Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

October 2006

The jacket copy for Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvoes From an American Iconoclast, a book of selected letters by author Edward Abbey, edited by David Petersen (Milkweed Editions, 2006), quotes reviewers who have compared Abbey to the likes of Cervantes and Mencken, and labeled him (among other things) “Huck Finn and Henry Thoreau wrapped into one.”

A google.com search shows that the source of the Huck Finn comparison is the May 18, 2004 entry of Pondblog, written by Bermuda-based columnist Gavin Shorto.

Edward Abbey’s 1988 book One Life at a Time, Please echoes the famous line attributed to Thoreau by Franklin Sanborn, in response to a sickroom visit by Parker Pillsbury in 1862, after Pillsbury suggested that Thoreau might be able to see the opposite shore of a dark river: “One world at a time.”

That line appears without attribution in Chris Dodge’s chapbook Present Perfect (Dorchester Dog Hip Press, 2006):

“Two ravens squawk and depart from the top of a red rock cliff. I perch in their place for a time and look out over the world: Oberg Lake, snow-covered, to the northwest, a valley of birch below, Moose Mountain to the northeast, Superior to the east, and everything beyond, the rest of the Sawtooth Range, the lesser great lakes, Canadia, Wapusk Land, and Xanadu.

One world at a time.”

Lawrence Sutin’s All is Change: The Two-Thousand Year Journey of Buddhism to the West (Little, Brown; scheduled to be published August 30, 2006) includes a chapter titled “Transcendentalists, Christian Missionaries and Asian Buddhist Immigrants to America,” with material on Emerson and Thoreau.

William Lansing Brown’s “Why John Brown Matters” (American Book Review, March/April 2006) is another review of David S. Reynolds’ John Brown, Abolitionist that mentions Thoreau. “Reynolds writes that the slaughter at Pottawatomie hardened the thinking of ‘previously mild reformers’ such as Thoreau and Garrison,” the reviewer writes. “After the tipping point of Bleeding Kansas, Reynolds informs us, the words of Thoreau and Emerson began to take on a new exigency, sounding like clarion calls to insurrection on behalf of Brown’s ‘holy war’ against slavery. In this light, Thoreau’s turning ‘full circle,’ as Reynolds explains it, ‘to promote the nation’s most violent abolitionist’ seems less a radical change than a logical outgrowth of his thinking, especially in light of a speech given at an abolitionist rally in Boston on July 4, 1854 (and quoted by Reynolds), during which Thoreau had shocked his listeners by comparing the Fugitive Slave Act to a ‘venomous reptile’ whose natural habitat ‘is in the dirt,’ likened the press to a gurgling ‘sewer’ clogged with ‘slime,’ and exhorted his audience to follow ‘a higher law than the Constitution. Thoreau said he felt that he had ‘lost’ his country, and concluded, ‘My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.’“

Bill Henderson’s Simple Gifts: Great Hymns: One Man’s Search for Grace (Free Press, 2006) exaggerates about the Thoreau replica house:

“Simplicity is not a feature of many Sunday morning sermons these days.... Perhaps simplicity is too threatening to us. Many churchgoers are well-heeled, with too much to hide and too many shoes. However, a sort of ersatz simplicity is fashionable in American life. Thoreau has always been a secular saint, the builder of that cabin by the pond that we all run to in spirit when commercial clutter overwhelms us. But, as I discovered on a recent trip to Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, the replica of Threau’s shack is surrounded by howling highways. Thoreau’s small haven is lost in the din, obliterated by commerce, as are his ideals.”

Henderson also writes: “Today we seem anxious to get rid of our heritage, even the past of a few decades ago. We are taught by the digerati that speed is all, since the race for riches goes to the swiftest. We worship at the church of what’s happening now. We invest in faxes, e-mails, Internet connections--whatever supplies instant information. And of course, as Thoreau warned us, machines drive us, not the other way around.”

Martin Murie’s “Losing Solitude” column in February/March 2006 issue of The Canyon Country Gazette mentions Thoreau as it often has in the past:

“The wild is of us and everywhere; it is most definitely not a thing that you boldly venture in and take. Not a Holy Grail. My guess is that nature is a very complicated situation, beautiful at times, and always, ultimately mysterious, and that we are inside it and there’s no escape. Thoreau spent a lifetime trying to sort this out.”

