Assignment 1: Compare and contrast these two perspectives. Are they contradictory or complimentary?

Henry David Thoreau and Marilynne Robinson are two authors who write about the experience they made with their society. 

In “Walden” Thoreau portrays his two years spending in Walden Pond (in 1845), Massachusetts, living a simple life supported by no one. He wants to illustrate the spiritual benefits of a simplified lifestyle.  The first Chapter “Economy” is supposed to be a declaration of social thought and meditations on independence, where Thoreau outlines his ideals as he represents his Walden Pond project. 

He has a critical attitude towards society, and education. He criticizes University for teaching students about life, when they could only learn about it, by actually living life.

“[…] defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. […] you do not mean that students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads? I do not mean that exactly, […] I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning. How could youth better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds [...]” (Thoreau 33).

In his opinion you can only learn about life through making your own way in the world, instead of learning solely in the classroom. Students have to be more self-reliant and self-supporting to achieve more education and value it accordingly, for instance student housing. Considering Thoreau´s idea, with an advancement of education and reduction of costs students would learn more.

In “Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist” Marilynne Robinson is a Calvinist essayist who writes about human life with political aspects of society. In opposite to Thoreau she has a positive attitude towards society and culture. She writes about how living together in its best way can be attained. “Western Society at its best expresses the serene sort of courage that allow us to grant one another real safety, real autonomy, the means of think and act as a judgment and conscience dictate” (Robinson 5). This accommodation can only be achieved with “[…] respect, educate, inform and trust […]” (Robinson 5).

While Thoreau describes his society in an economical way, Robinson outlines her society more political. At first glance both of them have a different point of view that is why it seems to be contradictory. But, considering their different perspectives– Thoreau, a transcendentalist born in 1817 and Robinson born approximately a hundred years later, they seem to write about the same problem. Both of them focus how an improvement of a better civilization can be achieved. 

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or Life in the Woods. USA: Dover Publications, 1995. Print.

Robinson, Marilynne. “Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist”. The Nation 8. Nov. 2011. Web. 11 Jan. 2014 <www.thenation.com/print/article/164466/night-thoughts-baffled-humanist>.