The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.

Hello, we can never have enough of nature, wrote Henry David Throw in 1854.

We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea

coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thundercloud and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets.

I suppose that what in other men is religion is in me love of nature."

End quote. With his book Walden or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau turned a two-year experiment to live in a small

cabin into one of the seminal moments in American literature.

Here was a transcendentalist, a follower of his conscience, a pencilmaker, a teacher, a

searcher who soaked up religion and philosophy and declared himself a follower of

spiritual and moral truths, wherever they came.

I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another, he said.

I have no sympathy with the bigotry and ignorance which make transient and partial and purestitions between one and all nations are alike. I like Brahma, Hari, Buddha, the great spirit, as well as God."

With his trip to the woods described so vividly in Thoreau's unmatched prose, Thoreau launched a tradition of

writers who followed his path, sometimes trying to replicate it quite literally, and

sometimes finding a new way of their own. Our guest today, Nina Shengold, is one of those who found

a new way. She didn't retreat to a life of solitude to commune with nature. She departed from

her writer's desk, her teaching, her more or less suburban

existence to explore the world of the Ashokan Reservoir, a setting of gorgeous vistas

and teeming humanity.

She was turning 60 and she was looking for a kind of renewal, a kind of project to help her return

to her childhood yearning for nature and her grown-up desire to impose some discipline on a life of creativity, to give

herself a goal and then to see it through.

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