Murie’s “Losing Solitude” column in the August/September issue of the Zephyr includes some words under the rubric “HENRY THOREAU, AGAIN.” Thoreau, Murie writes, “spent a good part of his life writing and lecturing, trying to get people to take nature seriously. Now, about 150 years after his death, we can safely say that he is as relevant today as in his own time. Why? Because he was so continually conscious of his society, his fellow American empire builders, what they did, how they lived. I keep finding evidence that Henry had an unusual capacity to find new tangents in his thinking life. A full-of-odd-thoughts adventurer…” Murie notes that he addressed a conference “dedicated to discussion of Thoreau and Rachel Carson,” held in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, in mid-June 2006, and calling his presentation a “brief spiel on Henry.”

In an interview in the August/September 2006 issue of The Canyon Country Zephyr, artist John Depuy talks about his Korean War experience, being injured by an exploding mine, and then going AWOL, hitchhiking cross country, and getting a job in Flagstaff. “I was going under the name of Thoreau then,” Depuy says. “I was John Thoreau for my hero Henry…”

The apocryphal tale of Thoreau and Emerson--and the exchange they allegedly had during the short time Thoreau was in jail--continues to thrive. From an unsigned op-ed piece in the Ithaca (New York) Journal, January 27, 2006, titled “St. Patrick’s Four: Anti-war group belongs in prison”:

“What the St. Pat’s Four did was illegal. They knew it....Of course, they aren’t the first Americans to be right and find themselves behind bars.

In July 1846, Henry David Thoreau was walking into Concord, Mass. from his small cabin near Walden Pond. On his way he met a local man, a friend, whose many jobs included tax collector and constable. The man reminded Thoreau that he had not paid the required poll tax for several years. Thoreau, who like anti-war Congressman Abraham Lincoln opposed what he believed was President Polk’s preconceived and imperialistic war with Mexico and its threat to expand slavery, said he had no plans to pay the tax to support an unjust government. When told he could be jailed, Thoreau insisted on it, right then and there. He spent one night in a cell and resisted his release when an anonymous benefactor paid the tax for him. In the famous essay that sprang from that night, ‘Civil Disobedience,’ Thoreau insisted that, if government commits injustice, the ‘true place for a just man is ... prison.’

Legend has it that Thoreau’s friend, fellow war critic and slavery opponent Ralph Waldo Emerson was appalled by this act of defiance, and pressed Thoreau for an explanation of why he went to in jail. Thoreau’s reply was direct and challenging.

‘Why did you not?’“

From the back cover of the March/April 2006 issue of Orion magazine:

“Perceiving the injustices of slavery and the Mexican-American War, Thoreau wrote, ‘Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.’ In the forests of the Northwest--as in so many abused places--individuals are giving themselves over to the defense of something, some place, that they cherish. In this issue of Orion, Christopher LaMarca reveals what love of country looks like today.”

Lamarca’s photograph on page 65, apparently depicting arrests of logging road blockaders, is accompanied by a longer quotation from “Civil Disobedience,” ten sentences, that begins with “Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them...”

Dept. of Misquotes:

The “Dream Deluxe” sleep mask, sold by Dreamessentials.com, comes with a wrapper on which an ostensible Thoreau quote is printed: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.” These lines, now widely spread via the Internet (85,000 google.com hits), make Thoreau seem prescriptive when in fact the actual lines he wrote in Walden are not: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Dept. of Sheer Error:

Here’s a 22-year-old Minneapolis-based college graduate myspace.com user who asserts that Thoreau “lived in Minneapolis for a while”...

John Tinker, an Iowan living in New England, writes in “New England: You Gotta’ Problem With That?” (Wapsipinicon Almanac #12) that “In high school I read Emerson and Thoreau, and was impressed by transcendentalism,” but doesn’t say how he was impressed. Insubstantially, perhaps.

The introduction to R. Bruce Hull’s Infinite Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2006) contains a section titled “Unifiers: Thoreau and Leopold” with four paragraphs on Thoreau. Hull says these two “early and foundational environmental thinkers” were “unifiers, not polarizers,” describes Thoreau’s economic values, and describes what Walden Pond is like today, noting that “[s]teel-wire fences and strongly worded signs direct visitors to narrow trails...”

