Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

February 2007

"A Thoreauly Unhappy New Year"-- a short piece by Mark Sherman published January 7, 2007 on FightingBob.com, a Wisconsin-based "nonprofit, nonpartisan online opinion magazine" that aims to "honor and revive the spirit and mission of our namesake, Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette-- imagines that "If he were alive today, Henry David Thoreau would be extraordinarily rendered at Guantanamo." Sherman writes, "I just completed re-reading Henry David Thoreau's essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. I believe that I last read it in high school - it's probably banned now. Certainly, he would be arrested under the Patriot Act, and since the last Congress abolished habeus corpus, he wouldn't just spend a night in jail he'd be shipped to Guantanamo or worse for 'extraordinary rendition.' I can't help but wonder what Bush would keep as a trophy of his triumph over Thoreau? Maybe an ear, a finger, or a tongue? Probably more than one part, so he could share with Mommy, and because unlike most of us Thoreau had the fortitude not only to speak, but also to act."

From Donovan Hohn's "Moby-Duck or, The Synthetic Wilderness of Childhood" in the January 2007 issue of Harper's, an investigation, in part, on the phenomenon of "rubber ducks" that wash up on ocean beaches: "Why do precisely these objects we behold make a world?" Thoreau wonders in Waiden. 'Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice?' Since Thoreau's time, ecologists have explained why that mouse filled that crevice, and since then Waiden woods have grown far less bewildering. For Thoreau the distinction between the natural world and the manmade one matters less than that between the subjective experience within and the objective world without. For him, both rocks and mice are objects that he perceives as shadows flickering on the walls of his mind. For him, anthropomorphism is inescapable. All animals, he writes, are 'beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.'"

Hohn writes later, "A century and a half ago, beachcombers tended to be transcendental weirdos like Ellery Channing and Henry Thoreau. Back then, much of New England's shoreline was as wild as Alaska's is today and more treacherous to passing ships. Just before Thoreau arrived at Provincetown in 1849, a ship carrying Irish immigrants sank off Cohasset. The bodies of the drowned lay strewn along the beach, torn asunder by the surf and fish. 'There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice,' Thoreau observed. 'The Gulf Stream may return some to their native shores, or drop them in some out-of-the-way cave of Ocean, where time and the elements will write new riddles with their bones.' Even where no shipwrecks had occurred, a Cape Cod beach in 1849 was 'a wild rank place' littered 'with crabs, horse-shoes and razor clams, and whatever the sea casts up-a vast morgue, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them.'" Hohn notes that "the word 'beachcomber' in 1849 meant approximately what we mean by 'beach bum' and adds, "The local Cape Codders whom Thoreau met on his seaside rambles usually took him for a traveling salesman. What other explanation could there be for a vagabond with a walking stick and a knapsack full of books?"

The Wish Jar ("Explorations of the Familiar"), a blog by author Keri Smith, has as its January 4, 2007 entry an artwork that includes a hand-printed quotation, all in caps, from HDT: "The life in us is like the water from the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets." (source, not noted: penultimate chapter of Walden)

According to the publisher's website, Howard Zinn's new A Power Governments Cannot Suppress (City Lights, 2007) "dedicates entire chapters to troublemakers like Henry David Thoreau, Eugene Debs, Philip Berrigan, Italian immigrants Sacco & Vanzetti. . ."

Eric Blehm's The Last Season (HarperCollins, 2006), a book describing the 1996 disappearance of longtime seasonal backcountry park ranger Randy Morgenson in rugged Kings Canyon National Park, and subsequent search and rescue efforts, contains several Thoreauvian references and epigraphs. Describing Morgenson's childhood, Blehm notes nature walks at Yosemite National Park during which Morgenson's father would feed his two sons "a seemingly endless diet of quotes from John Muir, Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Ogden Nash—a few of the authors whose books lined the walls of the Morgenson home…" Blehm adds a few paragraphs later, "Soon enough, Randy, too, was quoting Thoreau and Muir from memory."

Chapter three begins with an epigraph from Walden ("I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. . ." [my ellipses] while chapter five quotes from a 1972 Wallace Stegner letter that advises Morgenstern, then trying to get some of his writing published, "If I were you I'd follow Thoreau or somebody like that [sic] rather than Muir."

The last piece in Bob Abernethy and William Bole's The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World (forthcoming from Seven Stories Press, 2007) is an interview with William Sloane Coffin whose last words here have to do with death and dying. "I don’t think much about what comes next," Sloane says, then echoes Thoreau: "One world at a time, I think."

The fifth edition of Participating in Nature: Thomas J. Elpel's Field Guide to Primitive Living Skills (Pony, MT: HOPS Press, 2002), written by Hollowtop Outdoor Primitive School Founder Thomas Elpel, concludes with some wise words about "the art of doing nothing." Elpel writes "The do-something approach to primitive skills is to make everything you need while the do-nothing method is to find everything." And he notes: "Henry David Thoreau wrote of having a rock for a paperweight at his cabin by Walden pond. He threw it out when he discovered that he had to dust it. This is the essence of a do-nothing attitude." (The passage from "Economy" reads thus: " I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.") Elpel also echoes Thoreau when he writes, "It is much easier to teach how to make something than to teach how not to need to make anything."

Tom Brown's The Tracker: The Story of Tom Brown, Jr. (Prentice-Hall, 1978) includes a chapter titled "Thoreau Summer" that is partly about the author's 18th summer spent living mostly naked in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, and partly about scaring away two jeep-driving louts who encroach upon his roughly built "Good Medicine Cabin." (Thoreau isn't mentioned other than in the chapter title.)

William Burt's Rare and Elusive Birds of North America (Universe Publishing, 2001) has an epigraph from Walden facing its title page: "At the same time that we are in earnest to explore and learn al things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable . . ." [ellipses appear in the book] Chapter 6, about the Swainson's warbler and the yellow-breasted chat, begins with a Thoreau quote ("Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking bogs" –from "Walking," though that source is not cited here) and then describes a fruitless search for a Swainson's warbler nest in the Dismal and Atachfalaya Swamps. "'Hope and the future?,' No, they were not forthcoming here," writes Burt, "not for me, in this impervious if not quaking swamp. Could Thoreau himself have found them here? I don't think he had so extreme a case in mind when he wrote those inspired words. But this is to miss the point, is it not, in the usual anthropocentric way—the major point, if not Thoreau's? A swamp is not what it is for my express enjoyment, after all, but for the enjoyment of other sincere lives, the snakes and bears and birds and butterflies and other that belong there, and belong nowhere else."

Thoreau Yesterday

From Bartolomeo Vanzetti's July 21, 1925, letter to Alice Stone Blackwell, in The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (Penguin Press, 1997; first published in 1928 by Viking): "Well, I have been taken out of my room without being warned of my returning to the prison…. I will give you a note of the books which I lost. 1st. A Divine Comedy…. 2nd. W. Emerson's Essays…. 3rd. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius…. 4th. Thoughts of Nature. 5th. Friendship by Thoreau."

Which edition of Friendship was that, I wonder? Thoreau's essay from A Week was published in multiple editions, including: Friendship, T.Y. Crowell & Co. 1906; Of friendship: an Essay from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Riverside Press, 1901; The essay on friendship, Roycroft, 1903; Friendship, Barse & Hopkins, 1910; and Friendship : an essay, A. Bartlett, 1907.

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