"Nature is not yours until you more hers"

28 June 2026: Still working my way through Laura Dassow Walls's biography of Thoreau. The section on Margaret Fuller's death provides moving details that I didn't know before (some of them disturbing). Walls concludes that section with an idea that really struck me: 

"Once again harrowed by tragedy, Thoreau turned not away from the things of nature, but towards them, voicing again his awe before the fundamental strangeness of materiality. Nature is not yours until you are more hers: that sympathy had been part of Fuller's legacy to him" (294).

Work Cited

Walls, Laura Dassow. Henry David Thoreau: A Life. The U of Chicago P, 2017.