xix). Thoreau's existence
             typified this conflict, as "he was not destroyed by an internal conflict between the
             transcendentalist and the surveyor, between the Yankee and the Greek; he was
             made, he was created, because he was both" (Seldes 269). Thoreau was defined by
             the duality of his obsession with natural observation and the awareness of his own
             consciousness. "I am conscious of the presence [of] a part of me," he notes in
             Walden, "which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no
             experience, but taking note of it" (95).
             Existentialists realized the futility of the quest for truly objective observation.
             Rather than attempt to completely isolate concrete reality from abstract
             consciousness, they recognized that the two are eternally inseparable. Mankind lives
             in the physical universe, and existentialists reasoned that inhabita
             ...