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"I heard a very loud sound": Thoreau processes the spectacle of sudden, violent death.(Henry David Thoreau)

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From: ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly)
Date: 20050601
Author:Conrad, Randall

This essay originates in a presentation given at the 2002 convention of the American Literature Association, just nine months after the fall of the World Trade Center Towers. Thoreau Society panelists had been asked to consider how (or whether) the Transcendentalists' philosophy can help twenty-first-century citizens cope with a disaster of the magnitude of September 11, 2001. Seeking some equivalent in Thoreau's experience, I decided to examine the following journal passage for 7 January 1853, in which the thirty-five-year-old philosopher writes of viewing burnt, scattered human ...