Thoreau Today

"[B]y 1920, Sinclair would admit that he had been wrong about the war; Debs had been right. And as Debs still sat in prison, Sinclair imagined a meeting with him. It would have been a lot like the meeting between Emerson and Thoreau in jail about fifty years earlier [sic]. Emerson famously asked Thoreau why he was willing to go to jail for refusing to pay taxes that would have funded the United States' takeover of Mexico's land, including Texas. Thoreau retorted that he couldn't understand why Emerson wasn't in jail."

Here's Walter Harding on the topic:from "The Influence of Civil Disobedience," by in The Western Thoreau Centenary: Selected Papers (Utah State University Press, Jan. 1963, v.10 #1):

"When, according to the legend at least, Emerson asked Thoreau what he was doing in jail, Thoreau, disappointed that Emerson himself was not willing to take a strong stand against slavery, replied, 'Why are you not here?'

I suppose that little anecdote is one of the most famous in American literature. Some years ago when Henry Seidel Canby wrote his biography of Thoreau, he did his best to demolish that legend by demonstrating that it would have been almost impossible for Emerson to have visited Thoreau in jail that evening. But the story has been handed down in the Emerson family itself as authentic and the interview could have just as logically occurred after Thoreau's release the next morning as in the jail itself.

Even that legend--if legend it be--has had its own influence. I was amused a few years ago to pick up the daily newspaper and discover that in the comic strip 'Bring Up Father' Jiggs was calling on one of his old pals in jail for drunkenness, and when Jiggs asked Paddy how come he was in jail, Paddy's reply was, 'How come you're not?'"

I think this last note is further reason to be skeptical of the Emerson story.

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man [sic] is also in prison....It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,--the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor." The elision (of one sentence) and the "sic" are the authors', it seems, though that's unclear since they cite not Thoreau but Dorothee Soelle's The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance(Fortress Press, 2001).

In a 26 Sept. 1979 letter to The Nation, Abbey criticizes a "spiteful, mean, petty" review of Kurt Vonnugut's novel Jailbird, and calls Vonnegut "one of America's basic artists, a true and worthy heir to the grand tradition of Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Traven, Tom Wolfe (the real Tom Wolfe, I mean) and Steinbeck."

In a letter to author John Gardner, dated 5 April 1982, after having read Gardner's On Moral Fiction. Abbey writes, "It is a writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be, as Isaiah was, and St Francis, and Diogenes, and Rabelais, and Villon, and Thoreau and Mark Twain and Tolstoy, to name but a handful, the severest critics of our own societies."

Heading a litany of 39 American authors that Abbey sent to Earth First! Journal on 6 October 1982, calling it a "reading list for Nature Lovers, resistance fighters, 'deep ecologists' and regular working environmentalists": "Thoreau (of course)..."

A letter to author Annie Dillard (28 December 1983) addresses "[y]ou mystics and transcendentalists" and asks questions such as "What is the true subject, or point, or premise, of literary art?" He answers his own question by citing five authors, including Thoreau: "[T]his above all, says Thoreau, over and over again, give me the truth, the truth however cruel rather than a comforting fabrication."

In a letter dated 5 July 1984 to his publisher at Holt, John Macrae III, Abbey says he'd had dinner with Larry McMurtry, who, he says, "feels sorry for his part in branding me as one more goddamned Son of Thoreau."

On 27 April 1988 Abbey sent Robert Houston three reading lists, the third labeled GREATEST BOOKS OF ALL TIME, SO FAR. That long list begins with Montaigne's Essays, Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, and Thoreau's Walden (and other essays).

A long letter dated 18 June 1984 to one Karen Evans channels Thoreau twice, without mentioning his name. Abbey writes, "Those who waste their whole lives hungering for fantastic and occult sensations are suffering from retarded social development and stunted imaginations," then adds, "One world and one life at a time, please," echoing Thoreau. (One Life at a Time, Please would four years later become the title of an Abbey collection of essays published by Holt.) Abbey also writes, "I've led a mostly furtive, cowardly, reclusive life, preaching loudly from the sidelines and avoiding danger," then adds, again echoing Thoreau, "If I regret anything, it is my good behavior."

How many people have been referred to "the Thoreau of [fill in the blank]"? Abbey himself warrants such comparisons now. The editor of HopeDance magazine, Bob Banner, writes of Jim Merkel, a San Luis Obispo, California activist "who was very involved in alternative transportation and living simply. In fact he was considered to be the Edward Abbey of the Central Coast." Steve Brock, reviewing Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (Scribner, 1995) calls Hogan "the Ed Abbey of the North." (Who will the next Linda Hogan be?)

