Tuesday

Today, we are going to go over your multiple choice questions and your "Pond" answers.

Then we will look at Chief Seattle's speech - go here and "The Destruction of Culture".

Homework - page 956 (in The Language of Composition) questions #1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 10.

Remember by Friday you should be at page 228 and by the time you return from Thanksgiving Break you should have finished the book and posted all your dialectical journals. 

Monday

Today we are going to talk about the chapter entitled, "Ponds".

First - go here

What unifies the structure of Walden has been much debated. Two of the most frequently noted structural devices are the seasonal structure (one year from summer to spring) and a dialectical structure in which pairs of chapters present thematic counterpoints to each other (e.g. "Reading" vs. "Sounds," "Solitude" vs. "Visitors").


Bill McKibben's focus on Thoreau's practical advice for living, however, calls our attention to another structure in which the long opening chapter, "Economy," provides a diagnosis of what is wrong with American life: materialism. The body of the book then presents a cure for the disease of materialism: striving for purity and simplicity as exemplified by Thoreau's own experience and by the symbolic purity of Walden Pond. The final chapter presents Thoreau's optimistic prognosis that each individual reader has the potential to vastly improve his or her life by shifting priorities.

 CHAPTER 9
"Ponds" - Thoreau sees something spiritual in ponds and water.  Most of the chapter holds an idyllic tone and he describes the unity of nature, self, and divinity.  The pond, among other things, is called "God's Drop".   Note - "Ponds" also comes between the chapters "Village" which recounts his sojourns to the village of Concord - where he is locked up (he reports on the incessant gossip which numbs the soul, and compares going to the village to running the gauntlet), and the chapter entitled "Baker's Farm" where he talks about his neighbor John Field who works himself to exhaustion to pay for his "rustic hut" and feed his family.  The question - why this juxaposition?  

Quotes from the chapter to discuss:

"Once in a while we sat together on the pond, he at one end of the boat, and I at the other; but not many words passed between us, for he had grown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally hummed psalm, which harmonized well enough with my philosophy." (169)

"It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again.  It seemed as if I might next cast my line, upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense.  Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook."  (170)

Also on 170 there is a description of Walden" "It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference...a perennial sping in the midst of pine and oak woods."

"Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both" (171)

"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." (180)

This is one of the most symbol-laden chapters in Walden; it presents the pond as having human character. Thoreau introduces the symbolic mode at the end of his opening to the chapter, as he talks about fishing at night, when, he says, "I caught two fishes as it were with one hook", a literal fish and a "symbolic" fish.

 In groups on by yourself answer the following:

In what ways are the following qualities of Walden Pond symbolic of human qualities for which Thoreau thinks we should strive?

1. Its depth and the purity of its water 
2. Its colors, blue and green, and its position between land and sky 
3. Its role as "earth's eye"
4. The pond as a mirror 

HW: Do the multiple choice questions on Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience".  

Tuesday

Today, we are going to continue with your the AP analysis question on "Higher Laws".  I've made notes on all of your drafts (except Zach because I have no idea where it is). Please look at my notes and either 1) rewrite your opening paragraph; 2) work on Point #1.  Remember - a) a transition, b) topic sentence, c) generalizations and proof from the text.  Think about your order of development and what you are trying to prove or argue.  3) a couple of you need to work on Point #2.

Take 20 minutes.

Then we will continue with "Civil Disobedience".

Monday

Today, we are going to go over your precises on "Self-Reliance", then revisit - briefly - the analytical essay (the one on "Higher Laws"), rewrite and post your opening paragraph, and finally begin reading "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience".

Remember you should be on page 178 by Wednesday.

Precise Review

1. Name of author, [optional: a phrase describing author], genre, title of the work, date in parentheses (additional publishing information in parentheses or note); a rhetorically accurate verb (such as “assert,” “argue,” “suggest,” “imply,” “claim,” etc.); and a that clause containing the major assertion (thesis statement) of the work.
2. An explanation of how the author develops and/or supports the thesis, usually in chronological order.
3. A statement of the author’s apparent purpose followed by an “in order to” phrase.
4. A description of the intended audience (and/or the relationship the author establishes 
with the audience) and a description of his or her tone.

