“The sun is but a morning star”: Thoreau’s Future

Abstract

Thoreau was canonized a century ago for puncturing genteel provincialisms, but only recently have scholars acknowledged nationalism among them. Equally humbling, our first guides to Thoreau’s radical universalism were war protestors and environmentalists, not academics. Lately, pairing Thoreau with “planetarity” lets us valorize particularism, but, still, not his core dictum: always universalize. Thoreau’s was no retrograde Platonism; his Transcendentalism was empirical if visionary: even our particular sun “is but a morning star,” temporary sponsor of “the spring months in the life of the race.” Whereas Nietzsche and the postmoderns have been sure what physicist Fermi calls the “Great Silence” means we “clever animals” will die alone in an empty universe, Thoreau heard from the cosmos a different future, one to which, like those today at places like the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, we should attend.