Hull also devotes over three pages late in the book (pp. 196-200) to Thoreau, following a section on Thomas Jefferson and preceding one on environmental education, plunked down there, it seems, like a meteorite, without transition at either end, and reading like a term paper. Of most interest to me is a footnote wherein Hull suggests that Thoreau read Marx: “Thoreau was imbedded in and influenced by a growing critique of industrialization from both sides of the Atlantic (i.e. [sic], Karl Marx, Emerson, Carlyle); see Marx (1964, chap 4.)” The latter cites Leo Marx’s “Environmental degradation and the ambiguous social role of science and technology,” Journal of the History of Biology, 25:449-68, a piece said to be republished in Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Edited by Jill Ker Conway, Kenneth Keniston, and Leo Marx (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), but I’m skeptical. Let me know if you come across evidence in support of this assertion.

From Bill Kauffman’s Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), in a chapter about artist Grant Wood: “Might artists need not subvention, or direction from above or government checks in the mail, but simply to be left alone? Henry Thoreau would say so. His doggerel could have been penciled in response to the NEA’s Guidelines for Grantees:

Any fool can make a rule
And every fool will mind it.

The source (Journals, Feb. 3, 1860) is not cited.

Later in the book Kauffman writes, “My daughter’s lemonade stand is a great enterprise; the cabinetmaker’s shop is a great enterprise; the town historical society’s new museum is a great enterprise; the undertakings of the warped and scrofulous men who rule us call to mind Thoreau’s remark on the pyramids, ‘There is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.’“

Kauffman has quietly elided from the original: “As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them …”

Robert C. Williams’ Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom (New York University Press, 2006) includes a ten-page section titled “Thoreau, Fuller, and the Literary Free Market,” about half of which focuses on Greeley’s relationship with Thoreau (pages 82-87). Williams writes, “As with Emerson and Fuller, Greeley would puff Thoreau’s work in the pages of the Tribune...”

A paragraph on page 177 describes Greeley’s “reprinting” of Thoreau’s “Slavery in Massachusetts” speech, as well as his role in helping Thoreau with Walden.

The September/October issue of ForeWord, a magazine reviewing books from small and independent presses, includes several Thoreauvian refererences.

A review by Joe Taylor of Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom asserts that the newspaper Greeley edited, The New York Tribune, "reflected Greeley's flirtation with the associationist ideas of Charles Fourier and the transcendendalist works of Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Thoreau."

A review by Aimee Houser of Kit Bakke's Miss Alcott's E-mail: Yours For All Kinds of Reform (David R. Godine, 2006) notes that Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne "were friends and sometimes neighbors of Louisa May Alcott's family in Concord, Massachusetts."

A review of Kathleen Hall's A Life in Balance: Nourishing the Four Roots of True Happiness notes that the author "is one of those rare people who who actually did step off the fast track to live a Thoreau-like life in a cabin next to a small lake in Georgia."

Two small ads appear for two titles edited by David S. Parsons and published under the "Thoreau Samplers" imprint, Thoreau Unmuzzled! A Free Speech Friendly Thoreau Sampler for Patriots, Pundits & Provocateurs and The All Natural, 100% Wild Thoreau Sampler: Excerpts from the Best Nature Writings of Henry David Thoreau. The latter has a publication date of March 2007 and the thumbnail graphic of its cover has a different subtitle than that given in the ad copy: "Selections from the Best Nature Writings of H. D. Thoreau."

From Anne Firth Murray’s Paradigm Found: Leading and Managing for Positive Change (New World Library, 2006): “Many people have asked me: ‘How did you actually start a new organization? How did you start The Global Fund for Women?’ My answer is usually something like this: ‘I just began. We just did what needed to be done.’ In moving forward to actually create a program, even though your actions may be modest, keep in mind Henry David Thoreau’s dictum: ‘For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be; what is once well done is done forever.’“ A footnote cites Walden and “Civil Disobedience” (Signet, 1999). The quote is from “Civil Disobedience.”

Deborah E. McDowell’s “The Self in Bloom: Walker’s Meridian“ in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad Press, 1993), describes Walker’s character Meridian as being a person whose “suffering takes an extremely ascetic form congruent with her nascent sainthood,” adding, “She restricts herself to the ‘gross necessaries’ of life, to borrow from Thoreau.”

In Will Tuttle’s The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony (New York: Lantern Books, 2005) the author says that for the first 22 years of his life he ate large quantities of “animal flesh, eggs, and dairy products,” but did “encounter seeds of inspiration” to eat differently.” One of these “seeds” was being born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts. Tuttle discusses Emerson and Thoreau, asserting that “Thoreau had the largest library of books on Eastern philosophy in the United States at that time” and quotes him: “I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came into contact with the more civilized.”

The book’s bibliography cites Walden and Other Writings (Bantam, 1981).

Previous issues: August 2006 … September 2006

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