If you could have a conversation with anyone..

[Alan V]

I think I'd pick Thoreau, too.

I don't think his religious ideas were all that vague. He was a mystic. But unlike most mystics (who have extraordinary experiences of God or divine spirits) he had extraordinary experiences of nature. To Thoreau, the natural world was the divine object... just like (to the theist) God is the divine object. I actually like Thoreau's choice of divine object. Mainly because (unlike the aforementioned divine object) the natural world demonstrably exists. You just can't put a price tag on something like that.

Like many 19th century nature worshipers, Thoreau was an idealist who only slowly learned that nature wasn't exactly what he expected it to be. Although he was an early supporter of the book in America, he only read Darwin's Origin of Species after it came out late in 1859, only a few years before he died of tuberculosis at the age of 44.

I have watched David Attenborough nature videos which would likely make Thoreau reconsider his views. Nature is both remarkably intricate and remarkably brutal. I would be very interested to know what Thoreau thought about the opportunism of the natural world. Perhaps I will find some answer in his late journals, which I haven't read in full yet.