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If any news in advance of letters and politics of Mr Jeffords. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren repeatedly came under attack last night a consequence of her emerging status as a front runner in the race Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar Shar and South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete booted judge slammed her for not saying as Bernie Sanders has that taxes would increase under the Medicare for all plan she and Sanders favor Sanders and Warren both say that overall costs for health care would decline with an end to premiums deductibles and out of pocket expenses House panels conducting the impeachment inquiry our hearing today from Michael McKinley a former top aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompei o the career foreign service officer resigned last week ending a 37 year career he had served as Pompei as defacto chief of staff yesterday another career State Department official George Kent reportedly testified he was told by administration officials to lay low and Ukraine as the quote 3 of the ghosts tied to the White House took over u.s. Foreign policy toward the country for junior Democrat Gerry Connolly said can't describe the results of the May 23rd meeting at the White House organized by Trump's acting chief of staff Nick Mulvaney the 3 Gordon son the ambassador to the European Union u.s. Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and energy secretary Rick Perry declared they were the people now responsible for Ukraine policy can't testify to the committee's despite the State Department telling him not to in Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmakers interrupted Leader Kerry Lamb if she was trying to deliver a speech laying out her policy objectives. Charming so Jorja and Cheney. I would call up the lamb was forced to abort her annual address to the Legislative Council and deliberate the video instead the pro-democracy lawmakers shouted she was the mother of the mafia police and should. Zine I'm Only Delfin letters and politics is next big day and welcome to letters in politics I'm it shows or it you could be said at the great 19th century American writer Henry David Thoreau gave the powerless one of the most precious guess one can give and that is the philosophy of civil disobedience his essay on civil disobedience would go on to inspire the likes of Mahatma Gandhi as well as Martin Luther King Jr many more including and spirally and people today we are going to be in conversation about his life Joining me now is Laura walls she is the William p. And Harvard be white professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and she is the author of a new biography that's called Henry David Thoreau a life Laura walls is my very good pleasure to welcome you to this program well thank you Mitch it's a real pleasure to be here and I'm excited to have this conversation Henry David Thoreau is so connected I think in our own imagination to Walden Pond for the time he spent there because I think 845849 and then obviously the book that he wrote about his experience there and I think in the popular imagination we think of bold and as this isolated natural pristine place untouched by industrialisation but it seems to me in spending a great amount of time with your book that it was important for you to show that that is not necessarily the case of Walt and Henry David Thoreau even when he was at Walden Pond during these years was experiencing a changing world something that we may in fact be able to relate to today yes I think both those points are really crucial 1st of all. Going to Weldon was a little bit like setting up camp in your backyard I mean not quite that much but it was it's only about a mile from the center of town and back then walking a mile was something people did. Without thinking twice about it so it's where you went to fish people went there to hunt people cut wood on the shores and the trees and it was a place people walk to for leisure time so it was really a popular place to be and I think I'm part of the reason you went there was that the railroad had just gone past and even cut into one of the coves of walls and pond and Emerson used to walk to the pond on the other side on the main road so you've got the pond right in between those 2 transportation networks but Emerson was taking that walk on a particular day when some land speculators drawn by that brand new railroad were about to buy that piece of property and Emerson got his own bed and to preserve it because he wanted to keep having this nice place to walk to and that became that was in fall of $844.00 and the friends got to talking and throwed been talking about moving out to a pond someday soon and one thing led to another and it became Thoros turn to sort of do this experimental house building but the conditions for that chance for him to do it. Ironically came about because it was a on the main road and b. Across the pond was the railroad the brand new railroad So there he was in sight of everybody and staring out at this train if you look at the train schedules that train was passing about 20 times a day by the time he left 20 times a day yeah I'm very sick Rated Yeah yeah so I mean I think there's a real His his his expressions of desire for doing this make it sound like a real deep inward journey it does sort of give that hermit feeling he wants