Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

May/June 2007

Maureen Dowd's "The Year Without Toilet Paper" in the New York Times, March 22, 2007, describes a Manhattan couple who are conducting "a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation." Why? "Mr Beaven... needed a new book project and the No Impact year was the only one of four possibilities his agent thought would sell."

Thoreau is referred to twice, first when Dowd writes, "Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style." Second when she says, "Thoreau left home for the woods to make his point (and secure his own book deal); Mr. Beavan and Ms. Conlin and others like them aren’t budging from their bricks-and-mortar, haut-bourgeois nests."

From "Tread Lightly and Carry a Big Bag of Batteries: Rethinking Technology in the Wilderness," by Chris Dodge, in the May/June 2007 issue of Utne Reader: "Are people today 'the tools of their tools,' as Thoreau wrote more than 150 years ago? To the degree that technology aids human awareness, that it augments and extends abilities without concomitant loss of native knowledge, the answer is no. Technology may be appropriate. But if we give up our innate sensibility and rely on machines to do our thinking and sensing for us, we're lost."

A book mark labeled "HAPPY NEW YEAR 2007" issued by Books West, a Kalispell, Montana, independent bookstore, includes Thoreau's question, "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?" (In this day and age, how many a woman?)

Thoreau Yesterday

From The Autobiography of Mark Twain (edited by Charles Neider, Perennial Library, 1975): "I can see . . .the vast fireplace, piled high on winter nights with flaming hickory logs from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate it." From Thoreau’s journal, February 9, 1852: "For the first time this many a year, I tasted . . . some of the sweet froth which had issued from the sap of a walnut of hickory lately cut. . . . It reminded me of the days when I used to scrape this juice off the logs in my father's wood-pile."

What else did Samuel Clemens have in common with Henry David Thoreau? Both spent time in the company of Emerson, though Emerson was "senile" in 1877 when he and Clemens both attended a dinner in honor of John Greenleaf Whittier's 70th birthday. Thoreau was born in Concord; Mark Twain was banned in Concord. And both started forest fires, about which they wrote almost gleefully. Otherwise two more different people are difficult to imagine, as opposed to Clemens and Kurt Vonnegut who died recently. Vonnegut was my generation's Mark Twain. Both spanned the centuries, came east from the Midwest, and were dissed for a long time as being just humorists. Both are famous for novels but got to the point where they were only inclined to write political rants (anti-imperialist, cautionary, caustic ones). Both had formative war experiences and suffered from depression. Both were skeptical free-thinkers, public speakers, and smoked like chimney in January in Montana. Hey, they even looked alike.

Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (Random Hose, 2001) includes a chapter on apples that either mentions or quotes Thoreau half a dozen times. Quotations include HDT's "it is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man"; one that begins, "Every wild apple shrub excites our expectations . . . somewhat as every wild child"; and the famous "In wildness is the preservation of the world."

Pollan writes of John Chapman (aka "Johnny Appleseed"), '[M]aybe his libido was submerged in some sort of polymorphous love of nature, as some biographers have theorized about Thoreau," and further notes, "The fruit of seedling apples is almost always inedible–'sour enough.' Thoreau once wrote, ' to set a squirrel's teeth on edge and make a jay scream.' Thoreau claimed to like the taste of such apples, but most of his countrymen judged them good for little but hard cider–and hard cider was the fate of most appled grown in America up until Prohibition. Apples were something people drank."

Finally, in a chapter about marijuana, and a discussion of Nietzsche's 1876 essay "The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," Pollan writes that Nietzsche "argues (much like Emerson and Thoreau) that we spend altogther too much of our energy laboring in the shadows of the past–under the stultifying weight of convention, precedent, received wisdom, and neurosis."

Pollan's book cites Thoreau's "Wild Apples" from The Natural History Essays (Peregrine Smith, 1980).

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