Preface
1. Silent snowfall
2. The colors of snow; or, where beauty is
3. In the still of the night
4. The snowplow
5. Ice wings
6. The Storm Beech
7. The Moon and Venus
8. The cabin; or, plucking the raisins
9. The past has not passed
10. Neighbors
11. But where's the pond?
12. River of fog
13. My "office"
14. Conversations with Marlon Brando?
15. Ice wings, Part Two
16. Douglas the Fir
17. Aurora
18. Freaks of nature; or, lighting fires and mourning the woods
19. H.D. in bed
20. Maudlin and bathetic
21. Add your dreams, and not just the sexy ones!
22. Tell Marlonbrando your dreams, honey, and everything will be all right
23. Neighbors, Part Two: Herr S.W.
24. The darkness of the woods
25. Monarchs in December
26. The limits of description
27. The limits of knowledge
28. Black and white
29. Fool's spring
30. A reflection on consumer society; or, a Romantic has his uses
31. The deserving poor
32. A succession of beautiful days
33. Neighbors, Part Three: Wolfgang
34. La pensée du jour
35. The smartphone in high mountains
36. The new adventures of Pinocchio
37. News of the world
38. On the difference between European and American "values"
39. Tell Marlonbrando your dreams, honey, and everything will be all right, Part Two
40. On the degeneration of poetry to chemistry
41. Platonism and Puritanism keep us on our spiritual toes
42. Neighbors, Part Four: Frau S.M.
43. Let's (not!) do lunch
44. The perfect universe
45. Autarchy; or, fatties beware!
46. Woodchuck Heaven
47. Mudslide Man
48. Knowing beans
49. Tell Marlonbrando your dreams, honey, and everything will be all right, Part Three
50. Moving mountains
51. Obscene spring
52. On jealousy and brutalization
53. The bowlegged larch
54. Speculative gardening
55. Former inhabitants
56. The two corners of Melville's smile
57. Thaw and Thor
58. Former inhabitants, Part Two
59. Taking the arm of an elm tree
60. Thoreau's serviceable body
61. On loneliness; or, snap out of it!
62. The work of mourning
63. A cautionary note
64. Hurry up, please, it's time
65. Return to sender
66. Former inhabitants, Part Three
67. A snippet on schnapps
68. Tell Marlonbrando your dreams, honey, and everything will be all right, Part Four
69. Doubling up
70. My little chickadee!
71. Home Entertainment Center
72. Neighbors, Part Five: Rüdiger
73. The forlorn pair of shoes
74. The forlorn BMW
75. Kids
76. Henry's mom and dad
77. More work of mourning
78. Tell Marlonbrando your dreams, honey, and everything will be all right, Part Five
79. Old people
80. About that blackbird
81. Former inhabitants, Part Four: The lover suspended in the rafters
82. On doing good
83. Organized religion
84. Tell Marlonbrando your dreams, honey, and everything will be all right, Part Six
85. Living in the present
86. Out of doors
87. Bronchitis? Pneumonia?
88. Day, season, and year
89. The bloody truth about trees
90. The head monkey at Paris
91. On the gift-giving vice
92. Losing the whole world
93. Knowing when to break up
94. Accentuate the negative
95. Prejudice
96. How to become just friends
97. Faithless fidelity
98. Advice to the lovelorn
99. Books
100. Former inhabitants . . . of color . . . at Walden Pond
101. Crooked genius, crooked rules
102. Art is not yet weaned
103. Life is not yet weaned
104. Problematic praxis
105. The Copernican Revolution?
106. New beech leaves
107. God bless the American Igel; or, true patriotism
108. One more angel story, the last one, I promise
109. Creationism
110. Capital punishment
111. May fog
112. Thoreau's model farm
113. The water works
114. There is nothing inorganic
115. The ashes of once living things
116. The katzenjammer of birds
117. The wolf spider
118. A morning hike
119. Music of the rain
120. Tell Marlonbrando your dreams, honey, and everything will be all right, Part Seven
121. Save your hay
122. A day's journey
123. Dream and catastrophe; or, the politics of archaeology
124. And then the sky fell
125. Still more work
126. Life stammers on
127. Pinions
128. The logic of error; or, a modest disquisition on the synthesis of being, time, and truth
129. Tell Marlonbrando your dreams, honey, and everything will be all right, Part Eight and Last
130. Cabin smells
131. Desperately sad
132. Self-confidence
133. Polonius
134. Sea of fog
135. Sunworshiper fog
136. Weather can be extraordinarily precise
137. The man in the moon
138. Breaking News: Marlonbrando confesses all!
139. Extra-vagance
140. September mood
141. Periwinkle and ivy
142. To see and say it all
143. Marlonbrando sees the light
144. The power of the past tense
145. From the mountains of Saint Ulrich to the prairies of Chicagoland?
146. Life is at bottom indestructibly powerful and pleasurable
Notes
List of Illustrations

Finalist for the 2022 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Essay Category
A Black Forest Walden is a work of philosophical reflection, nature description, and sly humor. In brief chapters, or aphorisms, the American philosopher David Farrell Krell recounts his experiences in a cabin located in the mountains of southern Germany's Black Forest, where he has lived for several decades. Insofar as Krell compares his experiences with those of Henry David Thoreau, who serves as both inspiration and irritation, the book could be described as a critical commentary on Thoreau's Walden. Yet it equally reads as a rigorous yet playful and profoundly literary manifestation of where and how the mind wanders. Hence, the "Marlonbrando" of the subtitle is not the late actor but a feral cat who frequents the cabin and comes to be an important interlocutor, as if playing the role of analyst to the author. The subjects Krell treats are wide-ranging: the changing seasons, environmental issues, romantic love, parent-child relations, European versus American "values," higher education, artistic creativity, solitude, and the contrast between lifestyles in a quiet Black Forest village and in a noisy contemporary United States. Forty-one black-and-white photographs taken by the author accompany and enliven the text.

David Farrell Krell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and Brauer Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brown University. His many books include The Cudgel and the Caress: Reflections on Cruelty and Tenderness, also published by SUNY Press.