic.He is surprising; he is swiftly persuasive [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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