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The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail Essay

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Emerson's maxim "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind," means that nothing in life will have a meaning if the person's thoughts and foundation of intelligence is unstable, incomplete, or even has the slightest hint of corruption. This idea projected when reading "The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail," a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee retelling the life of Henry David Thoreau. In a flashback where Thoreau is working as a school teacher, the Chairman of the School Board Committee,
Deacon Ball, is scolding Thoreau for teaching ideas not proscribed by the textbook. Ball and Thoreau get into an argument in which Ball states "All they need to know is clearly spelled out in approved school texts," to which Thoreau later responds …show more content…
Tracing back to Emerson's maxim, this relates to the idea that nothing in life will have meaning if a person's thoughts or foundation of intelligence is incomplete.
Towards the end of the play, Thoreau has a nightmare in which he (along with other various characters from the play) are drafted into the Mexican War. The President, played by Waldo Emerson in the dream, states "This unnecessary war was unconstitutionally commenced by the President, who may be telling us the Truth- but he is not telling the Whole Truth...His mind, taxed beyond its powers, is running out like some tortured creature on a burning surface." Drawing from his speech, the President admits that the Mexican War was unconstitutional, as it was taking the lives of innocent people merely for the sake of expanding territory, and because the war was declared with moral conflict, the President is now living with anxiety and regret with his decision, referred to as the "tortured creature on a burning surface." When applying Emerson's maxim, it further shows how the Mexican War became

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