Solitude and Thoreau, Trancentdentalism
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.± Transcendentalism, according to www. Dictionary.com, means a literary and philosophical movement, associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition. Transcendentalists believed that there is knowledge beyond what humans can see, hear, feel, smell, touch, and taste. Their theories were based on the philosophy of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. One of the theories they believed was the idea of solitude. It was an important theme to Emerson and Thoreau and both practiced and wrote about the importance of solitude in every persons life. Thoreau stayed in Staten Island for one year to tutor Ralph Waldo Emerson's children and when he returned from this experience, he built a small cottage on Emerson's estate next to Walden Pond. He lived in this cottage for two years in complete solitude. Thoreau thought of solitude as necessary to every per
Emerson believed that people need to be individual, both intellectually and spiritually. Both had periods where they left it all and lived alone. Until someone is independent, it was not possible to be self reliant. Among the moral truths are beauty, virtue, and love. Both Emerson and Thoreau demonstrate in their lives and also in their writing how important solitude is to achieve personal happiness. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. Kant gave Transcendentalists a base, a place to start from. The idea of solitude is one of these ideas. In 1847, Emerson left the states and went to France while Thoreau watched over his family. He wanted the United States to be self reliant. During Thoreau's two year stay at Walden, he wrote a book that today is considered a classic. Transcendentalism was a bunch of ideas that a group of people came up with. There hadn't been a great American writer or poet yet.
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