3 Review(s)

Thoreau's Week shared many themes with his classic Walden: self-renewal in nature, the spiritual meanings of perception, and the shallowness of contemporary culture, religion, and politics. But while Walden portrays a pastoral life essentially impervious to time, A Week dramatizes change and the inevitability of loss. The loss that implicitly informs the narrative, deepening its elegiac treatment of New England's past, is the tragic death of Thoreau's brother, John, only three years after the journey. Yet, through the classic structure of departure and return, Thoreau imaginatively redeems both his personal and historical losses, as he voyages upon the stream of time.