that isolation and aloneness and there's a kind of a feeling in his journal and in the early pages of Walden that he's done it and I think that really carries over in our imaginations we want that to be the case we sort of imagine it out in the wilderness but the more you go into wonton and again if you look at the record and you just go to the place and look around Wow a lot of it was the sense that you can find these wild places these strange surprises wherever you are New York City Berkeley. I grew up in Seattle and or just on the edge of Seattle and that was certainly my experience and so that sense that no matter where you are you've got some place right there that if you open your eyes becomes wild to your perception if you really see truly even in the city. Even in the city yeah so then the other thing that happens is so he goes there in this kind of like you say a kind of hermit even religious aspiration but it does happen to be the case that he's right there in sight of everybody and of course as soon as he starts to build everybody is coming around saying hey what you doing. So if you've been out in the wilderness the. Through sort of John Muir wilderness it would have been a very different story but because there were all these people coming by asking you know this is an odd thing you're building this very trim very tight formal but small house right here. So he started playing himself he loves to talk this is another feature that we sort of lose sight of if he was. Famous as a talker. So he would talk and he started to fall into this mode of explaining what he was doing and realizing that he was doing some good teaching he was a kind of born teacher and he enjoyed this role it got him into this mode of of exploring the possibilities of what he could be doing there not just in an inner life the original goal but also what could he communicate to others how could he convey to them not just the privacy of his own project but how they too could catch a piece of this ambition and elevate their own lives I want to ask you as somebody who's very familiar with his writings obviously Walden but you read his journals and probably read everything that he has written. That we know of d.d.t. Ever complain about some damn train going by every half hour I've never seen you know I think. I literally have not found any complaints he is most explicit Well for one thing he tore apart his original journal writings many of them in the writing of his early books so he might have had complaints that just he literally used it and threw it away. It was only later after he returned from Walden that he started to preserve all of his journal records so that we had a complete That starts about $850.00 but Walden is in the $840.00 so while I don't know maybe there were I've often wondered so he. The key turning point in his life was just before Walden he went to New York City Staten Island for. What 7 months or so trying to break into the New York literary market. That was a failure he was not a New York writer any ended up returning as we all know and eventually at Walden Pond but the key point is that it was while he was gone that the railroad went and so you're you've got somebody who loved the pond. Went away to the big city and is dreaming literally dreaming of the pond and longing to be back there he was so homesick and he comes back and there's the railroad it is just ripped this trench there is you know scores and scores of railroad workers are building this thing and it's right there literally heaps of dirt in the waters of the pond itself I would love to know what he thought. There was a time of complaint Yeah it would have been then but we don't have the journal then and he's not writing letters because he's he's always writing letters home well he was home so he didn't need to write letters. So Darn it all there's Yeah but somehow we get the ambivalence and Walden the sense of excitement I mean it was a brutal Can you imagine seeing that speeding railroad engine for the 1st time that's right and sudden sense of freedom you could go to Boston you know and an hour instead of a day that's where the future is here your future is here it is and it really radiates through this whole literature of all these people who are just you know it it open sponsibility and he was totally excited as was everybody else about what this would do at the same time he's kind of a little skeptical and thinking why are we so sure that this is a good thing so he's asking. Jones and several pages and Walden worry looks out at that railroad are really pretty interesting because it's a mix of emotions and very interesting intellectual reactions what do we do about this how do we think about it. What are the moral consequences of this so it's complex and I think really it's one of the important sections of Walden in questions were so we're grappling with today yeah it's a confrontation with modernity we can say and we're still confronting it it's like he was on the front end of a process and we may be on the back end this is that in the same period you know times beginning will you recall the Anthropocene it was I mean I don't think the geology would just as Sara Lee agree they're looking for that what they call the golden spike when they can say yes you know a 1000000 years from now we you know some future geologist could say at this moment so atomic radiation looks like a good candidate and we don't have that until