Thoreau Today

Henry David Thoreau in the Literature and Culture of the 21st Century

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

December 2006

From Lorna Dee Cervantes' Drive: The First Quartet (Wings Press, 2006):

Corky's First Elegy

"He is somewhere down
amid the withered
sedge and alder bushes there
by the water's edge, but where?
From that quarter his shrill blast
sounded, but he is silent, and
a kingdom will not buy it again."

- from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau
9 April, 1856

Corky's Next Elegy

a kingdom – blast
withered amid the Bushes
silent sounded
shrill
somewhere down
that quarter by the water's edge
there, but where?

from his - a journal, and an April
will not buy it again

- 13 de abril
he has passed on a portal day, 13 Ahau

American War Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Lorrie Goldensohn (Columbia University Press, 2006) includes Thoreau's "When with pale cheek and sunken eye I sang" under the section headed "The Alamo and the Mexican-American War."

From Chris Dodge's poem "Kinds of Birds" (Minneapolis Observer Quarterly, Spring 2006): "Known to Henry David Thoreau as 'peetweet'"

Claire Preston's Bee (Reaktion Books, 2006), a book about the natural history of bees, contains several Thoreauvian references, including these:

"Those country persons learned in bee-lore around Concord, Massachusetts, seemed to Henry Thoreau to have garnered a kind of natural wisdom: 'I love best the unscientific man's knowledge; there is so much humanity in it.'" (Feb. 13, 1852 journal cited in notes)

"The commercial bee of Vergil is imagined by Henry David Thoreau as a prosperous and hardworking Yankee burgher with negotiable business interests: 'The rambler in the most remote woods little thinks that the bees which are humming so industriously on the rare flower he is plucking for his herbarium, in some out-of-the-way nook, are, like himself, ramblers from the village, perhaps from his own yard, come to get their honey for his hives.'" Here Preston inserts ellipses and continues from Thoreau's Sept. 30, 1852 journal entry with five sentences, beginning with this one: "I feel the richer for this experience." "At Walden Pond no natural phenomenon was too insignificant to interest Thoreau. An epic battle between red and black ants, narrated as a Homeric formicomachia, produces a meditation on power. Unusual for Thoreau, the bee could prompt less pleasant ruminations: the shape of the gluttonous bee-larva is retained in the adult insect form: 'the abdomen under the wings... still represents the larva,' he notes, making the grubby appetite stage latent in the aerial adult anatomy. 'The gross feeder,' he concludes,' is the man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.' This could be a description of the hive: a nation without fancy or imagination." (The ellipses are Preston's.)

From an article about maple syrup in the Winter 2006 issue of Gastronomica ("'Pure' maple syrup?," by Matthew Holmes):

"Living now in small-town New Brunswick, I no longer need to leave the city in order to see the maple declare the seasons, 'run[ning] up its scarlet flag on that hillside, to show that it has finished its summer work before all other trees' (as Thoreau wrote) or giving us that first taste of spring in March." [A footnote cites HDT's September 27, 1857 journal entry.]

From Richard Hughes Seager's Encountering the Dharma: Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Gakkai, and the Globalization of Buddhist Humanism (University of California Press, 2006):

"[From] Dr. Lawrence Carter, chaplain at the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College... I [got] a crash course on the historical-spiritual connections among Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman, a legacy of nonviolent protest that found its ultimate American expression in King."

How many errors can you find in the following excerpt from Stanley E. Flink's Sentinel Under Siege: The Triumphs and Troubles of America's Free Press (Westview Press, 1997)?: "Words are the voices of memory, making the past available. Henry David Thoreau, in the early 1840s, was visited in Concord, Massachusetts, by a reporter who wanted to get the transcendentalist's view of a new device called the telegraph. 'The President of the United States,' the reporter said excitedly. 'sent a message to the Mayor of Baltimore in a matter of minutes.' Thoreau, the story goes, pondered this news soberly and then asked, 'What did the President say?"

A footnote confusingly cites three sources (perhaps the latter two are the sources cited by the first one): "Cited in Frank McCullough, Nieman Reports, no.2 (Summer 1995): 56; Bradford Torry and Francis H. Allen, eds. The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949); Walter Harding, The Days of Thoreau [sic] (New York: Knopf, 1965).

Here's Walden: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

Harding's biography is titled The Days of Henry Thoreau, for starters.

Thoreau’s opinion of the telegraph comes up again in Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History (Hill and Wang, 2006): "The telegraph enabled people spread across vast spaces to live contemporary lives. If Henry David Thoreau famously doubted that Maine had anything to communicate by telegraph to Texas, many thought otherwise."

