Thoreau Today



Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge








October/November 2007

  • Thoreau and the Parks

  • The Redlands Daily Facts reported on August 26, 2007 on the recently renovated cardiology unit at the Loma Linda University Medical Center in California. The unit's designer, "Annette Ridenour of San Diego-based Aesthetics Inc.," posted inspirational messages at the entrance to each room, "from such diverse sources as the anonymous author who observed that courage is sometimes defined as the resolve to 'try again tomorrow' to more widely known thinkers such as Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King and Henry David Thoreau."

  • Newsweek magazine has a regular feature these days in which a contemporary author names and says a few words about "My Five Most Important Books." Michael Pollan puts Walden at the top of his list (Sept. 3, 2007), saying, "It got me thinking hard about American attitudes toward the natural world, and the relationship between the two."

  • Cecil Bothwell's The Prince of War: Billy Graham's Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire (Asheville, NC: Brave Ulysses Books, 2007) reports evidence of Billy Graham's "absence from the struggle for racial equality" in the 60s, and notes that Martin Luther King Jr. "was operating in the tradition of Thoreau and other advocates of strategic civil disobedience, while Graham continually defended governments as instruments of God, and therefore to be obeyed right or wrong." Bothwell goes on to quote Howard Zinn from the Zinn's introduction to The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience (Princeton University Press, 2004).

  • The March 2007 issue of popular architecture magazine Dwell depicts a strange structure that looks two-dimensional, with cut-out rectangles where such things appear as stacked firewood, a watering can, an empty clay pot, and people sitting at a tiny table, all open to the elements. This color photo is labeled "Walden / By Nils Holder Moormann / www.moormann.de" and also has these words: "Thoreau once said, 'A little thought is sexton to the world.' It seems so, too, when it comes to design. Walden's simple structure and thoughtful design multitasks everything from flowerpots to beer glasses to a fire cauldron to a wheelbarrow, so that you can enjoy anything you can possibly ever think of in the great outdoors." More here: www.moormann.de/ moebel/walden.html.

  • Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez (Trinity University Press, 2006) is an encyclopedia of geographic, geologic, and land-related terms—from arroyo, fen, slickrock, and spit, to esker, escarpment, estuary, coulee, krummholz, and kudzu—written by the likes of Ellen Meloy, Linda Hogan, Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben, and Pattiann Rogers. There are sixteen Thoreau pages locators, the first pointing to the page-three entry for "abutment" where Patricia Hampl employs a Thoreau quote from Walden that begins, "Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's arch. . ." Thoreau and his words are also used to describe and define "cape" (quoting his description of Cape Cod, "the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts. . ."), "catoctin," "cave," "freshet," "lobe," "mountain," "muskrat house," "pond," "promontory," "tarn" ("What ponds were to Thoreau, tarns were to Wordsworth"), "wood," and "woodlot," while "Thoreau's Walden Pond" is used to illustrated "kettle."

  • A column by Ric Hernandez in the Trinidad & Tobago Express, September 7, 2007, inexplicably titled "The curse of plastic in our watercouses"—it's about stones as mementos—ends with a few lines about taking a stone from the cairn at Walden Pond: "Then there is the stone from Thoreau's yard. We'd made a pilgrimage to Walden Pond for my 50th birthday. We spent the time there walking around the pond, reading Thoreau, becoming members of the Thoreau Society, even getting ourselves Saunterer T-shirts, The Concord Saunterer being a journal devoted to Thoreau. But I couldn't resist the cairn covering the spot where his cabin stood for the two years, two months and two days that Thoreau lingered there. The stones beckoned and I came to possess one of their number. The Thoreau stone is a reminder of why he went to live in the woods by the pond. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

  • "Thoreau Would Understand My Sock Choice" Jimmy Lowe writes in the Glasgow (Kentucky) Daily Times, on September 6. Lowe kvetches about his wife and daughter's displeasure that he might go out in public wearing thin dress socks with jeans, and apparently his giving in to them. "As I endured the bother of changing my socks, I thought of Thoreau and what he had said about clothing in Walden. Now there was a free man who didn't succumb to the dictates of fashion. But then, living by himself at Walden Pond, he was a man without women in his life."

