Free Literary Books for the Kindle (US & UK)

Monday, May 26, 2014

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

"OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American, author of the essay, Nature. (US Edition) (UK Edition)

This was written in 1836. It is difficult to imagine a time when our view was through the eyes of those who went before. We seem to be pressing ever forward. We only look back in nostalgia for those things that brought us pleasure in the past, never for instruction. I speak generally, but I cannot think of a time since Emerson when the present was absorbed in the past. I think this lack of interest is accelerating. Today the price of antiques is falling because they are not in fashion anymore. I tutor school children who only learn history in the classroom. It is not learned from the media or their families.

What would Emerson have thought if he knew we were picking up his essay now to see nature as seen through his eyes?

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Tuesday, March 11, 2014

After London or Wild England by Richard Jefferies

Free US/UK Kindle Classic

Dystopian books about a post-apocalyptic future also are a part of our past. Follow that? English writer, Richard Jefferies, wrote his entry in this genre, After London or Wild England, in 1885. (US Edition) (UK Edition)

He was primarily a nature writer and this is apparent in his story:

"The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike."

The book's form will not be particularly familiar to the readers of Young Adult trilogies. It takes the form of a journal or history by someone living after the apocalypse and trying to explain the present and relate it to the past.

"Indeed, we have fuller knowledge of those extremely ancient times than of the people who immediately preceded us, and the Romans and the Greeks are more familiar to us than the men who rode in the iron chariots and mounted to the skies. The reason why so many arts and sciences were lost was because, as I have previously said, the most of those who were left in the country were ignorant, rude, and unlettered. They had seen the iron chariots, but did not understand the method of their construction, and could not hand down the knowledge they did not themselves possess."

Apparently this history is to serve as background for the adventure tale that comprises the second part of the book:

"What was there behind the immense and untraversed belt of forest which extended to the south, to the east, and west? Where did the great Lake end? Were the stories of the gold and silver mines of Devon and Cornwall true? And where were the iron mines, from which the ancients drew their stores of metal?"

Come along and find out!