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Our Things: Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives

Our Things: Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives ARTICLES Our Things Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives branka arsi Distantly related things are strangely near. --Thoreau, Journal, May 23, 1851 Thoreau is as much obsessed with things as he is with oak trees. Things play a central role everywhere in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Most obviously, the Thoreau brothers make a boat and then turn it into a central character of the narrative, so that the boat, which is supposed to transport them leisurely from the Concord's stream of death into the Merrimack's waters of life, is elevated into a sort of amphibious ontological phenomenon. Promoted as both capable of flying like a bird and drifting on water like a fish, it is a creature capable of drifting flights, which Thoreau imagines as an excellent mode of existence. But there are other objects also: arrowheads just under the surface of the earth, churches spoiling the beauty of a Sunday landscape, houses, monuments indiscernible among the stones, and cemeteries grown into moss. In A Week, material culture is always immersed within animated processes, history turning into forests, archaeology into geology, objects into creatures. Similarly in Walden: from Concord houses to pyramids and coffins; http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences University of Nebraska Press

Our Things: Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives

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University of Nebraska Press
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Copyright © University of Nebraska Press
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1938-8020
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Abstract

ARTICLES Our Things Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives branka arsi Distantly related things are strangely near. --Thoreau, Journal, May 23, 1851 Thoreau is as much obsessed with things as he is with oak trees. Things play a central role everywhere in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Most obviously, the Thoreau brothers make a boat and then turn it into a central character of the narrative, so that the boat, which is supposed to transport them leisurely from the Concord's stream of death into the Merrimack's waters of life, is elevated into a sort of amphibious ontological phenomenon. Promoted as both capable of flying like a bird and drifting on water like a fish, it is a creature capable of drifting flights, which Thoreau imagines as an excellent mode of existence. But there are other objects also: arrowheads just under the surface of the earth, churches spoiling the beauty of a Sunday landscape, houses, monuments indiscernible among the stones, and cemeteries grown into moss. In A Week, material culture is always immersed within animated processes, history turning into forests, archaeology into geology, objects into creatures. Similarly in Walden: from Concord houses to pyramids and coffins;

Journal

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences – University of Nebraska Press

Published: Oct 9, 2014

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