Thoreau Farm

Last week in my introductory post, I suggested (only half jokingly) that I launched this blog “because I wished to blog deliberately.” Don’t worry, I’m not really going to write a Walden parody — for one thing, the competition is too intimidating; how could I top this? But I’ve been thinking that I should say a few more specific things about what I’m planning to do here (you know, just to “manage expectations,” as they say), and what it might actually mean to blog deliberately. Continue reading →

First, a big, sincere thanks to everyone who came out for Vivian Gornick yesterday and made our first Thoreau Farm Forum a great success. We had a very nice turnout, a highly engaged audience, and of course a famously engaging speaker (and topic!). Continue reading →

“The most alive is the wildest,” Thoreau wrote. I couldn’t help thinking of that line as I read the first pages of Vivian Gornick’s Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life, the book she’ll be reading from and discussing at our first Thoreau Farm Forum at Concord Academy this Sunday. Read Gornick’s opening paragraph, and you’ll see what I mean. It draws a bead on Thoreau’s idea of wildness as something within — something he wanted to liberate. She writes: Continue reading →