  • Holland Cotter's New York Times think piece of Sunday, September 9, "White in America: A Long, Strange Ride: Idealistic Lad Travels by Bus and Finds the Reality of Being Black," looks back at the author's 1964 summer trip from his hometown in Massachusetts to Texas to visit a friend who'd been sent to a reform school there. The books Cotter took with him: "Thoreau's Walden, Dickinson's poems, Whitman's Specimen Days and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It was the Kerouac novel, first published 50 years ago, that inspired the trip." But after the trip, Kerouac already seems something of an artifact. "After the summer I found myself reading a little less, and differently, and looking around me more," Cotter writes. "Thoreau--loner, sojourner, abolitionist--still made sense. Dickinson is forever. But Specimen Days, Whitman's diaristic account of nursing Civil War soldiers, boys dying far from home, was a revelation, as if I'd never seen it before." (Early in this piece, Cotter asserts a John Bunyan influence on Thoreau, unusually: "In literature John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress was a national best seller before the Civil War, second only to the Bible. Its redemptivist impulse powers Thoreau's perambulations.")

  • The Daily Review, based in little Towanda, Pennsylvania (pop. 3000 or so), recently published a commentary by staff writer Eric Hrin about the joys of living in even smaller towns. In "Seeking the Simple Life around Troy and Canton," Hrin writes, "One of my favorite TV moments is an exchange between the characters of Woody and Diane on 'Cheers.' The subject was simplicity and Diane quoted author Henry David Thoreau. For those of you who don't know who that is, he's a famous dead guy who lived by himself in the woods and wrote a book on his musings called Walden. Diane quoted the 19th century transcendentalist who urged 'Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!' Woody, the bartender in the Boston bar, wasn't exactly quick on the uptake, if you recall. But on this occasion, he displayed some unusual insight. If Thoreau was so interested in simplicity, he asked, why did he say 'simplicity' three times? Wasn't once enough? It was a good joke about a good subject." (My partner Martha has made this point more than once and doesn't find it a joke.)

  • How many schools are named after Henry David Thoreau? There's one in Woodland Hills, California. Do the school have a football team? A mascot? No, it's an alternative school focusing on "drug-free education." (Imagine the Thoreau Loons. The Iconoclasts. The Observers. Or the Woodchucks.) Ah, but then there's Henry David Thoreau Middle School in Fairfax County, Virginia (http://www.fcps.edu/ThoreauMS/), home of the Thoreau Golden Eagles. And Thoreau Demonstration Academy, a public middle school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, home of the Timberwolves. Named after Henry David Thoreau, the school is—according to the Web site of Tulsa Public Schools—"a research-based, brain compatible learning environment" where "[s]chool uniforms are required to assist in the creation of one learning community." According to the same Web page, "[s]pecial academic programming [at Thoreau] includes Tribes, MicroSociety, Integrated Thematic Instruction, gifted/talented classes, courses for high school credit and an Extended Day for all children." Well.

  • Andrea Barrett's 1998 novel The Voyage of the Narhwal (Norton) has Thoreauvian references throughout. The book jacket says that the novel combines fact and fiction (as if most novels don't) and "focuses on Erasmus Wells Darwin, a scholar-naturalist accompanying the [boreal] expedition of the Narwhal [1855–1856]." The ship's doctor, named Boerhaave, has met Thoreau and "some of his friends" (including Louis Agassiz) in Boston, and writes to "his English friend Thomas Cholmondelay": "Do you remember the story I told you about Mr. Thoreau's pilgrimage to Fire Island and his attempts to gather up the relics of Margaret Fuller's drowning? It sticks in my mind: how he found that shift with her initials embroidered on it; her husband's coat, from which he took a button; her infant's petticoat. . ." (Thoreau had an English admirer named Thomas Cholmondeley.)

