SOURCE: Peck, H. Daniel. “Killing Time.” In Thoreau's Morning Work: Memory and Perception in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the Journal, and Walden, pp. 3‐21. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Peck analyzes Thoreau's concern with the nature of time, showing how he responded with literary techniques of temporal disorder and creative remembering.

On January 8, 1842, the day his brother John began to experience the first symptoms of the virulent infection that would kill him three days later, Henry Thoreau was thinking of time. In his Journal, he asks meditatively: “Of what manner of stuff is the web of time wove—when these consecutive sounds called a strain of music can be wafted down through the centuries from Homer to me—And Homer have been conversant with that same unfathomable mystery and charm, which so newly tingles my ears.—These single strains—these...