This section contains 7,860 words (approx. 27 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: Hutchinson, Jamie. “‘The Lapse of the Current’: Thoreau's Historical Vision in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 25, no. 4 (fourth quarter 1979): 211‐22.
In the following essay, Hutchinson contends that A Week documents Thoreau's belief in historical progress and that he sought inspiration, not eternity, in his river voyage.
A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments.
—T. S. Eliot
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
—William Blake
Beginning with Sherman Paul in The Shores of America, critics of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) have generally agreed that Thoreau's journey may be interpreted symbolically as a spiritual quest on the river of time. What has been largely overlooked, however, is the connection of this quest with his implicitly teleological view of the nature and meaning of...
This section contains 7,860 words (approx. 27 pages at 300 words per page) |