Thoreau's Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture

Cover
Contents
Introduction: Distraction and the Disciplines of Attention
Part I. From the Devil to Distraction
	1. “Wandring or distraction” (Thomas Clayton)
	2. “Satan had hidden the very object from my mind” (Jarena Lee)
	3. “Hundreds of thousands have their appetite so depraved” (J. H. McIlvaine)
	4. “My non-compliance would almost always produce much confusion” (Frederick Douglass)
	5. “Opium-like listlessness” (Herman Melville)
	6. “Morbid attention” (Edgar Allan Poe)
	7. “The shell of lethargy” (William James)
Part II. Reform
	8. “A white man could, if he had paid as much attention” (Lydia Maria Child)
	9. “The cultivation of attention as a moral duty” (Elizabeth Palmer Peabody)
	10. “The heart must be cultivated” (William Watkins)
	11. “You might see him looking steadily at something” (Susan Paul)
	12. “Their nobler faculties lie all undeveloped” (William D. Kelley)
	13. “Subdued and tender” (A. D. Eddy)
	14. “If he wanted to kill time” (Austin Reed)
Part III. Revival
	15. “All attention to the last sermon” (James Dana)
	16. “The power of fixed and continuous attention” (Robert Baird)
	17. “The relations of business and religion” (Henry Clay Fish)
	18. “My mind was powerfully wrought upon” (William Apess)
	19. “I began to direct my attention to this great object” (Nat Turner)
	20. “Hear me now, love your heart” (Toni Morrison)
	21. “Read these leaves in the open air” (Walt Whitman)
Part IV. Devotion
	22. “Noble sentiments of devotion” (J. S. Buck minster and Ann Plato)
	23. “Savoir attendre” (Adrien Rouquette)
	24. “The greatest exercise of mind” (Anonymous/Abraham Jacobs)
	25. “A true sauntering of the eye” (Henry David Thoreau)
	26. “If we do not guard the mind” (Hannah More)
	27. “The valves of her attention” (Emily Dickinson)
	28. “Aroma finer than prayer” (Walt Whitman)
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index