    Boerhaave is a fan of Thoreau, and copies excerpts from "A Winter Walk" and A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers into his journal, some of which is included here, including some of Thoreau's words on travel from A Week. . . (the three sentences beginning, "[C]ontinued traveling is far from productive. . ."). Barrett's chapter 6 epigraph also comes from A Week.

    "Dr. Boerhaave, arranging the grubs on a tin plate, made a wry face. 'Fish murderer,' he said. 'One of the things that made me want to meet Thoreau was an early essay he wrote [since this is set in 1855, an astute editor would have scratched "early"] about the joys of fish spearing; and then the way he grumbled later about the fate of fishes. Somewhere he talks about fish as if they have souls. About their virtues, and their hard destiny, and the possibilities of a secret fish civilization we don't appreciate. 'Who hears the fishes when they cry?' he wrote. He worries about the strangest things." ("'Who hears the fishes' and Thoreau's musing about dams is in A Week.) Boerhaave also copies into his journal a long excerpt from Walden about exploration, which appears here, beginning, "Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi. . ."

    Thoreau and the Parks

  • Dyan Zaslowsky's These American Lands: Parks, Wilderness and the Public Lands (Henry Holt, 1986) contains a paragraph on Thoreau on its fifth page, calling him "an odd man . . . observed in his native Concord, Massachusetts, standing in downpours for hours or staring at mallards on a pond long after his neighbors deemed there was any purpose in it." Poetic license, this. In his journals Thoreau describes taking shelter from rain, and watching the likes of loons and frogs. Mallards? On the same page Zaslowky goes on to describe one of Thoreau's later admirers, John Muir, but erroneously attributes an Emerson line to Muir, saying, "Eventually Muir dismissed Thoreau as 'the captain of a huckleberry party.'" It was Emerson whose eulogy to Thoreau chided him for lacking ambition: "Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party."

    Later in the book Zaslowky erroneously quotes Thoreau without citing the source: "[A] town is saved, not more by the men and women in it than by the woods and swamp that surround it." Thoreau's actual words in "Walking": "[A] town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamp that surround it." Zaslowsky also quotes the most famous line in Walking"—"In wildness is the preservation of the world," adding, "There are those who say it is high time we understood the full implications of Thoreau's simple statement."

  • Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac paraphrases this quotation in "Thinking Like a Mountain," a section in the chapter on Arizona and New Mexico where Leopold writes about wolf extermination and following deer overpopulation: "[T]oo much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf. . ."

  • Charles E. Little's Discover America: The Smithsonian Book of the National Parks (Smithsonian Books, 1995) also quotes Thoreau's "Walking," using the words to bolster a description of how Maine's Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island came into being: "To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it." Little goes on, "Heeding this dictum, the truth of which is known to anyone who is blessed with the deed and title to a beautiful landscape, a group of wealthy conservationists met in 1901 to discuss how Mount Desert might be protected on the public's behalf, for even then the island was threatened by tawdry commercial development."

  • Scott Herring's Lines on the Lands: Writers, Art, and the National Parks (University of Virginia Press, 2004) includes about a page on Thoreau, saying, "In 'Chesuncook,' printed in Atlantic Monthly in 1858 and eventually included in The Maine Woods, Henry David Thoreau recommends the creation of wilderness parks well before Yosemite (1864) and Yellowstone (1872) were set aside. Such parks will, he believed, directly benefit the nation's literature." Herring quotes Thoreau ("Chesuncook") at length, and says, "In Thoreau's conception—and unlike the later forest reserves—parks in which wild nature is protected should serve no utilitarian end. . . . Thoreau sees the writer and the park working together, their union secured, at some future date, by the law of the land."

  • Alfred Runte, in his National Parks: The American Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 1979), writes, "Simply admiring the natural world was nothing unique to the people of the United States; the transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, themselves followed the example of the likes of Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, and Keats."

