Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

December 2007

The headline of an obituary in the Daily News of Newburyport, Massachusetts, on October 18, 2007: "From reading Thoreau to fixing computers, bartender remembered." The obit, which describes the drowning death of 35-year-old Marty Bajdek, relies on a coworker as a source: "Dennis Metrano, who also tends bar at the Starboard Galley, said Bajdek was very well-read and enjoyed studying history, particularly the history of Newburyport. He was also a nature buff and fan of Henry David Thoreau's writings, Metrano said."

The November 11, 2007, issue of the Springfield, Massachusetts-based Republican has another obituary of a Thoreauvian, under the surprising title "Friends Mourn Plague Victim." Stephanie Barry writes, dateline Shelborne, "Eric York wore a compass on his wrist that always pointed northeast, and carried the works of Henry David Thoreau. The compass denoted his love for his picturesque New England hometown, where he planned to return one day. The writings were a nod to his lifelong love affair with nature and wildlife, according to his girlfriend, Laurel Klein, who addressed mourners at York's funeral service yesterday. 'Eric lived life exactly as he wanted," until the end, she said, during a tearful, poignant homage that included readings from Thoreau, whose work focused on simple living in natural surroundings. York was found dead on Nov. 2 in his home on the South Ridge of the Grand Canyon. He had died from pneumonic plague, contracted during the Oct. 27 necropsy of a cougar, or mountain lion, according to Grand Canyon National Park officials. York, 37, was a wildlife biologist at the park, working in the cougar collaring program."

The November 8, 2007, issue of The Herald of Randolph, Vermont, describes a sculpture by local artist Jim Sardonis, dedicated July 23 in Greenville, Maine, "exactly 150 years to the day after Thoreau and his Penobscot guide left Greenville by birch bark canoe on the last of his three trips through the Maine wilderness." "Sardonis's lastest piece [sic] is a pair of hawks installed in July . . . in honor of Henry Thoreau and the Wabanaki Indian tribes," the anonymously written article says. "The final piece is ten feet tall and weighs about seven tons. The birds and pillar are carved from one piece of granite, and the work is inscribed with quotations from Thoreau, as well as quotations in the Penobscot language. Entitled 'Birds of a Feather,' the pair of hawks symbolize the camaraderie of Thoreau and the Native American guide, Sardonis said."

The artist's website contains several photos of the piece . In one, a quotation can be made out, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." But what is that shorter quotation beneath this? I can't make it out.

The Australian "Men's Sheds" movement is described by Pete May in the October 22, 2007, issue of The Guardian. In "Men love to think inside the box," May mentions Gordon Thorburn's book Men and Sheds and says of his own shed, "[S]ince my wife bought two chickens, it's become a sort of spiritual priesthole. The hut now houses chicken feed and straw, an old fish tank, some Victorian pottery I found when the water authority men dug up our road, and a garden chair. But under the pretext of feeding the chickens, it provides a welcome refuge from the turmoil of family breakfast and the endless search for school bookbags and bike locks. . . .[S]teaming coffee in hand, I escape to the shed, which enables my creative processes to flourish far away from email land. It's at its best when the autumn rains pelt the asphalt roof. You feel like a latterday Henry Thoreau. He might have had Walden Pond, but we too have a small pond in the corner of the garden, populated by newts and algae. Like Thoreau I can feel all transcendental chasing urban foxes with my broom and listening to the rhythmic thud of the street kids' football banging against the garden fence."

Jill Lepore's "Vast Designs" in the October 29, 2007, issue of the New Yorker, a four-page review of Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, contains numerous Thoreauvian quotations and references. Lepore says that Thoreau "can be very, very funny," trots out the Thoreau-in-jail story, the phrasing it equivocally ("When Emerson asked him why he had gone there, Thoreau is said to have answered, 'Why did you not?'"), and asserts that he "wasn't so much battling the market revolution as dodging it." Lepore adds, "If Walden was Thoreau's flight from the market economy, it was, equally, a flight from women, from domesticity, from family life," asserting that Thoreau walked to town nearly daily "to dine with friends" (during his Walden years) and that "he carried his dirty laundry to Concord for his mother to wash." Can anyone verify this?

Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin, 2006) describes an Iowa farmer in debt. "He explained to me he'd had to take on long-distance hauling work to keep [his] farm afloat. 'Have to drive a big rig to pay for all my farm toys,' he chuckled." Pollan comments , 'I was reminded of Thoreau's line: 'Men have become the tools of their tools.' And I wondered if Billy gave much thought . . . about who he was really working for now."

Later, in a chapter titled "The Forager," Pollan quotes Thoreau out of context, citing "that line that irritated me when I first came across it years ago. 'We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun,' he wrote in Walden. 'He is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.'" Pollan neglects what Thoreau adds, that this "boy" "goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are still and always young in this respect."

