(Henry David) Thoreau in His Journal‪.‬

ON 22 October 1837, Henry David Thoreau, then 21 years old and a recent graduate of Harvard, began to keep a journal. He continued to do so for the next quarter-century, until ill-health forced him to stop some months before he died of tuberculosis in May 1862 at the age of 44. By that time the journal had become the central work of his literary life - an enormous document of over 2 million words that is only now in the process of being published in its entirety as Thoreau originally wrote it. It is not surprising that an educated New Englander of the day with literary and intellectual aspirations would keep a journal. Its first entry reads: "`What are you doing now?' he asked, `Do you keep a journal?' - So I make my first entry to-day." The interlocutor was almost certainly Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had been keeping a journal for 17 years and encouraged those who were coming under the influence of his Transcendentalist exhortations to do the same. In its earliest phase, as the editors of the new edition point out, the journal was "a kind of display case for [Thoreau's] reading, his poetry, and his original thoughts and aphorisms" on typical Transcendentalist themes like friendship and truth. In the second phase, between 1842 and 1849, the journal became a writer's workbook in which Thoreau drafted passages intended for essays, lectures, and for the two books published during his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden or, Life in the Woods.