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Interchange – Living Deliberately: Laura Dassow Walls On The Whole Human Life of Thoreau

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In the liner notes to the album Pithecanthropus Erectus, Charles Mingus calls the title song “his conception of the modern counterpart of the first man to stand erect – how proud he was, considering himself the “first” to ascend from all fours, pounding his chest and preaching his superiority over the animals still in a prone position. Overcome with self-esteem, he goes out to rule the world, if not the universe, but both his own failure to realize the inevitable emancipation of those he sought to enslave, and his greed in attempting to stand on a false security, deny him not only the right of ever being a man, but finally destroy him completely.”

And so here we are.

It is difficult to encapsulate all one means to say or wishes to have said over the course of years of work. I at least have recourse to all the wonderful and wise things that others have said and written, and sung, and played, and acted, to assist in trying to share understanding. Of course, as Mingus also said that “it is amazing how many ways a four-bar phrase of four beats per measure can be interpreted!”

Charles Mingus has accompanied Interchange on at least 14 programs over the last six years. Perhaps he and Henry Thoreau are its tutelary divinities. At least they both seem comparably cantankerous, honest, and dedicated to conversation, to making a world in their art that is not only beautiful and architecturally intricate, but significant and instructive. We only need openness and patience. A tall order these days.

Today Laura Dassow Walls will tell us about how a man, in seeking the best way to be fully alive, gave his life to his neighbors, and the world. In her biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Walls shows us a man deeply engaged with friends, relatives and neighbors, a man thoroughly of his time and place, but in a way that still finds him out ahead of us. In every way we need Henry Thoreau’s work to ring in our ears. We need to front life deliberately and not come to the end of our days knowing that we have not lived.

And further, let me just say, you could do much worse, and many of us have in our university classes, than spending many hours reading and studying just two of Thoreau’s great essays, “Civil Disobedience” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” The first, influential for a non-violent response to tyranny, the second, recognizing the necessity of violence in response to the quotidian and incessant violent institutions of capitalist America.

GUEST
Laura Dassow Walls is William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America and Henry David Thoreau: A Life, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Thoreau at 200 (book review) by Randall Fuller
Laura Dassow Walls: “We have misread Thoreau, tragically”
The Succession of Forest Trees by Thoreau

MUSIC
“Pithecanthropus Erectus” by Charles Mingus

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kyrie Greenberg

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