From the Thanksgiving 2007 issue (#78) of John Toren's zine Macaroni and Toren's review of Donald Revell's The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye, about which he says "I am suspicious. . . [i]t all sounds a little glib to me": "It strikes me that the theories Revell is advancing in these pages are not only based on faith, they are based on a genuine delusion. Poetry is not the same thing as description. This is born out by the examples he offers to prove his point. He identifies Henry David Thoreau's two-million-word journal as a true masterpiece of 'carelessness' but the brief passages he cites are philosophical rather than descriptive."

Count the errors here: an October 16, 2007, editorial by John Armor in USA Today ("Opposing view: Press has enough protection") states, "Two centuries ago, Henry David Thoreau went to jail for not paying his war taxes. Ralph Waldo Emerson came to visit and asked 'Why are you here?' Thoreau replied, 'Why aren't you with me?' Writers who choose to be martyrs don't warrant a federal law to protect them from themselves."

Manya A. Brachear comments on her colleague Eric Zorn's "staunch opposition to a mandated moment of silence in public school classrooms" in the October 12, 2007, issue of Chicago Tribune. "I, for one, cherish the moments of solitude and silence that so rarely punctuate my day," Brachear writes. "On those long, extended moments of silence I like to call vacation, I often read and occasionally re-read works of literature that remind me to seek more silence once I return to the daily grind. One of those essays is 'A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,' an account of a boat trip Henry Thoreau took in 1839. Thoreau wrote: 'Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts . . . where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.' Is a moment of silence only a thinly veiled political ploy to allow prayer or could it be a healthy habit to cultivate in our children? Or is it a little bit of both? Is it a healthy habit we simply cannot require, given the highly charged world we live in today?" Calling A Week an essay is like calling Macbeth a scenario, no?

From Andro Linklater's, The Fabric of America: How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity (Walker, 2007): "In Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau, who had already refused to pay taxes for Polk's imperialist war and advocated civil disobedience for those who wanted 'to do justice to the slave and to Mexico,' pleaded with his fellow citizens in 1850 to remember that 'they are to be men first and Americans only at a late and convenient hour."

Liz Tubman reports in the November 9, 2007, issue of Lawrence University student newspaper The Lawrentian on the November 6 address by Paul Hawken who "has worked throughout his life to promote sustainability and better relationships between businesses, the environment, and humans by speaking across the world and writing about his experiences." Tubman says that Hawken's search for the roots of the environmental movement "led him to the Transcendentalists, including Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson realized the interconnectedness of nature and all living things, which is the idea driving these organizations today, while Thoreau's protest of the use of his tax money for the Mexican-American war gave us the first example of what came to be known as civil disobedience."

Thoreau Yesterday

From John Rezmerski's five-paragraph foreword to John Caddy's Eating the Sting (Milkweed Editions, 1986): ""Probably nobody has written about nature the way Caddy has. Thoreau is closest, but Caddy is concerned about feeling as Thoreau was not. Caddy shares Thoreau's way of meeting nature and finding lessons that are not obvious. Like Thoreau chasing a woodchuck, Caddy gives us civilization relearning wildness by breaking free of observational custom."

John McPhee's The Control of Nature (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989) contains a long chapter (one-third of the book) about the debris falls from the mountains adjacent to Los Angeles (and chaparral wildfires and floods), and the efforts of people who live the shadow of the San Gabriels to avoid natural disaster. McPhee writes of people who moved east from the city, "By the nineteen-thirties, the Thoreauvian recluses were well established in the mouths of the canyons, and the city had not yet approached them."

The Gospel According to Larry, by Janet Tashjian (Dell Laurel-Lear, 2001), a short novel intended for "young adult readers" (actually young teens), starts with a "A Note to the Reader" in which Tashjian sets up the book as actually having been written by a young man she met in line in the grocery store, "Josh," who says "I just came back from Walden Pond" and pulls a paperback copy of Walden from his pocket, and reads, while standing on one leg, "To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts. . ." The book has Thoreau references throughout. For starters, a footnote to Josh's text: "Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden and Civil Disobedience. We had to read them for English last semester–very New England–nature is good, materialism is bad." An epilogue quotes from Walden: "You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint 'No Admittance' on my gate." And in a conversation with author Tashjian at the end of the book, she says, "One of the most gratifying things for me is hearing how many teens are reading Thoreau after finishing Larry. Walden Pond is not far from where I live; every time I walk those woods I imagine Henry David and his life of contemplation and work. His choice to live a simple, thoughtful existence is even more meaningful in the age of supertechnology we live in today, His book and essays should be required reading for all of us, no question."

From a reading group guide to Kristin Hannah's novel The Things We Do for Love (Ballantine, 2004): "Kristin Hannah begins her novel with a quote from writer/philosopher Henry David Thoreau: 'Things do not change—we change.' Do you think the events of the novel are responsible for Angie's personal growth?" The quote is from the last chapter of Walden.

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