Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

March 2007

A short piece by Monica Ali in the January 22, 2007 issue of New Statesman about Bangladeshi expatriates in London ("A woman's voice in the Bangla chatrooms"), begins with a reference to Thoreau:

"The election is postponed. Depressed, I surf through discussions about lost ideals and lost lives. Then one particular post catches my attention . . .

Spend the holidays, as usual, in rural Portugal. It's like sitting on a telescopic/microscopic see-saw. It's the only place where I devote a considerable amount of time to watching the sky and a serious consideration of the natural environment. Here, in my little slice of Walden, I can just about begin to make sense of Thoreau, his feeling that communing with nature is essential for "the preservation of moral and intellectual health". The rest of the time disappears in minutiae. Though the village is pretty tiny, it's never short on gossip. People drop round and discuss abandoned puppies, affairs, palm readers, snakes in the rafters, who's taken and eaten the swallows that were nesting in the olive tree. What falls away are my usual concerns: news, politics, the world."

From the label of Republic Chai Traveler's Tea, a product marketed by The Republic of Tea (Novato, California): "'A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to leave alone,' wrote a tea drinker named Thoreau, who discovered what we have known from the time before our little land: 'Tea is wealth itself, because there is nothing that cannot be lost, no problem that will not disappear, no burden that will not float away, between the first sip and the last.'"

Beyond the dubious claim for Thoreau as tea aficionado (the sole index entry for tea drinking in Torrey and Allen's The Journal... is to Nov. 27, 1852: "I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee...") and beyond the inanity of the clause "discovered what we have known from the time before our little land," lies the second quotation. The words following the colon, "Tea is wealth...," appear here as if they were Thoreau's when instead, I think, they are the invention of a Republic of Tea employee. (A Google search for the quote results in just a few hits, most or all of which cite "The Minister of Leaves." This is a Republic of Tea appellation that appears on the Traveler's Tea label under words I've just quoted.)

"Fear of Yoga", by Robert Love, in the November/December 2006 issue of Columbia Journalism Review, notes that in 1805 William Emerson published the first Sanskrit scripture translation in the United States, then mentions that Emerson's "son Ralph and his Transcendentalist posse, especially Henry David Thoreau, were dazzled by Indian spiritual texts, especially the Bhagavad-Gita, which Emerson read in translation for the first time in 1843. 'It was as if an empire spake to us,' he wrote in his journal, 'nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence.' Thoreau kept a well-thumbed copy of the Gita in his cabin at Walden Pond, and claimed wistfully that 'at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.'"

The article is excerpted in the March/April 2007 issue of Utne Reader where it includes a copy of the 1861 ambrotype photo of Thoreau).

R. Todd Felton's heavily illustrated A Journey into the Transcendentalists' New England (Roaring Forties Press, 2006) contains a chapter on Concord and one on Walden that focuses on Thoreau (though the overly detailed index doesn't make this clear). A wide range of contemporary and historical photos and reproductions here include one of the Thoreau's ad for his surveying services.

Seven Thoreauvian anecdotes are published at Anecdotage.com. One is erroneously labeled "Thoreau's Last Words": "Toward the end of his life Henry David Thoreau was urged to make his peace with God. 'I did not know,' he replied, 'that we had ever quarreled.'" The left hand at Anecdotage.com doesn't seem to know what the right hand is doing, because a note under an entry describing Victor Hugo's last words ("I see black light") says, "Equally enigmatic were Henry David Thoreau's final words, 'Moose, Indian.'"

Under the heading "Liberty or... Libertarianism?" is the old story about which I am skeptical: "Henry David Thoreau, having refused on principle to pay the Massachusetts poll tax in 1843, was visited in jail one day by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Why, Emerson asked disdainfully, was he in jail? 'Waldo,' Thoreau replied, 'why are you not here?'

A note under an anecdote from Thoreau's September 8, 1859 journal entry reads: "Trivia: In 1954, at the height of the 'red scare,' Walden, Thoreau's literary classic documenting his experiment communing with nature in Concord, was among a number of books deemed 'downright socialistic' and banned from the American Information Service libraries."

The July/August 2005 issue of Science & Spirit magazine includes a page of a 13 short quotations about poverty. Along with Woody Allen, Heinrich Heine, and Proverbs 14:23 is Thoreau's line from Walden: "Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth." ( Sources aren't cited. )

Jerry Keir's "Risking Life and Limb in Forest Restoration," an article about the work of "restoration sawyers" working in the Nevada Conservation Corps (Whole Terrain, 2004/2005) leads with a Thoreauvian epigraph: "The callus palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience." (The source–"Walking"–isn't cited.)

The Encyclopedia of New England, edited by Burt Feintuch and David H. Watters (Yale University Press, 2005), is a 1564-page book arranged in 22 thematic chapters, from Agriculture to Tourism. Henry David Thoreau rates a little over two pages (pp.1031-1033) in the Literature chapter, an entry written by T.S. McMillin (of Oberlin College). A black-and-white photo of "Henry David Thoreau's gravestone" is included.

McMillin avers that Thoreau remained in Concord, "[e]xcepting infrequent excursions," but otherwise does a fair job of debunking myths ("Thoreau is often unfairly remembered as something of a crank and an outcast") and describing reality (calling HDT an "ardent agitator for abolition... wide-ranging rambler and naturalist, and an uncompromising critic of economic politics and social customs that hinder rather than enhance life... loving brother... favorite with children... undeniably talented man" who performed myriad jobs but was always a writer). Among his chief works, "one must include the expansive, astonishingly insightful, and intellectually provocative 14-volume Journal."

Walden, McMillin says, "searches the intersections where literature connects with politics, work with life, nature with philosophy, seeing with being, and each with each." In Walden, Thoreau "returns from the woods for the same reasons he escaped there: to deliberately discern, through physical and metaphorical movement, the essentials of life, as well as the obstacles that prevent humans from living truthfully..."

Jessica Lamb-Shapiro's "We need heart-touching, soul-penetrating stories!" (The Believer, October 2005) is a long account about attending a "self-help authors' conference" (actually a $1000/person seminar by one Mark Victor Hansen). Lamb-Shapiro starts by presenting "A Brief Timeline of Some Seminal Self-Help Books;" sixth and seventh on the list: Emerson's "Self-Reliance" (cited as if it was a book) and Walden. (First is The Bible and last Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield's Chicken Soup for the Soul.

"One painter's DaVinci Code," published in the Fall 2005 issue of the Natural Resource and Defense Council's OnEarth magazine, is contemporary painter Walton Ford's three-paragraph description of "the origins of Ricordazione, his interpretation of a childhood dream of Leonardo da Vinci" involving a large bird. In it Ford describes John James Audubon's slaughter of birds. The piece ends thus: "I don't want to tear down Audubon's accomplishments. He was a brilliant naturalist, and he was a persistent--if not brilliant--artist. But let's be honest, He wasn't exactly your Audubon Society type. He was more of a Nascar, I-love-my-gun type. But it's his complexity that makes him so interesting. What irritates me is when people say, oh, you can't judge him by modern standards, he has to be judged by the standards of his time. To which I say, fine--judge him by the standards of Thoreau and Emerson. Thoreau wouldn't have harmed a fly."

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