Reading path
A Green Thought
Nothing happens here but weather and attention. No tragedy waiting in the hills, no fate written into the soil, only the world looking back at whoever takes the time to look. Wordsworth counts his daffodils, Thoreau measures the ice on his pond, Hopkins catches a kestrel mid-stoop, Bashō walks north until the road runs out. This is the literature of pure noticing: the conviction, held by Romantics and transcendentalists alike, that a wood in snow or a meadow at dusk is reason enough to write. You finish it having remembered how to see.
In the app a path keeps your place, marks what you have read, and hands you the next work when you are ready for it.
The first button needs the app on this device; the second gets it there.
The route
- 1. The Narrow Road to the Deep NorthMatsuo Bashō, 1689
- 2. The Natural History of SelborneGilbert White, 1789
- 3. I Wandered Lonely as a CloudWilliam Wordsworth, 1807
- 4. NatureRalph Waldo Emerson, 1836
- 5. Self-RelianceRalph Waldo Emerson, 1841
- 6. The PreludeWilliam Wordsworth, 1850
- 7. Bezhin MeadowIvan Turgenev, 1851
- 8. WaldenHenry David Thoreau, 1854
- 9. Song of MyselfWalt Whitman, 1855
- 10. The WindhoverGerard Manley Hopkins, 1877
- 11. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy EveningRobert Frost, 1923
- 12. The Land EthicAldo Leopold, 1949
- 13. The PeregrineJ.A. Baker, 1967
- 14. Pilgrim at Tinker CreekAnnie Dillard, 1974
- 15. The Living MountainNan Shepherd, 1977
- 16. The Rings of SaturnW.G. Sebald, 1995
- 17. Wild GeeseMary Oliver, 1986
- 18. The Snow ManWallace Stevens, 1923
- 19. Silent SpringRachel Carson, 1962
- 20. The Lives of a CellLewis Thomas, 1974
- 21. On Growth and FormD'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, 1917
- 22. The CossacksLeo Tolstoy, 1863
- 23. Ode on IndolenceJohn Keats, 1819
- 24. The Summer BookTove Jansson, 1972