Excursions with Thoreau is a major new exploration of Thoreau's writing and thought that is philosophical yet sensitive to the literary and religious. Edward F. Mooney's excursions through passages from Walden, Cape Cod, and his late essay "Walking" reveal Thoreau as a miraculous writer, artist, and religious adept. Of course Thoreau remains the familiar political activist and environmental philosopher, but in these fifteen excursions we discover new terrain. Among the notable themes that emerge are Thoreau's grappling with underlying affliction; his pursuit of wonder as ameliorating affliction; his use of the enigmatic image of "a child of the mist"; his exalting "sympathy with intelligence" over plain knowledge; and his preferring "befitting reverie"-not argument-as the way to be carried to better, cleaner perceptions of reality. Mooney's aim is bring alive Thoreau's moments of reverie and insight, and to frame his philosophy as poetic and episodic rather than discursive and systematic.

"A literary and philosophical exploration of Thoreau as a prose-poet and religious adept who carries us into fresh and unexpected communion with landscape, seascape, open sky, and what he calls "the unfathomable.""--

This is, from my point of view, a delightful book. ? Mooney is not just interested in explicating Thoreau. The title, Excursions with Thoreau, is meant more seriously. The essays attempt not only to show us Thoreau's way of living, (or, what I called above, his being-in-the-world) but, to some degree, to initiate Mooney himself, and his readers, into that way of life. ? Mooney masterfully characterizes the complexity (and sometimes contradiction) that structure these ways of being in the world.