Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

September 2007

A graduation card from a company called Artists to Watch depicts a beach scene (Steve Katz's painting Path to the Sea) and Thoreau's alleged, prescriptive words: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Life the life you've imagined." Thoreau's actual words from Walden: "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

Ex-Senator Bill Bradley's The New American Story (Random House, 2007) contains this head-scratcher: "[I]t must be remembered that Web sites are only tools. The values of those who use them will determine to what end they apply the tools. As Henry David Thoreau once said about the telegraph, 'It's an improved means to an unimproved end." Doesn't sound right, does it? Here's Thoreau from the Economy chapter of Walden: "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York." Thoreau then goes on to comment on the telegraph, famously writing, "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

Peter Nabokov's Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places (Viking, 2006) describes Maine's Mount Katahdin which native Penobscot people called Pemola. Three paragraphs on Thoreau here begin like so: "One celebrity trespasser of Pemola's stronghold was Henry David Thoreau. In early September 1846, he joined on of the earliest climbing excursions up Katahdin. By this time Thoreau's fame derived from meditations written in semisolitude and material simplicity in a homemade cabin beside a pond two miles outside of the town of Concord, Massachusetts." In fact Thoreau was just 29 in September of 1846, still living at his Walden cabin, and writing journal entries that he would eventually mine to write Walden; certainly he was not famous, much less for the words he was then drafting. Nabokov goes on to quote from The Maine Woods, and also quotes from a secondhand source, Mary P. Sherwood's Thoreau's Penobscot Indians (Stormont Press, 1970) and cites The Indians of Thoreau: Selections from the Indian Notebooks, edited by Richard F. Fleck (Hummingbird Press, 1974). Nabokov also notes that Thoreau's last word, whispered "in a delirium," was "Indian."

The August 12, 2007, Indianapolis Star reports on a tour of an "energy-efficient home/museum/recording studio/bomb shelter" that Vic Cook has been building in the woods southwest of Pendleton, Indiana, since 1978. The article starts with a Thoreauvian epigraph ("Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.") and ends by referring to Thoreau again:

"'This has been a great adventure,' Cook says. 'I don't think people have enough adventure in their lives." He points to a plaque hanging behind him, which carries a message from Henry David Thoreau's 'Walden,' the 1854 classic about his time spent living in a second-growth forest. In the passage, Thoreau writes about being an individual and following your dreams. With daylight diminishing, it's time for Cook's audience to hit the trail back to their cars. Michael Ryan of Indianapolis turns and takes one final look at Cook's 'great adventure.' 'I think Thoreau would have been proud,' he says."

An August 13 article in North Texas newspaper the Star-Telegram, by Stephen Wilbers ("Avoid these three common errors, you'll write better") looks at popular errors in grammar and usage, naming them "comma splice, lack of subject-verb agreement and nonparallel structure," and giving examples of each. Wilbers closes by citing Thoreau as an example of good writing: "Here's a quote from Henry David Thoreau. See if you can restore it to its original parallel order. 'Any fool can make a rule and minding it is what every fool does.' Thoreau wrote the sentence as 'Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it.' Feel better?" (The source, not given here: Thoreau's journal entry from Feb. 3, 1860.)

Recently published, but something I haven't seen: Thoreau and the Art of Life: Precepts and Principles, edited and with an introduction by Rod MacIver, Heron Dance Press, 2006. The publisher's catalog indicates that the 116-page book is a selection from Thoreau's journals illustrated with MacIver's watercolors.

Adam McDowell writes in a blog called The Ampersand, published on the website of Canada's National Post, in a posting titled "Canon Fodder: The odyssey starts with The Iliad": "It was Henry David Thoreau who shamed me into lugging a copy of The Iliad just about everywhere I go. How could I not in the face of this logic: In Walden, his famous account of solitary living, Thoreau noted that readers at the Concord, Mass., library would ignore the classics — 'A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar,' but 'here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered … and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading.'" McDowell wonders, "Could it be that the classics just aren't that relevant or readable?" and continues, "For the next year, I intend to find out. Bruce Gilbert, director of the liberal arts program at Bishop's University, has kindly supplied me with a list of classic Western texts to absorb and has agreed to answer my questions as they come up. . . . Starting today with Book One of The Iliad (Homer's epic poem set against the Trojan War . . . ) I'll blog my thoughts a few times a week on this site. . . . A caution: He talked a big game, but Thoreau himself seems to have struggled to ground himself in the classics. 'I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer,' he wrote, adding: 'though I looked at his page only now and then.'"

An essay by Alex Mitchell about walking in New York City ("The extreme boulevardier," New York Times, August 19, 2007) quotes Thoreau's essay on walking: "Walking city streets played the same role for some New Yorkers as rambling through the forests and streams did for Henry David Thoreau. In a famous 1851 lecture and subsequent essay, titled simply 'Walking,' Thoreau declared: 'I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements.'"

Kennebunkport, Maine, high school student Shawn Callahan writes in Seacoast Online ("My Walden," August 17, 2007) of a house at the end of a dirt road where his family recently purchased land with a cabin on it: "It's our family camp, but I like to think of it as my Walden. We bought the camp toward the end of this past school year, just as my English class was delving into the transcendental philosophy. . . . I really didn't know what to expect from the philosophy, but by the way it was described by . . . my English teacher, I was rather excited about it. The transcendental lifestyle was very interesting. They were like hippies (without the prevalent drug use and Woodstock) who were educated at Ivy League schools. They were free spirits with boundaries. However, the one person and event that interested me the most was Thoreau and his journey to Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. I just found it terribly interesting that one man trying to find himself would extricate himself from society and slow down his life to do so."

Callahan says the "300-and-something square foot cabin" with no water and no electricity, has "gas lamps, a gas stove, a wood stove, and the radio and cellphone reception is great." Despite the latter, the place reminds him of Walden: "There are no streetlights, no cars, no neighbors close by, and at night it is quiet — and dark, don't forget the dark. It is there that we go to relax, to flush our minds, to extricate ourselves from society, to slow down our lives." Callahan says he "wanted desperately to get out of my camp what Thoreau got out of his cabin. After all, it's the perfect venue for 'soul searching' and it was as close to what Thoreau had as I was ever going to get to. But then it occurred to me that Thoreau was the 'ugly duckling' of society; he didn't want to go by the norm to find spiritual enlightenment. I could use Thoreau's teachings as a model, but I could not actually adhere to every little thing that he did. Oddly enough, it would be 'anti-Thoreauvian' of me to do that." Callahan asserts that in the twenty-first century, "Our lives are moving at such a rapid pace that it becomes almost necessary for us to slow it down to maintain our sanity. Granted, Thoreau's journey to Walden wasn't about maintaining his sanity; his life was already functioning at a slow and steady pace. But in a modern day adaptation of Thoreau's celebrated experiment, we would find ourselves slowing our life down, depriving ourselves of creature comforts, and taking time to find ourselves, so in the so-called 'real world,' we would be able to appreciate the things we do have better.

And what does Callahan conclude? "Every time we go up there and every time we come back, we appreciate a hot shower, or a flip of the lightswitch, or even the yap of the TV."

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