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ION MOBILITY IN 3HE AT INTERMEDIATE TEMPERATURES

A.F. Borghesani

in Ions and electrons in liquid helium

This chapter reports the small number of experiments on the ion mobility in liquid 3He at intermediate temperatures between the critical point at Tc=3.3 K and T=1 K. The inadequacy of the theoretical ... More

This chapter reports the small number of experiments on the ion mobility in liquid 3He at intermediate temperatures between the critical point at Tc=3.3 K and T=1 K. The inadequacy of the theoretical description in this cross-over region is pointed out.Less

“Rare and Delectable Places”: Thoreau's Imagination of Sacred Space at Walden

John Gatta

in Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and the Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present

Walden Pond, the obvious focal point of Thoreau’s worship and spiritual discovery, qualifies thereby as a sacred place in the author’s celebrated account of “where he lived.” Thoreau’s ... More

Walden Pond, the obvious focal point of Thoreau’s worship and spiritual discovery, qualifies thereby as a sacred place in the author’s celebrated account of “where he lived.” Thoreau’s place-centered spirituality is both active and contemplative, with the contemplative dimension vividly conveyed through his description of morning meditation in the chapter “Sounds.” Thoreau, despite his elusive and inconsistent theology, sometimes confirms belief in a personal Deity and typically envisions nature as a divine Creation. In the famous sandbank cosmogony that appears at the climax of the chapter “Spring,” Thoreau combines a numinous vision of continuous creation with an evolutionary dynamic informed by recent scientific discoveries in biology, geography, and geology. Thoreau imagined nature’s wildness, which enables us to “witness our own limits transgressed,” as wedded thereby to our sense of the sacred.Less

Learning from Walden

Joshua Kotin

in Utopias of One

This chapter concerns the pedagogy of Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854). When Thoreau moved to Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, his goal was to maximize his independence. America, from his perspective, ... More

This chapter concerns the pedagogy of Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854). When Thoreau moved to Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, his goal was to maximize his independence. America, from his perspective, had failed. To maximize his independence, Thoreau radically reduced the size of his world. He minimized his social and financial obligations, and chose to live in an artificially circumscribed environment. He also developed a practice of writing and rewriting that refined his perception of his environment. Writing became an instrument of attentiveness and suppression—a way to improve his vision and restrict its range. At Walden and in Walden there was little or no conflict between receptivity and sovereignty. Thoreau could be open to his surroundings and in control—vulnerable and secure. This was the beginning of Thoreau's utopia of one: a world small enough to be received in its entirety.Less

The Nineteenth-Century Canon: Hidden in Plain Sight

Michael T. Gilmore

in Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture

This chapter considers some of the classics of 19th-century American literature: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, and James’s The American. These canonical ... More

This chapter considers some of the classics of 19th-century American literature: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, and James’s The American. These canonical works toy with the edict of knowability, but unlike popular genres, they ultimately reject complete revelation as an illusion. Their protagonists gravitate to inscrutability and hide in plain sight.Less

Roughly Thoreau

Maurice S. Lee

in Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This chapter focuses on the radical empiricism of Walden, Thoreau’s journals, and his later scientific writings. As an artist, philosopher, surveyor, fisherman, and naturalist, Thoreau comes to ... More

This chapter focuses on the radical empiricism of Walden, Thoreau’s journals, and his later scientific writings. As an artist, philosopher, surveyor, fisherman, and naturalist, Thoreau comes to accept the uncertainty of chance and its imperatives for the conduct of life, even as—like John Ruskin, Charles Darwin, and William James—he engages in the probabilistic management of nature. Thoreau learns over the course of his career that natural science is not strictly a positivist enterprise but, rather, a probabilistic pursuit in which to measure under conditions of chance is not precisely to know. Thoreau’s disciplined commitments to the handling of chance distance him from the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and help him bridge the worrisome divide between his science and art.Less

Life near the Bone

Jonathan McKenzie

in The Political Thought of Henry David Thoreau: Privatism and the Practice of Philosophy

Thoreau’s Walden Pond experience is, at least in part, an individualistic response to the popular communal living experiments of the 1840s in the United States. This chapter examines one key aspect ... More

Thoreau’s Walden Pond experience is, at least in part, an individualistic response to the popular communal living experiments of the 1840s in the United States. This chapter examines one key aspect of those experiments—the desire to unify the self—in light of Thoreau’s successes and failures in his own living experiment. This chapter argues that Thoreau’s privatist political theory, which provides the backbone for the Walden sojourn, aids Thoreau in maintaining the goal of providing a sound foundation for a unified experience of selfhood in the changing nineteenth century.Less