DO YOUR HOMEWORK!

Update- Where you should be

Friday - you should be on page 150.

We will be discussing the analysis question (From Tuesday) and other rhetorical devices.

For Monday you also need to finish reading Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and write a precise on it.

11/3 - 150.  Precise on "Self-Reliance" (25 dialectical journals)
11/6 - Start "Civil Disobedience"
11/7 - 178 and "Civil Disobedience"
11/8 - In-class Analysis Prompt
11/10 page 194 (40 dialectical journals)

11/17 page 228
11/27 page 324 (with all dialectical journals done!)

Okay, here is what we need to do today: 1) Watch a clip from yesterday's Committee Hearing on Energy and Natural Resources and connect it with Walden.  Discussion here.  2) Go over the chapters you should have read since Monday; 3) Return to the Analysis questions that we looked at on Tuesday; and 4) Finish reading "Self-Reliance".

Chapter 4 - "Sounds"

This is a strange, but poetic chapter that focuses on the sounds that Thoreau hears when living at Walden (and how the sounds make him feel).  There is this idea of Thoreau's that most of humanity doesn't quite listen to its soundings.  To be in-tune with the place you live is - in part - to listen closely to it, to hear it, and perhaps to respond to what you hear.

Micah has too really good dialectical journals on this chapter:

#16: "Much is published, but little is printed" p. 108

By published, Thoreau means made public, as in, anyone can observe/hear. There are so many sounds and things of that nature that are able to be observed, each with their own meaning and cause, but very few care to listen, and fewer still, care to write them down. This continues the thought that man uses nature only for what it can get out of it, and tries its best to remove itself from it. Mankind in general doesn't care about the chirping of a bird, or the chirping of crickets. When they do care, it is as an annoyance, a reminder of the world they seek to leave behind by becoming civilized.

#17: The train

In the 'Sounds' chapter, Thoreau goes to great lengths to personify the train that he talks about. How it perspires steam, how it must put on snow shoes, etc. This is done because in a way, the train represents a concentration of what makes humans terrible, at least to Thoreau. They are cold, calculated, used to transport things from one end of the world to another, all the while cutting surgically precise lines through the wilderness that Thoreau believes greater than man. It is a machine made for business, and the making of money on the backs of those who are too lazy and too luxurious to get what they need from the land around them.

"I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe." (116)

"Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling.   I am more alone than ever.  For the rest of the afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway."  (119)

Chapter 5 - "Solitude"

Thoreau makes a case for nature being a better companion than humans.

"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." (131)

"Next to use the grandest laws are continually being executed.  Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman, who work we are." (130)

NOTE - ANAPHORA

I have occasional visits . . . from an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things.

Chapter 6 - "Visitors"

Thoreau in this chapter talks about the various visitors he had out at Walden over the course of the two years.  These visitors included a Canadian woodcutter and a "half-witted" man from a poorhouse.  Also, children.

"You need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give.   For my own part.  I was never so effectually deterred from frequenting a man's house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by the parade one made about dining me, which I took to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again." (137)

"Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods.  They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time.  Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not."

ANTITHESIS: (from literarydevices.net)

Antithesis, literal meaning opposite, is a rhetorical device in which two opposite ideas are put together in a sentence to achieve a contrasting effect.

Antithesis emphasizes the idea of contrast by parallel structures of the contrasted phrases or clauses, i.e. the structures of phrases and clauses are similar in order to draw the attention of the listeners or readers. For example:

“Setting foot on the moon may be a small step for a man but a giant step for mankind.”

The use of contrasting ideas, “a small step” and “a giant step”, in the sentence above emphasizes the significance of one of the biggest landmarks of human history.

OTHER EXAMPLES:

 Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

• Man proposes, God disposes.
• Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing.
• Speech is silver, but silence is gold.
• Patience is bitter, but it has a sweet fruit.
• Money is the root of all evils: poverty is the fruit of all goodness.
• You are easy on the eyes, but hard on the heart.

"