Henry David Thoreau e as Linguagens da Natureza

Abstract

This dissertation aims to present a hermeneutic reading of some of the religious symbols brought to light by the literature of the poet and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). The background of our argument is the romantic motto of the symbolic correspondence between Nature and spirit, inherited by the author from his contact with the movement that became known as “Transcendentalism,” a religious, literary, philosophical, and political circle gestated in the Nineteenth-century United States. From this panorama, we draw a poetic appreciation of the thinker’s interpretation of the linguistic correlation between Nature and spirit that points to the unity between the immanence of natural kingdoms (the earth) and the transcendence of the spiritual spheres (the sky). Emphasizing the sacred character of the symbols hinted by Thoreau’s texts, those emblems we call “mythopoetic hieroglyphs” and “musical hieroglyphs.” Beyond the tonalities of romanticism, the work proposed here, evoking distinct religious paths, seeks to highlight the multiple reflective possibilities that the North American thinker offers to comparative studies of religions, given the mark of dialogicity between different wisdom traditions in his composition. Highlighting seeing and hearing (i.e., reading and listening to the “book” and the “orchestra” of Nature), our exposition aims to unravel the intimate relationship between spirituality and bodily sensibility in the intellectual’s approach to those we call “Languages of Nature.”