Coda: Visitors

in Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley

This chapter presents some final thoughts. Kinsella talks about his increasing focus on the block of stony ground on a hillside he has always considered his home place — the land of the Ballardong ... More

This chapter presents some final thoughts. Kinsella talks about his increasing focus on the block of stony ground on a hillside he has always considered his home place — the land of the Ballardong Nyungar people. He also considers considers Walden and the politics of visitations, which comes from the chapter entitled ‘Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors’.Less

Walden

Denis Donoghue

in The American Classics: A Personal Essay

This chapter offers a reading of Henry David Thoreau's novel Walden. It discusses the claim that this novel is a pastoral or a pastoral romance and that Thoreau was no less interested in society than ... More

This chapter offers a reading of Henry David Thoreau's novel Walden. It discusses the claim that this novel is a pastoral or a pastoral romance and that Thoreau was no less interested in society than in nature. It discusses how Thoreau was influenced by intense awareness of the social and cultural costs of the transition to industrial capitalism in writing this novel during his so-called Walden experiment of solitary life.Less

Society and Solitude

Joel Porte

in Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed

This chapter examines the claim that Henry Thoreau's Walden experiment was prompted by antisocial tendencies. It explains that this experiment was an attempt to live a solitary life and which created ... More

This chapter examines the claim that Henry Thoreau's Walden experiment was prompted by antisocial tendencies. It explains that this experiment was an attempt to live a solitary life and which created an image of Thoreau as the celebrated hermit of Walden Pond. It argues that wanting to be alone was not simply and totally the substance of Thoreau's desire, but that is the reputation that has stuck to him and one that performs a certain kind of cultural work.Less

Material to Mythology

Patrick Chura

in Thoreau the Land Surveyor

This chapter discusses Henry David Thoreau's surveying career. To analyze nineteenth-century land surveying is to study Henry Thoreau's primary nonliterary pursuit, an activity that took up a large ... More

This chapter discusses Henry David Thoreau's surveying career. To analyze nineteenth-century land surveying is to study Henry Thoreau's primary nonliterary pursuit, an activity that took up a large portion of his adult life. Thoreau actually made the Walden survey, a three-dimensional pond map that is now one of the most important images in American literary history. The pond survey was a rare type of work, an experiential episode in Thoreau's life the processes of which are now somewhat hard to imagine.Less

Walden, Cape Cod, and the Duty of the Coast Survey

Patrick Chura

in Thoreau the Land Surveyor

The first superintendent of the Coast Survey was Swiss-born mathematician Ferdinand Hassler, who directed the project from its inception in 1816 until his death in 1843. Hassler was one of the most ... More

The first superintendent of the Coast Survey was Swiss-born mathematician Ferdinand Hassler, who directed the project from its inception in 1816 until his death in 1843. Hassler was one of the most skillful measurers in history and the ingenious method he conceived for implementing the vast survey was his greatest achievement. He devised a plan to measure the Atlantic seaboard by laying out a network of enormous consecutive triangles, the sides of which ranged from ten to sixty miles in length. Admiring descriptions of the Coast Survey appeared frequently in scientific journals and popular literature during the period immediately prior to Henry Thoreau's 1846 survey of Walden Pond.Less

‘Because I’m a wild animal’: Nature Versus Nurture in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox

Michelle Devereaux

in The Stillness of Solitude: Romanticism and Contemporary American Independent Film

This chapter analyses the ideological framework of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book. This film addresses various Romantic conceptions of ... More

This chapter analyses the ideological framework of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book. This film addresses various Romantic conceptions of childhood, personal and cultural history, and the natural world in relation to the self and subjectivity. In his reimagining of Dahl’s story, Anderson exhibits a disdain for the mechanization of the societal landscape and the beings inhabiting it, similar to a course charted by Henry David Thoreau in Walden, while also optimistically suggesting that animal/human ‘nature’ can still survive through aesthetic and ideological compromise and creative genius. Anderson creates a brand of ideological pastoralism to match the aesthetic pastoralism/picturesque of many of his film worlds. While the anxiety portrayed in his earlier films remains, it is somewhat defused by an anarchic yet collaborative spirit.Less

“… and you know I’m going straight for your heart …”: Licence to Kill

Jon Burlingame

in The Music of James Bond

John Barry's successor was American-born, London-based Michael Kamen, whose recent success as composer of action films Lethal Weapon and Die Hard (and his understanding of contemporary rock, having ... More