Bender also writes, "One peculiarity of the American Revolution is that it failed to inspire much taste for a revolutionary tradition. American elites were certain that all the necessary revolutionizing had been completed in the eighteenth century. Rufus Choate, a leader in the American bar, made this clear in a lecture at Harvard Law School in 1845. The age of 'reform is over; its work is done.' Of course, four years later Henry David Thoreau wrote his famous essay 'Civil Disobedience,' but if Choate and Thoreau represent extremes, most Americans agreed with the former rather than the latter."

Speaking of errors, here are a few lines from Robert I. Friedman's Zealots for Zion: Inside Israel's West Bank Settlement Movement (Random House, 1992):

"In 1987, I led a group of Americans on a tour of Israel and the occupied territories on behalf of The Nation magazine. We spent a day in Ofra, and our guide was Sherill Blass, the Barnard graduate who had been one of Ofra's pioneers. Our group sat... as Sherill, who by then called herself Shifra, told us that Ofra was founded, in part, on the principles of Walden Pond [sic], and that Gush Emunim was a movement that had borrowed from the teachings of Emerson and Thoreau. Indeed, Gush Emunim was, according to Shifra, a kind of Orthodox back-to-nature movement."

Further error: Bob Henderson's Every Trail Has a Story: Heritage Travel in Canada (Toronto; Natural Heritage Books, 2005) describes a book by P.G. Downes that "gives us stories of the time when white travellers were informed by indigenous peoples living on the land.... His enthusiasm flows freely off the pages of Sleeping Island. Indeed it could just as easily have been Downes and not fellow Massachusetts traveller, Henry David Thoreau, who on his deathbed was heard to have repeatedly whispered, "Moose and Indians." Oy, oy, oy.

From a chapter titled "Hermits I'd Love to Have Met": "There are 'fools for Christ' who wandered the Syrian desert weighed down in chains, transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau who was really a social hermit, and the hired hermits of the 1700s who were meant to inhabit English gentlemen's hermitage gardens where they might entertain picnic guests." The Thoreau reference here is footnoted and the note cites Isabel Colegate's A Pelican in the Wilderness as a source for Thoreau's having "three chairs in his cabin at Walden Pond, 'one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.'"

From Curtis Sittenfeld's novel Prep (Random House, 2005), a coming-of-age story about an Indiana girl attending a prep school in Massachusetts: "Near the end of class, Ms. Moray gave us our assignment, which was to read the first thirty pages of Walden, and, by the following Monday, to write two hundred words about a place where we went to reflect on our lives."

From Tom Slayton's "Forward" [sic] to Ethan Hubbard's Salt Pork and Apple Pie: A Collection of Essays and Photographs about Vermont Old-Timers (Montpelier, VT: RavenMark, 2004): "Every one of these photographs opens a special and unusual world... "that doesn't march to the beat of any of contemporary society's many urgent drummers."

David Dellinger's From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter (Marion, SD: Rose Hill Books, 1993) mentions "Aunt Neva, who wasn't really my aunt at all. She was my grandmother's second cousin..." Dellinger writes of Aunt Neva, who never married, "She seemed a lot happier than my mother or any of the other women I knew, even if she wasn't supposed to be. She gave me books by Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, and she treated me as an equal."

Toward the end of his memoir Dellinger writes, "[O]ne of the more sensible things that distracts me from saying what I do is that what most people do for a living rarely tells who they would want to be....Ask someone who has just been levitating on top of a mountain or listening to Mozart anywhere how eager s/he is to get back to the job s/he will have to go to the next time the alarm clock rings. Thoreau refused to have a job like that, and the alarm clock that goes with it."

Lillian S. Robinson's In the Canon's Mouth: Dispatches from the Culture Wars (Indiana University Press, 1997) includes several Thoreauvian references. The first appears in a review of the 1990 edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature:

"... I wish The Heath Anthology of American Literature had been available back then.... That semester's streetwise students not only distrusted Thoreau, they maintained that they'd picked up their skepticism from me. (Some of my best friends are white male Harvard grads, and Thoreau, I was ready to swear, has always been one of my heroes!) They were crazy about Malcolm X. Even students who considered the humanities a conspiracy perpetrated by the institution, their instructor, and the authors of the syllabus read the entire Autobiography rather than just the assigned chapters."

