INTRODUCTION

This is the second compilation of writings by students enrolled in the “Meet Mr. Thoreau” course at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. This work was too good not be shared. Like the bushel basket of “wild apples” which the first collection represented, every piece here is a tribute to the luminescent mind of a man long gone, once a neighbor to the people in these towns, a great walker in Lincoln and Sudbury.

No less incredible than the natural phenomena which constantly amazed him is the fact that Thoreau’s power as a writer and thinker has remained alive as ever. He noted that no one had yet described the use of a rainbow. The answer, perhaps, can be found in the use of his own life. For over a hundred-and-forty years, he has lain quietly beneath his tiny headstone on Authors’ Ridge in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Yet his work shines on, stimulating, challenging, fascinating new generations of high school students who have also been moved to stand in Walden’s early-morning darkness, to make pencils, to saunter, to reflect, to observe and record.

A century past is a long time ago. But as Thoreau’s great contemporary, Walt Whitman, reminds us, “It avails not time nor place–distance avails not.”

Look up and see the rainbow arching over Lincoln Road!

Bill Schechter
May 2002