Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar - by Kristen Case (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In the last years of his life, Henry David Thoreau created something new. Part blueprint for a major new work, part scientific chart, and part re-envisioning of the way we experience the passage of time, Thoreau's Kalendar was more a tool than a text. Comprised of six multipage charts of "general phenomena," the Kalendar was an instrument for recording not just natural and weather-related phenomena, but also the hidden relations among them--between the skies of one June and the skies of past and future Junes--relations we often feel but can't quite hold, rooted as we typically are in our own brief moment of linear time.

Combining reproductions of Thoreau's hand-drawn charts with transcriptions of the Kalendar's text and essays by acclaimed poet and scholar Kristen Case, this gorgeously crafted volume illuminates the final project of one of America's most treasured writers and naturalists and offers a timeless, transformative vision of how to live harmoniously with the living world around us.

Review Quotes

"An intricately charted yearbook of [Thoreau's] observations and thoughts. . . A poet and a scholar, Case brings the work to thrilling life."--Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

"At his death in 1862, Henry David Thoreau left behind a rich seedbed of unfinished projects. Now, Kristen Case, an amazingly perceptive scholar, has sketched for us the promised fruit of one of these. Thoreau's Kalendar, a years-long charting of 'natural phenomena' in Concord, Massachusetts, pointed the way toward an ecology of time in which the mind and moods of the naturalist are rightly joined to the plants and animals whose seasons Thoreau had so faithfully recorded. This book is a major contribution, not just to Thoreau scholarship but to everyone from ecologists and climate scientists to historians and philosophers of time."--Lewis Hyde, author of The Essays of Henry David Thoreau

"For years Thoreau's stunning late-life charts of natural phenomena have seemed impossible to read--until now. It took Kristen Case, with a scholar's eye and a poet's heart, to reveal these baffling works as nothing less than the culmination of Thoreau's life-long artistry, in which all that seemed lost to the past can live again in the unfolding of the present. Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar invites us to reimagine our lives in keeping with Thoreau--and with Case, herself a literary artist whose illuminations deserve to be lived with and reflected on, hand in hand with Thoreau's--across the turning of time."--Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life

"Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar will be doubly welcome to all readers seriously interested in Thoreau, for it offers both the long-awaited first comprehensive edition of Thoreau's last important unpublished manuscript and a deeply discerning and eminently readable account of the work's history and significance by editor Kristen Case."--Lawrence Buell, author of Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently

"A phenomenal book steeped in intricate attention to Thoreau's 'textual ecosystem.' One gains fluency in reading not just Thoreau's hand, but his heart, too--double its shadow and you will find Case's hovering near."--Jen Bervin, coeditor of The Gorgeous Nothings

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