What is meant by quiet desperation?
Quiet desperation is acceptance of–and surrendering to–circumstances. Quietly desperate lives are frustrated, passive, and apathetic. They’re unfulfilled and unrealized. Pay attention to the following signs of a quietly desperate life.
How would you summarize Thoreau’s ideas on technological progress?
To Thoreau, technological development was a kind of change, but rather for the worse. Thoreau feels that it prevents an individual’s personal progress by creating a mind-numbing amount of labor and by imposing materialistic values.
Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad?
Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you.
What does the intellect is a cleaver mean?
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in”. He is comparing time to a stream. “The intellect is a cleaver”. Your intellect can be used to discover the meaning of life. Thoreau used many metaphors to explain/describe life in the woods.
What metaphor does Thoreau explain spiritual awareness?
Thoreau compares this type of awareness to being awake, rather than spiritually slumbering through our days. Thoreau is using the metaphor of the artist in this quote. He is explaining that the artist can carve and paint a scene to make something look beautiful, such as a bowl of fruit.
How does Thoreau create his home?
The wooden boards he used to construct his house he acquired by buying and disassembling a small shanty that had been occupied by a railroad worker’s family. For the rest of the lumber, he chopped down some young pines with a borrowed axe.
What does Thoreau claim to have learned from his experiment in living?
What did Thoreau learn from his experiment in the woods? that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagines, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.