From Robinson's review of Paul Lauter's Canons and Contexts: "Lauter believes that 'the primary goal of study, and particularly of literature, is to shatter... [the] 'woodenness' [of head and heart that Thoreau speaks of], to open our heads and hearts to what needs doing in a world near the beginning of its better history." [Robinson's ellipses and brackets]

In "The Culture, Stupid," Robinson writes about speaking in March 1994 at an open hearing of her local public library board "on the issue of retaining the book Daddy's Roommate in the children's section. "In a letter to the editor, I followed this speech by addressing an argument to which the opponents of Daddy's Roommate gave great weight: since sodomy is illegal in that state, countenancing that book would be encouraging children to 'pick and choose' among the laws to respect and those to ignore. Someday, I said, sodomy will no longer be illegal in Virginia, and when the law is changed it will be by people who did 'pick and choose,' people who were free to read--to read the Bible and Daddy's Roommate, King's 'Letter from Birmingham Jail,' Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience,' and Baldwin's Another Country. (Always provide reading lists. You never know when someone is hearing about these books for the first time.)"

Cover story of the May/June 2006 issue of Backwoods Home magazine: "Walden Pond: The Solar Version." It's part one of a two-part article on building a cabin unlike Thoreau's, with freezer, clothes washer, and other electric appliances.

Robert Frenay's Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006) quotes Joseph Wood Krutch's The Desert Year without going to the source (he takes the quote from Things Precious and Wild: A Book of Nature Quotations, edited by John K. Terres; Fulcrum, 1991), in a section titled "Moving Toward the Light": "Both Wordsworth and Thoreau knew that when the light of common day seemed no more than common it was because something was lacking in them, not because of something lacking in it, and what they asked for was eyes to see a universe they knew was worth seeing. For that reason theirs are the best of all attempts to describe what real awareness consists of... that the rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at but the moment when we are capable of seeing it."

Issue #20 of The Reader (Winter 2005), a literary journal published by the University of Liverpool School of English, includes an essay by Ann Stapleton titled "Henry David Thoreau: The True Harvest," for the most part a run of the mill, if accurate summation of Thoreau's life and work. Most notably Stapleton asserts that Emily Dickinson "was admiring enough of Thoreau to pen a poem about the 'fighting for his Life' he was doing 'In that Campaign inscrutable / Of the Interior' in which she, too, had enlisted..."

"Thoreau's work is a hymn to interconnectedness," Stapleton writes, and then quotes a three-sentence passage from "House-Warming" (not cited here) that begins "I went a-graping to the river meadows...

The essay is followed by four paragraphs by Emerson about Thoreau, from the August 1862 issue of Atlantic Monthly.

The 1996 updated edition of Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, by Robert N. Bellah and others (University of California Press, 1996) includes several Thoreauvian references. For example, Emerson's "Self-Reliance" is quoted and then an uncredited author writes, "His friend Thoreau would push this teaching to its extreme in his classic experiment at Walden Pond."

From a chapter on "religious individualism": "Many of the most influential figures in nineteenth-century American culture could find a home in none of the existing religious bodies, though they were attracted to the religious teachings of several traditions. One thinks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman."

And: "The western margin of the United States has long represented a national future in both promotional and imaginative writing. As Henry David Thoreau famously commented in 1851, his feet always took him westward when he stepped out for a walk, for 'the future lies that way and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side.'" (A footnote cites "Walking.")

From Bob Black's Beneath the Underground (Feral House, 1994):

"When I was in junior high school, in the 60's, we were assigned Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience.' Spontaneously and as one the students (I was probably one of them) rose up -- this was in a public school in a middle-class liberal suburb -- to denounce Thoreau's anarchist madness. The teacher didn't train us to react that way. It came naturally to adolescents habituated to hierarchy by schooling and the family, even if (as was the case) they believed in civil rights and soon smoked pot and opposed the Vietnam War. The teacher had to play Devil's -- that is, Thoreau's -- Advocate as no student would. Now Thoreau's essay is as good an introduction to constructive anarchism as any. He is no revolutionary. He has the added advantages of being a native-born Yankee, not an immigrant and/or Jew, and enjoying consecration by the curriculum as a classic American author. He does not even use the stigmatizing word 'anarchism.' If he met with unanimous dismissal it is because his ideas were unpopular. They still are."

In the same essay Black writes about finding nineteen books on anarchism in the Albany, New York, public library, then adds: "Moreover, the subject heading [anarchism] seriously understates the anarchist presence on the shelves. Thoreau does not appear there, nor do various historical and cultural studies by sometime anarchists like Paul Goodman, George Woodcock and Herbert Read."

From "Let the Quips Fall Where They May," Black's review of the "Radical Humor" issue of Cultural Correspondence, and Paul Buhle's Labor's Joke Book: "[R]adicals can't help but be humorous.... It was Marx who protested, 'I am not a Marxist!' And it was Bakunin who, standing Voltaire on his head, averred: 'If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him." Fourier and even Thoreau had spasms of sarcasm."