Irish author John Eglinton has been called "the Thoreau of the suburbs." (http://dl.lib.brown.edu:8080/exist/mjp/display.xq?docid=mjp.2005.01.014) A review by Adeldeid Fischer of Jennifer Price's Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America claims that Price is "a self-proclaimed "Thoreau of the mall." (Price's exact quote is this: "I had never planned to become a Thoreau of the mall.")

An article posted on the web site of the Scituate (Massachusetts) Historical Society, "Land of the Men of Kent," by C. Wellington Furlong, refers to one "Edward Wesley Cushman, philosopher, the Thoreau of the South Shore."

Oleh Lysheya has been called "the Ukrainian Henry Thoreau of the beginning of the 21st century."

Eric Blehm, author of The Last Season (HarperCollins, 2006), says that when he read the diaries of his subject Randy Morgenson, "It was as if I'd discovered the Henry David Thoreau of the High Sierra."

Henry Corrigan, in a review of Janisse Ray's Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land (Chelsea Green, 2006), calls Marjory Stoneman Douglas, "the Thoreau of the Everglades."

Such comparisons are not new. Mary Clemmer's Ten years in Washington: Life and Scenes in the National Capital, as a Woman Sees Them (A. D. Worthington, 1873) speaks of John Burroughs as being the Thoreau of the Treasury Department," gentle as one of his own birds." Painter Van Dearing Perrine (1868-1855) has been called "the Thoreau of the Palisades." Environmental artist Robert Smithson has been labeled "the Thoreau of the junkyards." And the anonymous author of a book titled Evasion (Crimethinc, 2003) has been called "the Thoreau of the alley."

Just as it's not only writers thus compared to Thoreau, it's not just humans: A reviewer of a graphic novel about Bigfoot (Graham Roumeu's Me Write Book; Plume, 2005) refers to Bigfoot as being "the Thoreau of the simian set."

People who predated Thoreau have even been thus compared. An English translation of Kamo no Chomei's Hojoki, by Kumagusu Minakata and F. Victor Dickins, published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, April 1905, was titled "A Japanese Thoreau of the Twelfth Century" (referring to Chomei).

A Japanese Thoreau of the 20th century was noted in American Literary Scholarship: An Annual 2000, an issue edited by David M. Robinson and titled Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism. Noboru Saito has an article herein titled "The Poet Called a Japanese Thoreau,'' (pages 204–10) presenting "an overview of Hajime Nozawa (1904–1945), a poet influenced by Thoreau's Walden."

In a July 1, 2004 Maverick Philosopher blog post titled "Nature, God, Thoreau, Abbey and Idolatry," Bill Vallicella writes:

"Michael Gilleland quotes Thoreau, letter to Parker Pillsbury, April 1861:

'Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and, through her, God.'

Edward 'Cactus Ed' Abbey has been described as the Thoreau of the American Southwest. Had Cactus Ed been Henry David's editor, the quotation would have ended with 'Nature.'"

A review of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild in the February 1996 issue of Outside magazine ("Books: The Feral Sons," by Miles Harvey) begins: "In the January 1993 issue of Outside, in an article that was nominated for a National Magazine Award, contributing editor Krakauer reported on the bizarre life and death of Chris McCandless, an eccentric young idealist who starved to death while attempting the "ultimate adventure" of living off the land in the Alaskan bush. Some readers wrote in, voicing the opinion that McCandless was a modern-day son of Thoreau who was willing to die for his convictions; others charged that he was insane, villainously arrogant, or just plain suicidal."

Critic Sharon Bass writes about other critics of author John McPhee, "Lounsberry provides more of a traditional literary analysis than Roundy, 'McPhee as a son of Thoreau and Emerson.'"

"The industrialization and deforestation of the latter half of the nineteenth century prompted a few Americans to think about nature in new ways, laying the groundwork for the environmentalism of the twentieth century. Henry David Thoreau, the bard of Walden Pond, worshipped at the altar of nature, and raged against its exploitation by man. 'We need the tonic of wildness,' he wrote. 'We can never have enough of nature.' Nature was his God, his nurse, his balm, and he denounced the destruction of trees and animals the way others denounced the murder of people. What is a country, he asked, without rabbits and partridges. He rejected his era's anthropocentric worldview: 'I love Nature partly because she is not a man, but a retreat from him.' He loved all of Nature--even the most dismal swamps: 'I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum.'"

Grunwald follows with a paragraph about John Muir that begins, "Thoreau inspired devout preservationists like John Muir..." and then one about George Perkins Marsh that begins, "While Thoreau was meditating at Walden, George Perkins marsh was developing a less radical but no less alarmist philosophy of conservation..."

A couple of pages later Grunwald asserts that Teddy Roosevelt "maintained sympathy for both strains of conservationism--Thoreau's aesthetic and spiritual revulsion to all attacks on nature, as well as Marsh's more practical and ecological opposition to needless and overzealous attacks."

