Kessler depicts his developing intimacy with a handful of dairy goats and offers an enviable glimpse of the pastoral good life. Yet he also cautions, "Wherever the notion of paradise exists, so does the idea that it was lost. Paradise is always in the past." The title Goat Song is a literal rendering of the Greek word traghoudhia, tragedy. Reading it, I was reminded of Leo Marx's analysis of Thoreau's Walden. In The Machine in the Garden, Marx names Thoreau a tragic, if complex pastoralist. After failing to make an agrarian living raising beans for commercial trade (although his intent was always more allegorical than pecuniary), Thoreau ends Walden by replacing the pastoral idea where it originated: in literature. Paradise, Marx concludes, is not ultimately to be found at Walden Pond; it is to be found in the pages of Walden.
Heather PaxsonTag: lost nature paradise marx walden thoreau pastoral pastoralist walden-pond
Henry David Thoreau is my favorite writer of all time, my literary god king, and his essay Wild Apples is my favorite thing to read.
Nicholas TrandahlTag: thoreau
Thoreau’s writings feel more alive to me than any thing that I’ve ever read. When I read anything by Thoreau, I see his subject. I feel it. I taste it. I smell it. I feel as though he’s walking beside me, showing me with gestures and soft-spoken words the marvelous natural wonders that he’s written about.
Nicholas TrandahlTag: thoreau
Whenever I read anything by Henry David Thoreau I honestly feel as though he’s with me. No. More like I am with him.
Nicholas TrandahlTag: thoreau
Give me a bottle of hard cider, a bowl of Peterson Irish Oak in my Neerup pipe, and please, above all, give my Henry David Thoreau’s Wild Apples. Do that and you will see a man contented.
Nicholas TrandahlTag: contentment thoreau
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