Henry David Thoreau central

This blog is probably going to become Henry David Thoreau central for the time being. I am reading his newly published -- abridged -- journals. Although they are abridged, they are the greatest compilation of his journals to date. And he has so many nuggets of interesting thoughts and observations that I feel I have to write them down somewhere.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is only another name for tameness. It is the untamed, uncivilized, free, and wild thinking in Hamlet, in the Iliad, and in all the scriptures and mythologies that delights us...A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvellous[sic], ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen...The fault of our books and other deeds is that they are too humane, I want something speaking in some measure to the condition of muskrats and skunk-cabbage as well as of men, -- not merely to a pining and complaining coterie of philanthropists.
pg. 43, November 1850, age 33

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What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
pg. 42, November 1850, age 33