~HENRY DAVID THOREAU . . . & HIS BHAGAVAD-GITA. divine talking gods & meadow fairies
‘THIS EVER NEW SELF: THOREAU and HIS JOURNAL’
JUNE 2 – SEPT 10, 2017
MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
see: ‘THIS EVER NEW SELF’ – EXHIBITION NOTES & IMAGES / MORGAN LIBRARY
‘THOREAU’S BHAGAVAD-GITA’
EXHIBITION NOTES:
‘One November day in 1855, Thoreau (that would make him 38) was boating on the Assabet River and found a 20-foot oak timber lodged in some rocks. He noted the find in his journal . He towed the wood home and used it to build a bookcase for a much-anticipated gift: forty-four volumes, primarily English translations of sacred VEDIC texts, that a friend had shipped from England. Among them was this book. Thoreau had come across the Gita (as translated and interpreted by an Englishman) a decade before while he was living in a cabin by Walden Pond. By the time his own copy, with its bright blue covers, arrived in 1855, it was already one of his most valued texts.’
Bhagavad-Gita; or The Sacred Lay: A Collloquy Between Krishna and Arjuna on Divine Matters, J. Cockburn Thomson, ed.
Hertford: Stephen Austin, 1855
One of two volumes, this one in Sanskrit
A gift from Thomas Cholmondeley to Henry Thoreau and from Thoreau to Bronson Alcott
Concord Museum, Gift of E. H. KITTREDGE, 1942: TH6B
well, I guess if you were a Thoreau scholar you would know . . just how far out Thoreau and his ‘Transcendental Club’ got. it was a like ray of other-worldy sunshine, inhabited by divine talking gods, yet !! splintering into golden dust . . as it head-first on the deep-set, dry & straight-laced early Colonial / Puritanical mindset.
this exhibit did not want to veer too far off the ‘naturalist’ & grounded path, but Thoreau, he was a strange bird, and a spiritualist visionary / aspects of which probably took him deeper into his nature ‘radar’- than the curator or curators of this are prepared to dwell on. so thank the divine streak in his journal, that burnt the lamp . . of eastern beliefs, and somehow . . made sure this book, and its ‘meaning’ – though not mightily engaged – still stands before us to ‘consider’ – in this display case.
I guess it’s not a far path, from the often tiny & multi-kingdom / of divine gods of ancient Hindu – to look up an divining the tiny faeries cavorting around you, in the present.
at any rate, fairies and nymphs are just a part of our European, and probably Native American heritage and FOLK LORE . . esp British / as ghosts, so what’s up with that ?
the world be a mighty strange place, and we’ve probably driven them all away, or killed them all off ,as in Lord of the Rings.
all I know is, no one can explain the tiny tiny golden arrows they found in the desk of the most famous Stonehendge scientist, so, as they day: BOO-YA !!!
Hawthorne has already told us, that Thoreau had the nature ‘radar’ of another . . ‘planet-mother’ / and she showed him things she kept from others. reading the Vedic scriptures and living alone in a cabin in the woods, must have just pushed that fairie gear into – high drive.
“I took a walk on Spauldings Farm . . . “
‘WALKING’ – by HENRY DAVID THOREAU
source: Sun and Shield – Thoreau on Fairies
yes, HE SAW FAIRIES . . .
“it is hardly surprising that someone who was an intimate and friend of Mother Nature as Thoreau should have been afforded glimpses of her deepest secrets. Not only did he write of his relationships with the fairy world in 3 beautiful poems, he was FAMOUS among his Concord neighbors for having escorted 2 generations of children to the places where Fairies could be met.” !!!!!
source: 5 Things You Did Not Know . . about Thoreau
PHOTOS: NANCY SMITH