Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

January 2007

Duane Elgin's Promise Ahead: A Vision of Hope and Action for Humanity's Future (HarperCollins, 2000) turns Thoreau's elegant prose into clunky words that sound more like George W. Bush in an epigraph to its chapter four ("Choosing a New Lifeway: Voluntary Simplicity"): "The price of anything is the amount of life that you have to pay for it. --Henry Thoreau"

This alleged quotation has subsequently been repeated on the Internet. Thoreau’s actual words from Walden: "'The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."

A Web page featuring supposed Thoreau quotes contains such one-liners as "Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes." As of December 22, 2006, there are 538 google.com hits for this spurious line. Thoreau’s actual words in Walden, from "Economy": " I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes."

The same Web page also has this: "Be true to your work, your word, and your friend. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)" Pray, tell me its source. (I think it's spurious.)

From the DVD package of "All That Heaven Allows," a 1955 film: "Jane Wyman is a repressed wealthy widow and Rock Hudson the hunky Thoreau-following gardener who loves her in Douglas Sirk's heartbreakingly beautiful indictment of 1950s small-town America."

As for the claim that Rock Hudson's character Kirby is a Thoreau-follower, the evidence is chiefly this: a scene in which Wyman's "Cary Scott" picks up an open volume of Walden at the house of Kirby's friend "Mick" and reads a short passage aloud: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed? [Pausing] If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." Having read this, Cary comments, "Why, that's beautiful" to which Mick's wife responds, "Yes, that's Mick's Bible. He quotes from it constantly." "Is it Ron's Bible, too?," Cary asks. "I don't think Ron's ever read it. He just lives it."

The filmmakers played fast and loose with Thoreau. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" comes from the beginning of Walden, but the rest comes from the Conclusion, with a few words removed. (Thoreau actually wrote: "Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?")

From Margaret Sartor’s Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up In the 1970s (Bloomsbury, 2006):

December 5
"Mama suggested I read Walden and left her copy of my bed with a note. She wrote that, 'somtimes the confusion and complexity of our lives gets in the way and we forget what is really basic and important and this book helps put things in perspective.'"

December 11 [next page]
"'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately….' (Henry David Thoreau)"

From Rebecca Clarren’s "Zine Roundup: Sweet Simplicity," a short profile of Moonlight Chronicles editor Dan Price in the October 6, 2006 issue of High Country News: "Price says he operates in the tradition of Jack Kerouac (he’s read On The Road at least 10 times). Others call him a modern-day Thoreau." Clarren doesn’t say who calls him this, but the back cover of Price’s Radical Simplicity: Creating an Authentic Life (Running Press, 2005) labels the book "This Generation’s Version of Walden."

The November 27, 2006, issue of High Country News contains a brief essay by Michelle Nijuis written from the point of view of her canine companion Pika. In it Pika describes her human companion's complaints about the melting of the Greenland ice sheet: "She sighs. 'I know, Pika,' she says. 'The present moment is all we've got. According to you and Ram Dass and all those chicken-soup books, not to mention the Buddha and Thoreau. But I don't have time for any panting or looking around. Didn't you hear what I just said about the ice sheet?'"

There exists today in Madison, Wisconsin a consulting firm named "Urban Thoreau". (Its president: Michael Barrett.)

Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man (Viking, 2002) describes the life of Eustace Conway who taught himself to live off the land while he was a boy growing up in suburban North Carolina. "A whole page in one of his childhood diaries was headlined FROGS," Gilbert writes, then adds: "It was not as though Eustace were some kind of baby Thoreau. Or maybe not. Although he was attentive to his environment, Eustace didn’t have then, and never would develop, Thoreau’s languid communion with nature. (For instance: ‘Sometimes in a summer morning having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise to noon, rapt in revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness.’) No way would Eustace Conway endure that kind of decadent repose. Even as a child, he was far too compulsive to sit for weeks on end to watch the light change. Instead, Eustace was driven to engage." Gilbert quotes here from the "Sounds" chapter of Walden.

In describing the times during which Conway grew up, the 60s, Gilbert writes, "Poets like Allen Ginsberg (heir to Walt Whitman) and writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an ‘urban Thoreau’) set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of ‘work, produce, consumer, work, produce, consume…’" Kerouac’s novels, Gilbert goes on, two paragraphs later, "alone sent no end of young men scrambling across the country to find their destinies, but Walden--a long-neglected work celebrating both nature and noncomformity—was also rediscovered around this time…"

Describing one of Conway’s girlfriends, Gilbert writes, "She was the Eve who would help Eustace build his Eden. She was the same dream girl, by the way, that Henry David Thoreau used to fantasize about back when he was holed up alone at Walden Pond—a faultless child of nature, a paragon modeled after the mythical Greek demigoddess ‘Hebe, cup-bearer who was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring.’" (The quotation is from the "Solitude" chapter in Walden).

Finally, Gilbert writes about a psychologist who failed to recognize Conway’s emotion problems. "Man, do people ever get a dream of Eustace Conway in their minds and then make it stick. This woman must have been so compelled by a Thoreau-inspired and idealized vision of life in the wilderness (‘There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still’) that she didn’t want to take a closer look at someone who was not a concept, but a real and affected person." (Gilbert again quotes from "Solitude.")

From "Messages from Above: Why the Clouds Are Worth Watching," an essay by Chris Dodge in the January/February 2007 issue of Utne Reader:

"Henry David Thoreau once wrote that for many years he was 'self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms.' Since moving to Montana, I’ve become a serious cloud watcher and thinker-about-clouds."

"[The] endeavor of finding shapes in clouds is an old one. There’s even a word for it: nephelococcygia, literally 'cloud cuckooland,' from the Aristophanes play 'The Birds.' Thoreau practiced it, describing a sunset in which he saw a 'phantom city.'"

"To really know clouds is to love them. Just look at the index to The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. Over 60 sub-entries appear here under 'Clouds,' including entries that describe cloud colors, the time of day or season in which they’re observed, things clouds resemble, lines of poetry they recall, cloud textures, their size and shadows, and more specifically a melon-rind arrangement of clouds, clouds at war with the moon, clouds spun from rainbows, snow from a single cloud, the need for clouds, drifting and downy clouds, clouds in the mind."

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