Keeping Time: Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar

An immersive, beautifully illustrated revelation of Henry David Thoreau’s final project--a monthly almanac of natural phenomena.

In the last years of his life, Henry David Thoreau created something new. Part blueprint for a major new work, part scientific chart, and part re-envisioning of the way we experience the passage of time, Thoreau’s Kalendar was more a tool than a text. Comprised of six multipage charts of ＂general phenomena,＂ the Kalendar was an instrument for recording not just natural and weather-related phenomena, but also the hidden relations among them--between the skies of one June and the skies of past and future Junes--relations we often feel but can’t quite hold, rooted as we typically are in our own brief moment of linear time.

Combining reproductions of Thoreau’s hand-drawn charts with transcriptions of the Kalendar’s text and essays by acclaimed poet and scholar Kristen Case, this gorgeously crafted volume illuminates the final project of one of America’s most treasured writers and naturalists and offers a timeless, transformative vision of how to live harmoniously with the living world around us.

Kristen Case is a poet and scholar. She is the author of American Poetry and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe and three books of poetry, most recently, Daphne. She has co-edited several essay collections on American writers, most recently the Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau. She lives in Maine.