  • Kim Heacox's An American Idea: The Making of the National Parks (National Geographic, 2001) calls Thoreau Emerson's "most famous disciple" (a dubious assertion; protégé, maybe) and confusingly (and/or confusedly) says that he contracted tuberculosis and died in 1862 "when . . . traveling in Minnesota to study Indian customs." Thoreau did die in 1862, of course, but he took sick in late 1860, a cold turning into bronchitis, and traveled to Minnesota for health reasons in the spring of 1861, returning in worse condition to Concord two months later, Walter Harding says, no doubt then coping with tuberculosis. (A letter by Benjamin P. Sadler M.D. in the May 1973 issue of Chest (63 #5), titled "Thoreau, Pulmonary Tuberculosis and Dietary Deficiency", asserts that Thoreau may have developed a tubercular lesion "of minimal extent" while eating a low-protein diet during his Walden years, something that "probably became inactive" when he moved back to Concord and his diet improved, and remained "quiescent until he caught a severe cold" in 1860.

    Heacox quotes Emerson widely on Thoreau, then regurgitates the old tale about the alleged encounter between Thoreau and Emerson when the former was in jail overnight: "Henry, what are you doing in there? Ralph, what are you doing out there?"

    Heacox quotes Thoreau on the "little oases of wildness in the desert of our civilization" (what is the source?) then adds, "Though Thoreau didn't use the term 'park' as George atlin did, he framed the idea as an essential need, something required not just to save America, but also Americans." Thoreau, says Heacox, "knew that without new and radical ways of thinking, his society, so eager to grow new branches, would rot away at the roots. . . . More than a single-sense naturalist, he was a full quintet, an explorer of the fragrant and tactile, of the grand and scenic, but also, and perhaps more important, of the small and unheralded. He never stopped admiring the ground at his feet, and thus learned to be home, rooted and perennial, singing the praises of belonging."

    Later in the book, in a couple of pages devoted to Thoreau's time at Walden, Heacox says that Thoreau "went to jail for one night to protest slavery," calling into question every thing else that appears in this book. (Thoreau, for the umpteenth time, went to jail because he'd not paid his poll tax.)

    But Heacox is right about some things. He says of Thoreau, "He . . . no doubt would have been alarmed, or at least surprised, when the federal government became the instrument of conservation that established national parks, saving those places that would one day be the largest islands of wilderness and biodiversity remaining in a sea of spreading monoculture and capitalism. Furthermore, that railroads would play a significant role in the establishment of those parks would have surprised him as swell." Heacox also compares Thoreau with Robinson Crusoe, writing, "In truth, Crusoe and Thoreau didn't harbor hate, and they didn't wish to burn Rome or sack Concord; they were simply disillusioned , and at times disheartened."

    Of Thoreau and parks, he writes, "The trick, as he saw it, was to find a balance between the extremes of wilderness and civilization and to live in that balance without remorse. The national park movement, indeed the entire American political conservation movement, at least in a political sense, would postdate him. But his fluid ideas helped to birth it and water it from infancy to its adolescence of today, giving others the inspiration and language require to create something that had never been created before. Not a King's Forest, but a people's forest, an unprecedented commons that belonged to everyone and no one, if they could keep it. And not so much something created, but something left as it was—nature unaltered and untrammeled. 'A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone,' Thoreau said. And people began to listen."

    Like those mentioned above, Heacox also cites "In wildness is the preservation of the world," predating it to a talk delivered at the Concord Lyceum on April 23, 1851 ("Thoreau stepped to the lectern . . . and said in his soft voice, 'I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness.'") Heacox goes on to talk of John Muir, saying about "the tide toward conservation and preservation": "Henry David Thoreau raised the banner. John Muir would raise the sword."

    The book also has a foreword by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter in which he writes, "National parks give us an opportunity to treasure what Henry David Thoreau called those 'little oases of wildness in the desert of our civilization.'" And a "Time Line of Western Awareness" notes that in 1854 "Henry David Thoreau publishe[d] Walden.

    Previous issues: August 2006 .. September 2006 .. October 2006 .. November 2006 .. December 2006 .. January 2007 .. February 2007 .. March 2007.. April 2007.. May/June 2007 .. July 2007 .. August 2007 .. September 2007

    Email: Thoreau Today

    Copyright 2006–2007, C. Dodge.