From the Pen of Thoreau

We're studying a chapter of Walden tomorrow in my American Literature class, so I'm catching up on my reading. Our hilarious professor had intended us to take a nature walk to the creek for our discussion, but the fact that the creek has over-spilled its banks makes that unlikely. Alas. The transcendentalists would not approve.
I thought I'd share several passages from the chapter "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" that I found interesting and enjoyable.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Classic Thoreau, sort of a manifesto if you will. Next, Henry David tells us why mail and newspapers are a waste (I wonder how he would feel about text messages and Yahoo! News).

The penny-post is, commonly, and institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned or one vessel wrecked, one one steamboat blown up or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter-we never need read of another. One is enough.

As a student journalist, I must say that I don't believe news is useless, but I get his point.
One more for good measure, one of my favorites:

Let us spend each day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails.

Ironically (as it is my life long quest to find irony and produce it where there is none), some club on campus had baskets of foam fortune cookies (I don't understand either) in the college center this afternoon, each with a slip of paper containing a quotation. The one I grabbed had a quotation by Thoreau about the importance of writing only when the impetus to write is hot upon you. Have you ever noticed that certain things seem to follow you in life? Words, stories, writers that pop up in various people and places that are unconnected to each other. This happens to me all the time, and lately it has been Henry David Thoreau.
I think it's time to officially upgrade him to Literary Crush. He makes me laugh, we could take nature walks, he likes the quiet, but doesn't seem dull- I like him. Although according to the pictures, he probably could have benefitted from a shave to get rid of that mutton chop/beard combination, but he has very soulful eyes. Besides, he's got a great cabin in the woods, and I've always said my ideal man is a rugged nerd. Yeah, this one has promise.

Teaser Tuesday: All's Well That Ends Well

I had to take a break from my reading of Sons and Lovers to begin reading All's Well That Ends Well for my Shakespeare class. It's very interesting, different than most of Shakespeare's better known comedies. Apparently it wasn't very popular in Shakespeare's life either, but presents a strong satire about class and also has several very strong female characters. From the very start, there's a constant discussion of sex and virginity and its importance and implications. This foreshadows events that lead to the conclusion of the play.
Here's a quotation from the end of act one spoken by Helen:

I know I love in vain, strive against hope;
Yet in this cap'cious and intenible sieve
I still pour in the waters of my lover
And lack not to lose still.

I've never seen the play performed, but I would like to. We'll be reading another play I have no experience with later this semester, Troilus and Cressida.

In the Words of Mark Twain...

"A Classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." (Here's looking at you Epic Book Blog)
Even though my reading has been sporadic this summer between moving, working, trying to write, my cat having a bladder infection, I have conquered my shameful secret of never having read The Great Gatsby and it was rather enjoyable. I'm almost finished A Farewell to Arms now, though it's depressing me greatly. Still there are so many other classics I really ought to read. None of them are as shame-making as Gatsby, but still. Here are some books I'd like to tackle soon:
Moby Dick by Herman Mellville
Lolita by Vladimir Nobokov
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Dubliners by James Joyce
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Possession by A.S. Byatt
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
Middlemarch by George Elliot

What is your list of unread classics (shameful or otherwise)?