unfortunately our our own time. Well thorough of course lives before then so maybe it won't be the golden spike for the geologist but for us perceptually when you start to see that great Excel aeration that shift the railroad is a good good marker sorow is right there watching it come to the United States and to his part of the world and so for him he is watching the shift from a colonial era very sustainable. Agricultural horticultural kind of a mixed use surprisingly balanced economy it was limited it had its limits but it was. You know for 200 years it had been a successful stable use of the land along a kind of English agricultural system he watched all that collapse and Rita. You'll into a much more modern market economy any watch farmers lose their land he watched the land depopulate he watched farmers have to shift their crops and suddenly they're worrying about getting things to market. They decrease in wildlife Yes the decrease in wildlife Well a lot of that had already happened. So it's startling to realize for instance that he never saw a deer around Walden Pond or anywhere in the area. A deer can you imagine I mean they're everywhere no. He never saw anything bigger as far as I can tell from all his writings bigger than a woodchuck. So you had to go to Maine to see a moose because they still had wildlife there. So the beaver were gone the turkeys were gone the deer were gone things that are all back today ironically he was in many ways in a much more depopulated and certainly almost completely de forested landscape it had all been clear cut by the by of the 850 s. We come back now and if you go to Walden I hope you and some of your listeners have or will you look around trees everywhere and they've all grown back since Soros day all he saw were by the 850 s. Were little coughs as of trees here and there which meant that he could look back on even his own childhood just a couple decades before and say I knew this pond when it was completely forested and I used to love those for a sea called the pond with the woods in the backdrop the drapery of my dreams the beautiful image in it haunted him so he's there but he's there and I'm watching it disappear. I don't know how many people today identify with this but I know growing up I identify profoundly with this because I saw exactly the same thing happening right outside Seattle where I grew up interesting and I I don't live in a very natural area I live in downtown Oakland Of all places yet it's going through these dramatic changes buildings are being smashed right down new ones are being erected in it for me it is all used in this is all fascinating because it does you know people have a great deal none of gentrification going on and for you know watching this being there experiencing this definitely brings a sense of melancholy to it but I also try to see the railroad as the sign of the future Yeah yeah and if you think about again what the railroad means we think of it as old fashioned technology and really we're trying to many of us would like to see the railroads brought back. And strengthened and made more a part of our United States transportation system. As opposed to cars they look great for a thorough course again at the leading edge of all this the railroad is is the beginning of what he calls calling later in this life the coming of the evil days when when he imagined tracks circling the Earth and in a sense kind of strangling it and the kind of meshes of the economy that the railroad not only represents but is and carries so his thoughts on this become darker as he watch watches what everybody was calling progress and again he starts the think are we so sure that we are calling progress is progress for everyone and are we so sure that it's progress even for ourselves. This is letters in politics and we are in conversation with Laura Walz author of the book Henry David Thoreau a life and this is truly one of my most favorite shows I think I've I've ever done it is not the 1st time I have a process program to air done it a few times over the years but every time I do it I have to prepare it because we are in our Fall 2001000 fund drive and edit it in order to get it ready for broadcast during a fun drive every time I do it it just stops me and makes me think and even see a new my Even in my own neighborhood where I live and always drives me back to my Kindle device or I have a large collection of Henry David Thoreau writings on there I actually have the physical book to have walled in but but it's so beat up I've had it since I was a kid and I'm afraid if I if I touch it if I put out it will you know it will just vanish right right in front of my eyes and deteriorate even more so friends as I indicated today is we're still in our 200-1900 fund drive and for our listeners. 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That phone number is 8.898557358189855735 and on line k p f k o r g do have some think you guess if you are interested in these for a pledge of $120.00 There's a book by Laura cell walls Henry David Thoreau a life is yours and I have to tell you the book is as good as the interview. Sometimes the interview is better than the book sometimes the book is better than the interview this is this is why this is one of my favorite programs I've done is because this book is actually one of my favorites is a beautifully written and it's deep the way that Laura does so well in this interview is deep in the Will