Mindprints: Thoreau's Material Worlds

A rediscovery of Thoreau's interactions with everyday objects and how they shaped his thought. Though we may associate Henry David Thoreau with ascetic renunciation, he accumulated a variety of tools, art, and natural specimens throughout his life as a homebuilder, surveyor, and collector. In some of these objects, particularly Indigenous artifacts, Thoreau perceived the presence of their original makers, and he called such objects "mindprints." Thoreau believed that these collections could teach him how his experience, his world, fit into the wider, more diverse (even incoherent) assemblage of other worlds created and re-created by other beings every day. In this book, Ivan Gaskell explores how a profound environmental aesthetics developed from this insight and shaped Thoreau's broader thought.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Preface Chapter One: Worlds Chapter Two: Migrants Chapter Three: Buildings Chapter Four: Shelter Chapter Five: Artistry Chapter Six: Collections Chapter Seven: Sounds Chapter Eight: Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Index

About the Author :
Ivan Gaskell is professor of cultural history and museum studies at Bard Graduate Center, New York City. He is the author or editor of several books, most recently Paintings and the Past: Philosophy, History, Art.

Review :
"A deeply researched and well-argued thesis showing how the experience of finding beauty and moral truth in ordinary things affected Thoreau’s ethics and philosophical thought." “‘I have travelled a good deal in Concord,’ Thoreau wrote in Walden, famously mocking the notion that travel takes place beyond the borders of one’s hometown. Devotees of the transcendentalist philosopher will be grateful that, nearly two centuries later, Gaskell took up residence in the adjacent town of Lexington and fixed his uncommon powers of perception on his erstwhile neighbor’s life and writing, traveling imaginatively with Thoreau to yield this extraordinary book. Gaskell unsettles and expands our understanding of Thoreau by homing in on the sensory particulars of his surroundings, cherished revelations of worlds past, present, and still to come.” “By situating Thoreau’s wide-ranging writings in their cultural, historical, and biographical contexts, Gaskell brilliantly illuminates the critical role that perceptual acuity and aesthetic sensibility played in his management of daily life, ethical commitments, and philosophical thinking. Gaskell’s meticulously crafted account makes Thoreau come alive as someone who practiced and lived his philosophy. The book is timely and pertinent today as we face global challenges posed by environmental crises and consumerism.” “Louisa May Alcott’s observation that Thoreau ‘made one small spot a continent’ could apply as well to this book. Gaskell’s study moves outward from the physical spot on earth that Thoreau inhabited to the virtual continents he embraced through mindprints, common things and experiences that ‘projected human presence across the ages.’ In the process of unpacking Thoreau’s contributions, Gaskell also pushes the study of aesthetics from a narrow focus on ‘the arts’ to an embrace of sensory engagement of all sorts. This is a magical book on an enduring topic.” “I’ve often wondered what a properly transcendental history of material culture might look like, and thanks to Gaskell’s Mindprints, I now know. Through carefully chosen examples of Thoreau’s distinctively subjective empiricism, Gaskell gives the reader profound means to consider Thoreau’s perpetual, heartfelt question: why do just these things make a world?”