Tuesday - Friday

Read Walden by Henry David Thoreau and work on dialectical journals. We will be discussing Bob Dylan and Gil Scott Heron on Tuesday.

Reading Schedule

10/6 page 100

10/7 page 125

10/8 page 135

10/9 page 150

10/10 work on dialectical journals

10/14 in-class writing prompt

10/15 page 178

10/16 page 194

10/17 page 228

10/20 in-class writing

10/21page 245

10/22 page 261

10/23 page 288

10/24 page308

10/27 work on dialectical journals

10/28 Finish book

10/29  work on essay

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’  

 

CHAPTER 2 - "Where I Lived and What For"

He goes to Walden Pond because he wishes to live deliberately, to slow down the fast pace of modern life and actually enjoy it.  He claims that you can't learn anything from newspapers about live ("The Revolution will not be Televised")

Quotes:
"As long as possible live free and uncommitted.  It makes little difference whether you are committed to a farm or a county jail."

"Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.  Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.  Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering?"

"The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life."

"I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.  How could I have looked him in the face?"

"Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity."

"We do not ride on the railroads; it rides upon us."

"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?"

"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip."

"Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature."

"I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."

Chapter 3 READING

Reading literature is the closest thing to living.

Reading great books requires training such training as athletes undergo.

Nothing truly can be translated.

"Most men have learned to read to serve paltry convenience, as they learned to ciper in order to keep accounts... but reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a higher sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury .. but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to."

"The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers."

"I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannont read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects."

"We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment."