Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

September 2006

A greeting card published by KOCO New York Inc (copyright 2003) quotes Henry David Thoreau: “Love your life.” Ellipses might have more accurately been used than a period. The full quote is from the conclusion of Walden: “Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring.”

The cover image of the card is a collage of a woman’s shoe (drawn), leg (made of newsprint pieces), and skirt.

Thanks to Martha Furman for finding another Thoreauvian stationery item, this one published by The Unemployed Philosophers Guild, a die-cut image of Thoreau walking, with a sheet of stickers on which about a dozen short quotes appear (as well as images of a small log house, HDT’s signature, and an edition of Walden).

From the editorial note (“From the Editors”) on page 1 of the July/August 2006 issue of Orion magazine:

“By this date it is safe to declare that [Edward] Abbey has joined the continuum of authors, from Thoreau to Muir to Leopold to Carson, who have broadened and deepened Americans’ understanding of their connection to the natural world and the ways that connection is threatened. Each of those writers is casually considered a ‘nature’ writer, but each wrote passionately and effectively about the risks the society of the day posed to human freedom, human community, and the real world which makes both possible.

Understanding where Abbey is coming from--where all of these alleged nature writers are coming from--means understanding how and why their passion, their conviction, and their arguments are still vibrant, insistent, and--in this warming, warring, globalizing world--vitally important. It’s true that they found their grounding in nature, but these are no more nature writers than Walt Whitman or Mark Twain. They took the wisdom of their relationship to a place and wrote it large. They wrote out of nature and into the most significant aspects of human existence: love, spirit, place, care, passion, compassion, honor, duty. They understood that labels, pigeonholes, and special interests are human constructs that bear little relation to the way the natural world and human society actually work.

Each of these writers was distinctly and remarkably original. Each was rooted in a profound sense of values, and each viewed his or her world, and era, through those values, giving form and voice to a nascent impulse of the day...”

In William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice (Random House, 1976), the narrator, a writer named Stingo, discloses “a few… feverish notes” about his encounter with a literary woman whose frank discussion of sexuality excited him and who used “words I have never in my life heard spoken by a female,” including “such phrases as… ‘jerking himself off’ (something having to do with Thoreau).”

An article published anonymously on the Web site of Outside Bozeman: The Gallatin Valley’s Outdoor Journal, itself “taken from The Tributary, October 1998,” profiles Bozeman-based author David Quammen and quotes Quammen on the Montana dream: “‘A lot of people fall in love with Montana,’ he explains, ‘and they think that the way to express that love is to instantly come up here and buy twenty acres in the foothills, cut a road, put up a log cabin, and then say “Ha! I’m a Montanan. I’ve seen A River Runs Through It and The Horse Whisperer and I’ve got a fishing license! I’m the next closest thing to Jim Bridger, or Henry David Thoreau.” It’s all a charade, it’s all a fantasy, and it’s costing us a lot of landscape.’”

Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds (Perigee, 2006) includes four Thoreau cloud-related quotations, one from A Week and three from the journals (September 7, 1851; July 20, 1852; December 25, 1851).

Previous issues: August 2006

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