#thoreau

Henry Thoreau did not go to Walden Pond because he thought it would be a fun adventure. He went into the woods because he was deeply depressed and burnt out. He was running from the horror of his brother and best friend recently dying in his arms, and the haunting memory of causing the Fairhaven Bay fire. His friend Ellery Channing literally gave him the ultimatum of either taking some time off to write and think, or else be institutionalized.

I think Thoreau’s mother saw her depressed son choosing to retreat into a small cabin in the woods, and was worried about him. Of course she did his laundry - just as Ralph Waldo Emerson probably brought him firewood and bread. These were not chores of obligation to support a “great” man, but services of love to help their deeply depressed 28yo son and friend.

Been replaying Super Paper Mario :) Here are some Flash doodles + a bigger one of Bleck because he was the only one I actually put a bit of effort into. I can't stop drawing these things now XD

"5 P.M. Just put a fugitive slave, who has taken the name of Henry Williams, into the cars for Canada. He escaped from Stafford County, Virginia, to Boston last October; has been in Shadrach's place at the Cornhill Coffee-House; had been corresponding through an agent with his master, who is his father, about buying himself, his master asking $600, but he having been able to raise only $500."

-From Thoreau's Journal; October 1, 1851.

By helping a runaway slave get to Canada, Thoreau was breaking the Federally mandated Fugitive Slave Law that had been passed as part of the so-called "Compromise of 1850" the year before. The penalty for anyone who harbored or concealed an escaped enslaved person was a fine of up to $1,000 and imprisonment for up to six months.

"If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine."

- From "Resistance to Civil Government" by Henry Thoreau; 1849.

Somewhere in the West

Continuing my month long series of posts with images made in New Mexico with the Great Divide as my focus or jumping off point. This is the Crosslands Bible Church, approximately five miles up Highway 371 from Thoreau, New Mexico.