He knows that the sights and sounds and smells about us,
clouds, songs, and wind murmurings, rain-washed earth, and fruit
trees blossoming, enter into our sub-consciousness with a power
but seldom appraised. Prison life, factory service long continued,
a clerk's stool, a housewife's day-long duties--these things stunt
and transform the human animal as nothing else, because of all
experiences they most restrict, most impoverish the natural
environment. And it is the especial function of nature books to
make vivid and warm and sympathetic our background of nature. They
make conscious our sub-conscious dependence upon earth that bore
us. They do not merely inform (there the scientist may transcend
them), they enrich the subtle relationship between us and our
environment. Move a civilization and its literature from one
hemisphere to another, and their adapting, adjusting services
become most valuable. Men like Thoreau are worth more than we have
ever guessed.
No one has ever written more honest books than Thoreau's "Walden,"
his "Autumn," "Summer," and the rest. There is not one literary
flourish in the whole of them, although they are done with
consummate literary care; nothing but honest, if not always
accurate, observation of the world of hill-slopes, waves, flowers,
birds, and beasts, and honest, shrewd philosophizing as to what it
all meant for him, an American.
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