Journal 02, 1850-September 15, 1851
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 2 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~140,000 words · 658 passages
Cite this work
- APAHenry David Thoreau. (n.d.). Journal 02, 1850-September 15, 1851. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/journal-02-1850-september-15-1851
- MLAHenry David Thoreau. "Journal 02, 1850-September 15, 1851." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/journal-02-1850-september-15-1851.
- ChicagoHenry David Thoreau. Journal 02, 1850-September 15, 1851. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/journal-02-1850-september-15-1851.
What it is about
The second volume of Thoreau's journal: a little over a year, after Walden, when the journal becomes his main work.
Context and history
Thoreau's journal is his real work, and very few people know it. He kept it for twenty-four years, from the age of twenty until nearly his death, and it runs to some two million words: more than ten times everything he published in his lifetime. It is not an intimate diary nor a notebook of jottings: it is a daily record of what he saw — what day each plant flowered, when the pond froze, which bird returned and when — mixed with philosophical thinking and with pages of prose among the best he wrote. His books come out of it; this is the material of which 'Walden' is a distillation. The botanical and ice records he kept for decades are being used today to measure climate change, which he could not have foreseen. NOTE: the catalogue holds two volumes of the journal, not the whole of it.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The Hindoos are more serenely and thoughtfully religious than the Hebrews. They have perhaps a purer, more independent and impersonal knowledge of God. Their religious books describe the first inquisitive and contemplative access to God; the Hebrew bible a conscientious return, a grosser and more personal repentance. Repentance is not a free and fair highway to God. A wise man will dispense with repentance. It is shocking and passionate. God prefers that you approach him thoughtful, not penitent, though you are the chief of sinners. It is only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to him. * * * * * The calmness and gentleness with which the Hindoo philosophers approach and discourse on forbidden themes is admirable. What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like the light of a higher and purer luminary, which describes a loftier course through a purer stratum,—free from particulars, simple, universal. It rises on me like the full moon after the stars have come out, wading through some far summer stratum of the sky. The Vedant teaches how, “by forsaking religious rites,” the votary may “obtain purification of mind.” One wise sentence is worth the state of Massachusetts many times over. The Vedas contain a sensible account of God. The religion and philosophy of the Hebrews are those of a wilder and ruder tribe, wanting the civility and intellectual refinements and subtlety of the Hindoos. * * * * * Man flows at once to God as soon as the channel of purity, physical, intellectual, and moral, is open. * * * * * With the Hindoos virtue is an intellectual exercise, not a social and practical one. It is a knowing, not a doing. * * * * * I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another. I have no sympathy with the bigotry and ignora