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 ever . . .
Transcendentalism, for Kant, was simply the idea that there were senses beyond the concrete senses. ¡± -Henry David Thoreau Today many people think of being alone as something boring, or a waste of time. Both Emerson and Thoreau demonstrate in their lives and also in their writing how important solitude is to achieve personal happiness. Soon enough, Walt Whitman came along. When Thoreau talked about solitude and transcendentalism , I don¡¯t think he necessarily meant that everyone should go live by a pond for two years. We have finally achieved what Emerson wanted us to achieve and America is independent from Britain. Emerson believed that people need to be individual, both intellectually and spiritually. Among the moral truths are beauty, virtue, and love. Both had periods where they left it all and lived alone. I think Thoreau thought of solitude as something that people can not live without. This was one of Emersons periods of independence. For instance, in this quotation from Walden, he talks about his loneliness. It is easy to live in the world after the world¡¯s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
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