Thoreau

For e.e. cummings, like earlier American transcendentalist poets like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, paying attention was everything.

Contra Thoreau, they all seem interested less in living life deliberately than deliberately avoiding life.

At Los Rios, the students hike on a nature trail designed by Myers with boulders etched with quotes from Emerson, Thoreau and Muir.

In “A Lesson From Aloes,” a character quotes Thoreau: “There is a purpose to life, and we will be measured by the extent to which we harness ourselves to it.”

As a student, like many of us, I liked to read Henry David Thoreau.