The first, dated August 13, 1859, under the heading "The Wise Simpletons": "Tolstoy to Rilke, who was pestering him about techniques in writings: 'If you want to write, write!' The dying Thoreau asked by some damn cleric if he was ready for the next world: 'One world at a time, please.' William Morris on politics: 'No man is wise enough to be another's master.'"

On Jan. 23, 1968, Abbey writes of "[g]ood ole gray fuddy-duddy J. W. Krutch... a bit of an equivocater [sic] on the Vietnam War issue--has he forgotten Thoreau?" (my ellipses and bracketed "sic")

Nov. 26, 1977: "[Annie] Dillard is, I believe, the only contemporary 'nature writer' who deliberately attempts to imitate [Thoreau]: the transcendentalist style, the high-flown (fly-blown) rhetoric, the raving about God. People who rave about God make me nervous." (Ed, how and where did Thoreau raved about God?)

October 1981, Abbey writes "Funeral instructions" to his wife Clarke, beginning with what he'd like done with his body. Next, he writes, "Ceremony? GUNFIRE! And--a little music, please: Jack Loeffler and his trumpet. Maybe a few readings from Thoreau, Whitman, Twain (something funny), Jeffers and/or Abbey, etc."

Feb. 2, 1989: Abbey quotes, "'I've gone for a little walk. Into the West. I'll be home by sunset.' --Thoreau? Ruess? who?"

In the essay "Reality in America," Trilling quotes one Edwin Berry Burgum who writes that Theodore Dreiser used diction "rich in colloquialism," unlike "the literary English, formal and bookish, of New England provincialism..." [my ellipses] Trilling judges, "This is mere fantasy. Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson were for the most part remarkably colloquial--they wrote, that is, much as they spoke, their prose was specifically American in quality and, except for occasional lapses, quite direct and simple." Trilling asserts that it was Dreiser who was bookish and lacked a sense of colloquial diction.

In an essay about George Orwell, Trilling names some American "literary figures" who "live their visions as well as write them, who are what they write, including Mark Twain, William James, Thoreau, Whitman, Henry Adams, "and Henry James, although posthumously and rather uncertainly."

How can one live a vision posthumously, I wonder.

An essay titled "The situation of the American Intellectual at the present time" (dated 1952) refers to the editors of Partisan Review and their citing "the tradition [in North American intellectual history] of critical nonconformism (going back to Thoreau and Melville...)" [my brackets]

An essay titled "The Leavis-Snow controversy" quotes C.P. Snow on the topic of "the response which literary men made to the Industrial Revolution": [I]intellectual persons did not comprehend what was happening. Certainly the writers didn't. Plenty of them shuddered away, as though the right course for a man of feeling was to contract out; some, like Ruskin and William Morris and Thoreau and Emerson and Lawrence, tried various kinds of fantacies, which were not much in effect more than screams of horror. It is hard to think of a writer of high class who really stretched his imaginative sympathy, who could see at once the hideous backstreets, the smoking chimneys, the internal price--and also the prospects of life that were opening out for the poor..." [Trilling's ellipses] Trilling differs, asserting, "Nothing could be further from the truth. No English writer of the nineteenth century, once he had become aware of the Industrial Revolution, ever contracted out."

Sullivan goes on to compare the American informative experiences of Frederick Delius who, he writes, had an approach to art that "was distinctly Emersonian and Thoreauvian; for him, life experienced immediately and ecstatically in nature was the source of art."

Perhaps the most "profound and prophetic insight of 'Civil Disobedience,'" says Carton, is Thoreau's perception that "not only is it possible to be 'sitting upon another man's shoulders' without knowing it, but in an increasingly interdependent and stratified society, such a position becomes the norm for many and comes to seem acceptable, even inevitable, for most."

Carton says he encourages his students to "sharpen their terms of resistance" to Thoreau's essay, but notes that these students incur a "soul tax" in reading it.

Last Child in the Woods: Why Children Need Nature, How It Was Taken from Them, and How to Get It Back, by Richard Louv (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005) was bound to have Thoreau appear somewhere in it. The book's Part I ("The New Relationship Between Children and Nature") begins with this epigraph, center-justified and in italics as here:

The book's Part 4 also begins with a Thoreauvian epigraph (after one from John Muir). The Thoreau quote (with Louv's ellipses): "Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence... The voice of nature is always encouraging."

Writing about New England wilderness, McLaughlin says, "When Thoreau and his ilk ventured into Northern New England a hundred and fifty years ago, it was a country as wild and dangerous as Alaska is today. But there has been a great deal of human intrusion here since then."

Later in his account of his month-long hike from the southern border of Vermont to Canada, McLaughlin notes, "'The infinite bustle of nature on a summer's noon, or the infinite silence of a summer's night, gives utterance to no dogma,' Thoreau once wrote in his journals. Tonight Pico Camp is consumed by that silence and I am only a watchful set of eyes and ears."