Rubin R. Naiman's Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening (Minneapolis: Syren Book Company, 2006) includes material on lucid dreaming, with a paragraph that quotes Thoreau:

"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake,' said Henry David Thoreau.

A chapter titled "Dawn: A Gradual Awakening" also quotes Thoreau after discussing "rude awakenings" and "[m]illions of Americans [who] routinely access morning news within moments of arising, through television, newspapers, radio, and the Internet."

Finally: "How else might we awaken? Henry David Thoreau offers another view in Walden: 'I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning... I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness....I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been.' For a few luckier souls, morning awakening is a slow and gentle process characterized by lingering in that limbic zone between dreaming and waking. Even if we do not take a margin as broad as Thoreau's, a good morning finds us patient with, and even enjoying, our low energy as well as our lack of orientation to the day. We are aware of and happy to explore our grogginess." [The ellipses are Naiman’s; he.removed "having taken my accustomed bath" and "while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time."]

A Thoreau epigraph opens a section in James H. Austin's Zen-Brain Reflections (MIT Press, 2006) titled "Self/Other Frames of Reference; Laboratory Correlates?": "Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden

From Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia (Summit Books, 1977):

"In the 1860s W.H. Hudson came to Rio Negro looking for the migrant birds that wintered around his home in La Plata. Years later he remembered the trip through the filter of his Notting Hill boarding-house and wrote a book so quiet and sane it makes Thoreau seem a ranter."

Terry Gifford's Reconnecting With John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice (University of Georgia Press, 2006) contains several Thoreauvian references. One is when Gifford writes about "the first and unintentional publication of Muir's writing," in the Boston Recorder of December 22, 1866, where James Butler, one of Muir's teachers, quoted a Muir letter he'd taken from the house of his friend Jeanne Carr:

"Muir's name had not even been mentioned by 'Prof. J. D. Butler,' who began his introduction to Muir's work, in a piece titled 'Botanical Enthusiasm,' with the words: 'A young Wisconsin gatherer of simples [sic] seems not a whit behind Thoreau as a scrutinizer and votary of nature.'"

In a chapter titled "Walking Into Narrative Scholarship," Gifford asserts, "Frankly, for Muir, Thoreau's essay 'Walking' must have barely scratched the surface of an understanding of the meaning of walking. More than Thoreau, Muir understood what the complete experience of walking in a landscape could be for a writer."

Frankly. Sheesh.

"Are You a Pantheist?," by Anjula Razdan, Utne magazine, July/August 2003, lists Thoreau's name with others:

"If you see divinity in a moonlit sky or a field full of daylilies; if a walk outdoors fills you with reverence more than stepping into a grand cathedral, synagogue, or mosque, chances are good that you are a pantheist. If so, you’re in good company. Albert Einstein, Georgia O’Keeffe, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Hawking, Sitting Bull, and Mikhail Gorbachev are just some of the notables who have counted themselves as pantheists, subscribing to the fundamental notion that nature and the universe merit deep reverence and awe."

Razdan also writes, "Some pantheists choose to celebrate solstices and equinoxes and Thoreau’s birthday; others... choose to spend at least half an hour every day exploring nature..."

In David W. Orr's Earth in Minds: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Island Press, 2004), Orr proposes education reforms that might require, for example, students to live on a river for a time, "swim in it, canoe it, watch it in its various seasons, study its wildlife..." Orr writes, "Among the precedents for the kind of experience I am proposing are Thoreau's Walden, Aldo Leopold's approach to natural history, Annie Dillard's (1974) sojourn at Tinker Creek, John Hanson Mitchell's (1984) study of 15,000 years on a square mile in Massachusetts, and William Least Heat Moon's study of Chase County, Kansas..."

Orr's chapter 15 ("Professionalism and the Human Prospect") begins with a Thoreau epigraph (source not provided): "The mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all out thought shall be tinged with triviality."

And his chapter 22 ("Prices and the Life Exchanged: Costs of the U.S. Food System") begins: "'The cost of a thing,' Thoreau once wrote, 'is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.' Thoreau knew what some have yet to discover: the difference between price and cost."

Later in the chapter, under a section subtitled "Toward an Honest Food System," there's another instance of Thoreau listed in a string of names. Orr lumps HDT in with a group that includes some I'd never encountered before: "[T]here isanother p[attern in American history that we might dust off and put to work I am referring to the minority tradition represented by Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, Liberty Hyde Bailey, F.H. King, J.I. Rodale, E.H. Faulkner, Russell Lord, Paul Sears, Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Marty Strange, and many others."

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