Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

July 2007

"Begone, different drummer," a National Public Radio essay by Garrison Keillor, and published May 13, 2007 on saukvelley.com, asserts, "Back in the day, we were more alienated from society than kids are today, and Thoreau was to blame for it. A gentle man, good with small children, smart about bugs and plants, but his line about daring to march to your own drummer, which is repeated every year at high school graduations, is just plain clueless. It excuses a rotten sense of rhythm as being a sign of intellectual rigor.

Somehow Thoreau missed out on the pleasure of being in tempo. He never drilled with the Concord militia, and if he ever attended dances, he didn't mention it in his journal. And when he matriculated at Harvard in 1833, there was no marching band where he could've played his flute and learned how thrilling it is when 50 or 60 people hit the cadence, the bass drum going BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM and the snares setting up a back beat and the saxophones swinging back and forth and all the shoes going slap slap slap slap up the street - this is electrifying to the whole town and the populace lines the curbs to watch the parade go by.

Rhythm, Henry - shared rhythm - is a powerful thing, compared to which your personal drummer who goes BOOM BOOM boink BOOM boink BOOM BOOM is a puny thing. So get over yourself, O Great One. Get with the program."

Mark Sullivan, professor of American Art at Villanova University, is writing a book about portraits of Thoreau done by American artists. Sullivan reports, "I just ran across a book by William McFeely, entitled Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins (NY: Norton, 2007). This new publication, according to the dust-jacket, 'relocates Eakins where he would have wanted to be—alongside Thoreau and Walt Whitman as central to American cultural expression in its formative years.' McFeely spends a lot of time in his book drawing parallels between Walden and Eakins's controversial painting "Swimming." He sees Eakins and Thoreau as celebrants of a joyful physicality of life that many Americans would not embrace until a hundred years later.

From Bruce Northam's "Rambling with Dad," (Newsday, June 17, 2007), an account of Northam's 10-day walk with his 79-year-old father along the Viking Way in the Midlands of England: "In a Rockville Centre hospital, my father imparted my middle name, Thoreau, hoping that I'd sympathize with philosophical naturalists; today my standing as a professional wanderer pleases him."

How many others have been given "Thoreau" as a middle name? I can think of one, offhand. American pacifist/anarchist John Scott (1879–1953) named one of his sons Marx (apparently before his conversion to anarchism); seventeen years later he named another son Jon Thoreau.

From Jim Stiles's Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Light (University of Arizona Press, 2007): "Within the conservation movement, there is a growing dichotomy between the more idealistic Thoreau types and the New Environmentalists, who have embraced the kinds of land preservation strategies that concern me so deeply. The two groups can look at the same tree and see different colors." Stiles also mentions Thoreau as a predecessor to his friend Ed Abbey, writing, "Before Abbey, writers like Thoreau and Muir poke eloquently but gently in defense of the Earth. Their message was clear but so slumberingly lyrical. Then Abbey came along with a clenched fist and a heart full of passionate anger."

A review by Nikhail Bilwakesh in the April 2007 issue of the CUNY Graduate Center Advocate of Sandra Harbert Petrulionis's To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau's Concord (Cornell University Press, 2006) asserts:

"Despite its title, this book is not about Thoreau's Concord. Perhaps if the apostrophe was shifted to the right, and we considered the town of Henry David's sisters, aunt, and mother, we would have a more accurate description of the best this book has to offer. What began, according to Petrulionis, as a project about fugitive slaves passing through Concord, became 'a story of influence and recovered lives--of little known women and men whose activism propelled Thoreau and others in this historic town to take a more public stand against slavery' (ix). As a story of influence, the book is not that convincing. As such, it seems to come close to proposing that it was domestic nagging on the part of the Thoreau women, Lidian Emerson, and their neighbors, that brought Waldo and Henry into active abolitionism. The book is much more successful, useful, and interesting, however, in following the women of Concord. . . ."

About halfway through the book, Bilwakesh says, "Petrulionis turns her attention to Henry David Thoreau, and many of her readings here are astute. Petrulionis edited Thoreau's Journal from 1854, and her juxtaposition of his natural observations with his turn to militancy is interesting, but Henry Thoreau's prominence in this book seems unjustified."

Thomas McGuane's New York Times June 24, 2007, review of Per Petterson's novel Out Stealing Horses (Graywolf Press; translated by Anne Born), describes a sixty-something male protagonist, an "Oslo professional" who has moved to the country after his wife's death: "We accept that cultivated people turn up in such places," McGuane writes, "though Americans tend to view them as Edward Dahlberg described the conventional view of Thoreau, 'as a kind of cranky male sibyl, a crabbed and catarrhal water sprite of our woodland culture.' Trond is no Thoreau — he's more like us than other Scandinavian protagonists including Knut Hamsun's Lt. Glahn or Halldor Laxness's Bjartur — but his efforts require peace and quiet."

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