Walden.
1854.
The Portable Thoreau. Ed. Jeffery S. Cramer. New York: Penguin, 2012.
☆1845年7月4日から2年2ヶ月2日に及ぶEmerson領地内Walden湖畔（というか"pond"なのだが）での生活記（…といっても大半はわりと抽象的なエッセイが多い）。Emerson不在時にEmerson一家の面倒をみてほしいというLidian Emersonのリクエストがきっかけでこの地を去り、Emmerson家で生活することになる。いかにもtranscendentalistといえばそれまでなのだが、個としての"I"が"every-man"に昇華されているというのが肝なので、個人的な記録としては読みにくい。が、端々の記述には瑞々しい自然描写や、家族を中心とした共同体へのアンチパシー、孤独であることの悦びがvividに描かれているという感じ。ひとりで主であり客たるものとなる。同時に、このように徹底してひとりで生きることがいかにpragmaticであるかを経済的な側面から（時に収支明細を含めてまで）語る、元祖「お一人様」でもある。
★These will be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent. (213)
★if one would live simply and eat only the crop, which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plow it . . . (241) 文明はエネルギーの「無駄」だ
★I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or harm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment. (242)
★I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was concerned (249) I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business. (253) Tradeに対するantipathy
★But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprise (255) This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. (259)ひとりでいることに対するコミュニティからの批判とそこから生じるphilanthropyに対するantipathy. ひとりでも"devoted to husbandry"(330). Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art. (333)
★ほとんどWhitman in proseと言っていいほどのセクション2, "Where I lived, and what I lived for"--なにも所有しないが故に、すべてを所有するというファンタジー。農夫に金を施す妄想をするThoreau. "I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted." (265) I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. (267)
★train, railroadに対するambivalence (295)→Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gablesの逃走シーン
★人間がいなくても真の意味で孤独ではない：In the misdst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. (305)／such kindredship is in nature. (327)
★Deep GossipでAbeloveが言っていたhomoeroticismはVIの"Visitors"の男性。たしかにこのセクションもかなりよいのだけど、homoeroticismというよりは惹かれあう孤独な魂たち、と言った感じ。"He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal. . . . In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock." (317) まぁインテリがガテン系に惹かれるというののクラッシックなファンタジーだけれども、会話がsexの代わりになっているところはとてもいい。
★逮捕された思い出—"the State"に対する疑義。I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house. . . . It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. . . . I was never molested by any person but those who represented the States. (339)
★the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a model of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things. (366) 倹約は国家を奴隷制その他の悪に走らせないためのモラルである
