{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03145235892691952, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0074005550416281225, 'mean_word_length': 5.112994350282486, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A Taste for the Wild: Some Nietzschean Themes in Thoreau

At first blush, it seems far-fetched, even perverse, to suggest an affinity between Thoreau and Nietzsche. Although a neighbour is said to have described Thoreau as a “dirty little atheist” (Harding, Handbook 141), in general there is little trace of the Antichrist in New England transcenden­talism. Yet, it was the American critic Joseph Wood Krutch, writing in the 1940s, who first commented on the striking similarities between the extreme vitality of Thoreau’s prose, which represents nature as beyond moral considerations, and Nietzsche’s more uncompromising vision of life beyond good and evil.2 Krutch’s observations suggest some merit in reading Thoreau with the more philosophically acute observations of his German contemporary in mind. Not only do Nietzsche’s writings explain some of the difficulties in Thoreau’s work, most notably this tension between the wild and the good in his view of nature, they also show Tho­reau to be on the same philosophical road as Nietzsche, rejecting the dec­adence of his n...