"In proportion as our inward life fails, we go constantly and desperately to the post office." ["Life Without Principle"]

"Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature." [Aug. 23, 1853 journal, plucked from a longer sentence]

"I took a walk on Spaulding's farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lightning up the opposite side of a stately pine wood." ["Walking" (Is that all the better Thoreauvian sunset quote you can glean, Mr. Kundtz?)]

"The wilderness is near as well as dear." [picked from a slightly longer sentence in the "Monday" chapter of A Week..._]

as azad
Burroughs's opinion of
and the concrete
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idealism of
influence of, on Buroughs
literary contribution of
as naturalist
reputation of
rhetoric of
as seeker of truth
sense of place of
solitude of
style of
as supernaturalist
wildness of

"Photography is commonly regarded as an instrument for knowing things. When Thoreau said, 'You can't say more than you can see,' he took for granted that sight had pride of place among the senses. But when, several generations later, Thoreau's dictum is quoted by Paul Strand to praise photography, it resonates with a different meaning. Cameras did not simply make it possible to apprehend more by seeing (through microphotography and teledetection). They changed seeing itself, by fostering the idea of seeing for seeing's sake. Thoreau still lived in a polysensual world, though one in which observation had already begun to acquire the stature of a moral duty. He was talking about a seeing not cut off from the other senses, and about seeing in context (the context he called Nature), that is, a seeing linked to certain presuppositions about what he thought was worth seeing. When Strand quotes Thoreau, he assumes another attitude toward the sensorium: the didactic cultivation of perception, independent of notions about what is worth perceiving, which animates all modernist movements in the arts."

Sontag also notes that photographer Edward Weston spent most of his life on "the California coast near Carmel, the Walden of the 1920s."

"At times I walk the trail slowly, like Thoreau's 'Sainte-Terrer, a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.' In 'Walking,' from his Natural History Essays, he goes on to say, 'They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.' At these times I am unafraid, regardless of storm or wind or torrent or darkness. Without fear, I am hopeful, peaceful, loving, and full of interest and passion. I am not consumed with myself--my worries, my shortcomings, my successes, my failures. I am aware of not feeling as burdened, of not creating suffering for myself in that moment, of being present, without even defining it as 'being in the now' or, indeed, 'being present.'"

"Above all, I thrilled to Walden. I read that brash, cranky, extravagant book as I had read the Bible, with a mixture of perplexity and clairvoyance. Much I did not understand. But I shivered in sympathy when Thoreau chased loons across the pond or traced the shapes of thawing mud or tracked the moon. When he proclaimed, 'Shams and delusions are esteemed for the soundest truths, while reality is fabulous,' I murmured yes, yes. Many passages lifted me up out of my chair and set me pacing, as when he confided, 'Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.' Other passages sent me outdoors to walk the streets of Providence, as when he exulted, 'This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself.'

In the chapter where Thoreau celebrated the gift of reading, I found the description of the impact Walden had on me: 'There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.' I dated a new era in my life from the reading of Walden. For here was a testament of a man who sought to live a purposeful life, who sensed the fashioning power at work in all that he saw and in his own depths, who never ceased to be astonished by reality, and who strove to record those moments, in the midst of ordinary nature, when he shook with a sense of awe."

"'[F]or our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them,' wrote Thoreau. 'And the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves.'"

"Thoreau agonized over whether his beans had any more right to life than the weeds he hoed out of the rows. The following year he took the weeds' side. His disapproval of agriculture was echoed in his disdain for all extraneous human-made comforts and his definition of extraneous was capacious. 'A lady once offered me a mat,' he sniffs in Walden, 'but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door.' Come on, Henry. No room for a mat?"

"Virtually every simplicity primer quotes Thoreau's beautiful passage from Walden, 'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, as see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.' My own feeling is that, avid naturalist though he was, Thoreau's own emphasis was more on the essential facts than on the woods. He conducted his experiment in rusticity with the intention of returning, vision clarified, to the fog of civilization."

"There are many prominent individuals whose names are susceptible to nicking but who somehow seem to have escaped the onus. The point is emphasized in a story told by Jack McPhaul, a Chicago newspaperman who wrote a book under the name he was accustomed to use as a byline. His publishers urged that he call himself John J. McPahul by reason of its being more distingue than Jack McPhaul. Mr. McPhaul later told the Saturday Review: 'Maybe they're right. Now that I think about it, authors under the name of Chuck Dickens, Hank James, Hank Thoreau, Wally Emerson, Andy Gide, or Jackie Keats probably would never have gotten off the ground.' He might have added Bobbie Lou Stevenson, Puddin'head Shakespeare, Manny Kant, and Bobbie Frost."

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