John Barry's successor was American-born, London-based Michael Kamen, whose recent success as composer of action films Lethal Weapon and Die Hard (and his understanding of contemporary rock, having worked with Eric Clapton, Queen and Pink Floyd) made him perfect for the job. Music supervisor Joel Sill suggested Kamen, and later recruited producer Narada Michael Walden to co-write a title song for R&B legend Gladys Knight; he also recruited top film songwriter Diane Warren to write an end-title song for Patti LaBelle. Kamen did not enjoy the experience; his planned collaboration with Eric Clapton and original “Bond Theme” guitarist Vic Flick failed, and his own attempts at a title song were not taken seriously. The Knight song performed well in the U.K., but the end-title song actually had much more success three years later when Celine Dion recorded a cover of it and it reached no. 4 in the U.S.Less

Reflections from Thoreau’s Concord

Edward F. Mooney

in Being-in-Creation: Human Responsibility in an Endangered World

In “Reflections from Thoreau’s Concord,” Edward F. Mooney turns to the concrete experience of living itself in order to reflect on “Creation, on being a creature among others in creation, and on the ... More

In “Reflections from Thoreau’s Concord,” Edward F. Mooney turns to the concrete experience of living itself in order to reflect on “Creation, on being a creature among others in creation, and on the role of creativity as a vector animating creatures and creation.” How, in reading Thoreau’s words, do we think with him and converse with him? When we follow him through the places he inhabited and visited, to what extent do we too become residents or travelers in these locales?Less

A Poet’s Trees

Richard Higgins and Richard Higgins

in Thoreau and the Language of Trees

Trees stirred the muse in Thoreau. He saw them as poems themselves, “living poetry,” writ by nature on the landscape. He “browsed” his poetic imagination on them and used the forest as a source of ... More

Trees stirred the muse in Thoreau. He saw them as poems themselves, “living poetry,” writ by nature on the landscape. He “browsed” his poetic imagination on them and used the forest as a source of figurative language in which to dip his pen. He said pines and maples encircled Walden Pond like “slender eye-lashes” fringing earth’s “liquid eye.” By moonlight, the shadows of trees checker the ground “like chandeliers of darkness.” The blazing fall sermons of maple trees surpass those of New England ministers. Thoreau also frequently imagined trees as the different kinds of writing—as the leaves of a book, mythic tablets, scrolls, sermons and inscriptions.Less

Thoreau: Words as Deeds

Michael T. Gilmore

in The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature

Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail for his beliefs, is an invaluable witness from the 1840s. Thoreau's belief in the power of oratory to move multitudes preceded and came after the publication of ... More

Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail for his beliefs, is an invaluable witness from the 1840s. Thoreau's belief in the power of oratory to move multitudes preceded and came after the publication of Walden, but the greatest of his writings does not share that confidence. The account of his life at the Pond self-consciously narrows its appeal from the imperfect but educable audience of 1849 to the handful still capable of understanding him in the early 1850s. This chapter proposes reasons that the inevitable overlapping of the political with the aesthetic at a time when words, the lifeblood of literature, were under extreme duress from institutional and consensual forces. Parallels with Abraham Lincoln's career suggest that Thoreau's avoidance or withdrawal from civic issues in Walden, mostly written in these years, was implicated in the republic's political impasse. He recoiled from his country, and the possibility of awakening it, because the country seemed to have subsided into quiescence over slavery. Thoreau did not give up during this period, any more than Lincoln did, and the dormant social dimension of his thought surged back to prominence just at the moment he completed his masterpiece.Less

Thoreau’s Neighbors

Nancy L. Rosenblum

in Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America

This chapter explains what “minding our own business” means, arguing that minding your neighbors' business and minding your own work is in tandem when it comes to self-examination and transformation. ... More

This chapter explains what “minding our own business” means, arguing that minding your neighbors' business and minding your own work is in tandem when it comes to self-examination and transformation. People listen and observe and then compare their neighbors' lives to their own. From the vantage point as witnesses to their neighbors' lives, people gain insight into their vulnerabilities, moral resources, and the terms of their happiness. Thoreau's Walden is the great American reflection on the quality of life at home, in this place, with these neighbors. Good neighbors emerge in Thoreau's work as essential to self-understanding and care of the self. The chapter also shows how Thoreau presents treating one another as neighbors as the “saving remnant” of democracy in America.Less

Joining Up and Shipping Out

Carol Boggess

in James Still: A Life

This chapter tells of why and how James Still entered the Army in March 1942, several months after the US entered World War II. His training began near San Antonio with the 8th Air Depot Group, which ... More

This chapter tells of why and how James Still entered the Army in March 1942, several months after the US entered World War II. His training began near San Antonio with the 8th Air Depot Group, which left New York six months later on a ship headed for the Gold Coast of Africa. Still carried a paperback copy of Walden and kept a diary of the crossing on the margins of the pages. Less