I'm Christopher Leiden, this is Open Source.

We're outdoors with Henry David Thoreau this hour,

walking his woods, canoeing his waters in his 200th birthday week.

We embark on the lazy hometown river where Thoreau's first great book got underway

alongside his brother John in the summer of 1839.

I had often stood on the banks of the conquered,

watching the laps of the current, an emblem of all progress,

following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made.

The weeds at the bottom gently bending down the stream,

shaken by the watery wind, still planted where their seeds had sunk.

And at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom

and float wither it would bear me.

What does the transcendentalist do?

We were asking in the first of our three by Centennial Thoreau shows.

All the answers are to be found in the canoe trip that became a masterpiece,

titled A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers.

What the transcendentalist does is soar between water below and sky above

between this day and eternity, between nature and human society,

between Thoreau's Christian neighbors and his own Buddhist universalist preferences,

between himself and the great Emerson, the patron that Thoreau is trying hard here to impress.

We're at the Southbridge Boat House, near Thoreau's house on Main Street in Concord,

just upstream from the Concord River itself.

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