Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

April 2007

Kurt Andersen's "1848: When America Came of Age," an article in the March 19, 2007, issue of Time magazine, sees 1848 as a "rhyme" for today--and has a Thoreauvian reference in its last paragraph: "Henry David Thoreau, laying the groundwork for environmentalism, was altogether disgusted by the new Zeitgeist and gimcracks. 'I delight to come to my bearings,' he writes in Walden, which he began in the late '40s, 'not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place ... not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating?'"

Michael Albert’s Remembering Tomorrow: From SDS to Life After Capitalism: A Memoir (Seven Stories, 2007) contains three Thoreauvian epigraphs, one of which is dubious. (None include sources.) The two verified quotes are from “Life Without Principle” (“I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business”) and Walden’s “Winter Animals” (“I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn”).

Here’s the alleged quote I’m skeptical about, widely attributed to Thoreau on the Internet: "Be true to your work, your word, and your friend." A prize to whoever finds its provenance.

A Thoreauvian reference popped up recently in Joe Weider's Muscle and Fitness Magazine, in a short piece by Gunnar Peterson about setting a good example for young people. "Kids today," Peterson begins, "tend to be nestled behind their computers, wading through video games or immersed in the latest video release. From chat rooms to Nintendo, children are literally spending their lives in a fantasyland. Henry David Thoreau once said, 'Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.' He did not say, 'Go ahead and imagine the life you're gonna live, and do it under a screen name.' In other words, you have to make a life and work at it. Without real work, the life you live will feel empty."

A review by Lucas Conley of Joshua Ferris's novel Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown) in the April 2007 issue of Fast Company notes, "Though his characters all lead lives of quiet desperation (an overt reference, actually; the author sprinkles Emerson and Thoreau throughout), Ferris treats them with wit and empathy."

From David Kirby's review of Brad Leithauser's Curves and Angles: Poems (Knopf) in the New York Times Book Review, March 11, 2007: "One poem has as its epigraph a line from Thoreau, who, from his solitary outpost on the shores of Walden Pond, wrote, 'The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion.'" (The review later refers to "Thoreau's more gregarious friend, Emerson.")

The Mar 15, 2007, issue of Booklist includes a review of by Jay Freeman of Joseph Wheelan's Invading Mexico: America's Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846-1848 (Carroll & Graf) that notes, "As Wheelan illustrates, the launching of the war generated intense domestic opposition, led by such notable figures as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and an obscure Illinois congressman, Abraham Lincoln."

Thoreau Yesterday

Have you ever seen "30 Drawings by Thoreau", by John Cage?

At about 3:45 p.m. on January 11, 2006, a Minnesota Public Radio broadcaster quoted a Henry David Thoreau poem, with the line "There enter moments of an azure hue," to introduce the news of Swedish opera singer Birgit Nilsson's death and funeral. (Her funeral was held that day.)

The tiny book Friendship (Running Press, 1989)—with jacket subtitle: A Bouquet of Quotes, sized approximately 2.5" x 2", 93 pages—has this first quotation: "Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody. -HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862) American writer"

The source isn’t given. (It’s "Wednesday" in A Week…)

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (Hill and Wang, 1970) incorporates some of Thoreau's words from Walden and "Civil Disobedience" so that he speaks things we've previously read. (Sometimes the words are paraphrased or changed. Why did Lawrence and Lee feel compelled to end, "The sun is only a morning star," marring the original, "The sun is but a morning star?") The play is set in the Concord Jail, but freely jumps elsewhere--to the school where Thoreau taught briefly, the Emerson household, even to a forced dream scene near the end where Emerson appears as a foolish President of the United States and where Abraham Lincoln makes an offstage cameo. By and large, Thoreau's conversational words in the play ring true, even when they are imagined by Lawrence and Lee, such as when they have him say, "Blessed are the young, for they do not read the President's speeches." Occasionally something seems off, as when "Simplify, simplify" is used as Thoreau's response to Emerson's saying, "When white people and black try to live together, it's infinitely complicated."

The play, written and first performed during the height of U.S. citizen protests against the war in Vietnam, still seems timely. Thanks to Sandy Berman. for calling to my attention that a production of this played in Minneapolis last spring.

Daniel Wickberg asserts in his The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Cornell University Press, 1998), "The Victorian concept of humor took its cue from Thomas Carlyle, who gave the fullest expression to the notion of humor as benevolence." Wickberg quotes Carlyle ("'True humour,' he said, 'springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love'") then adds, "In America, Henry David Thoreau followed Carlyle explicitly, rejecting the idea that a 'sneering, satirical devil' lay under humor, and claiming that 'the secret of true humor' is that it 'sympathizes with the gods themselves, in view of their grotesque, half-finished creatures.' Thoreau, characteristically, was able to have it both ways: to sneer at the 'grotesque' and 'half-finished' with vague contempt and to celebrate humor as the realm of sympathy. That the term 'humor' was still used in ways that ran counter to the emerging centrality of sympathy is indicated by the need both Carlyle and Thoreau felt to use the term 'true humor.' and thus distinguish it from what others often called humor.

Sources cited:

Thomas Carlyle, "Jean Paul Friedrich Richter," Edinburgh Review 91 (1827) in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (Chicago and New York: Bedford, Clarke [1890]), vol. 3, sec. 3, pp. 20, 19. (sic)

Henry David Thoreau, "Thomas Carlyle and His Works," Graham's American Monthly Magazine 30 (April 1847): 242; reprinted in Early Essays and Miscellanies, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhamer and Edwin Moser, with Alexander C. Kern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). The note concludes: "This essay was originally given as a lecture at the Concord Lyceum, 4 February 1846."

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