An Observant Eye

the long version

This book has a two-part purpose. The first is to make the Concord Museum's unique collection of objects related to Henry Thoreau and his family better known. Many details of Thoreau's everyday life in Concord can be discerned in these objects, and for this reason alone they are well worth study. The second purpose is to explore the role that objects - including some of these very objects - played in Thoreau's intellectual life. This might, at first, seem like a contradiction; why should a self-proclaimed idealist care about objects at all? But Thoreau did care about objects, and paid a close and particular attention to them. He was distinctively aware of the ability objects have to communicate. In this, as in his approach to natural history, his thinking is remarkably current. -- Introduction.