Results by title

Henry David Thoreau is celebrated as one of America's greatest nature writers, yet few readers are aware of the tender, perceptive, and often humorous attention he gave to the animals closest to human domestic life. Bonds of Affection: Thoreau on Dogs and Cats gathers the finest of Thoreau's own writings in which he turns his unflinching powers of observation and his characteristic philosophical wit toward our oldest animal companions.

In these pages, Thoreau emerges not merely as a solitary sojourner in the wild, but as a keen and affectionate chronicler of the relationships between people and the animals who share their lives. Whether tracking the behavior of a neighborhood dog, or meditating on the inscrutable self-possession of a cat, Thoreau reveals the depth of feeling and moral seriousness he believed we owe to all living creatures. His observations are sometimes wry, sometimes lyrical, and always charged with his conviction that an attentive life demands that we see the world through eyes other than our own.

Beautifully complemented by original engravings from celebrated artist Barry Moser and framed by a foreword from bestselling animal author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, this elegantly produced volume is both a delight for lovers of Thoreau and an essential companion for anyone who has ever shared their home—and their heart—with a dog or a cat.

Published in cooperation with the Thoreau Society, Bonds of Affection introduces readers to a Thoreau who is at once familiar and surprising: playful and profound, grounded in the everyday, and alive to the wonder of the natural and domestic world alike.

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Today that book continues to provoke, inspire, and change lives all over the world, and each rereading is fresh and challenging. Yet as Thoreau's countless admirers know, there is more to the man than Walden. An engineer, poet, teacher, naturalist, lecturer, and political activist, he truly had multiple lives to lead, and each one speaks forcefully to us today.

Sponsored by the Thoreau Society, the brief, handsomely presented books in this series offer the thoughts of a great writer on a variety of topics, some that we readily associate with him, some that may be surprising. Each volume includes selections from his familiar published works as well as from less well known lectures, letters, and journal entries. The books include original engravings by renowned illustrator and book artist Barry Moser.

Seeing to See focuses on two American authors who are notoriously hard to classify: Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau. Dickinson proves challenging due to her short and obscure poems and Thoreau due to his insistence on capturing even the most seemingly mundane information. Daniel A. Nelson uncovers evidence that the works of these authors are often intentionally and painstakingly without aim or purpose. He argues that in their texts there is in fact an avoidance of teleological structures of writing and thinking, whereby a thing’s—or a word’s, or a text’s—value hinges on its relation to the world or other contexts.

In Nelson’s reading, Thoreau and Dickinson seem to be able to set aside all thought of distinct personal and professional goals, through which readers typically try to make an overarching sense out of, and to derive some form of profit from, disparate experiences, events, actions, and feelings. Further, both authors seem to be able to get outside of the worldview according to which the value and meaning of something, be it a natural object, a word, or an experience, is a function of its participation in a larger system. Examples of such systems include an ecosystem, taxonomic system, or syntactic system; a writer’s career, or life, or philosophy; even a single poem or journal entry. In the absence of such connections to broader categorical spheres, both writers force readers to contemplate the ineffable, constantly changing relation between words and the natural world. This contemporary reading of two iconic writers reframes their work and how readers think of nature, accepting, as these authors did, the potential freedom of the unknown.