Two Fish on One Hook: A Transformative Reading of Thoreau's Walden - Softcover

Tripp, Raymond

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0940262894 ISBN 13: 9780940262898

Publisher: Lindisfarne Books, 1998

Synopsis

Here is a book about Walden that takes Thoreau on his own terms. Two Fish on One Hook is a transcendental study of Thoreau’s transcendental work. It offers us the task of doing as Thoreau does, exhorting us to follow the patterns Thoreau sets up in Walden and to approach his work as “an act of communication”―one that urges us to listen, to hear, and to act upon what he has to say, one that becmes a transformative experience.

“Thoreau’s first step is to remind us of how very idle and blockheaded we are. The busy folk ‘mind[ing] their own affairs’ he leaves to their own devices. Books about Walden are also obliged to begin on the right note by sounding Thoreau’s stern wake-up call. Many will find it a jarring note, but there is no better way to wake up from the Procrustean ‘sense of men asleep’ and to get ‘a sick one to lay down his bed and run’ into Walden in time. It may be wisdom to let the dead bury the dead; but Thoreau is convinced that ‘a man is not requried to bury himself.’ He, therefore, begins by asking his readers “Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?’”
―Raymond Tripp

About this title

About the Author:

Raymond P. Tripp, Jr. is a professor emeritus at the University of Denver, where he has taught American Literature and Medieval Studies.

Review:

“Ramond Tripp has written a short, witty, wise, and above all a helpful book about Henry Thoreau. What Tripp comes to say is that Walden is true, that Transcententalism is a spiritual way for us to follow. This is a book for those who find or hope to find in Thoreau the key to a better life and a better world.” ―Robert D. Richardson, Jr., author of Henry Thoreau: A life of the Mind

“Just a Thoreau placed himself squarely against the mercantile values of the nineteenth century, so Tripp places his own reading against the subtly materialistic epistemologies of the twentieth. The Walden that emerges is refreshingly sound and consistent in helping us see how life here and now, if attended to with all our faculties, opens into the voice of silence.” ―William Johnson, author of What Thoreau Said: Walden and the Unsayable

About this edition

• Publisher: Lindisfarne Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0940262894
• ISBN 13: 9780940262898
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160