Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

April 2008

Jonathan Rosen's The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) includes a chapter titled "Thoreau's Spyglass," in which is a photo, courtesy of the Concord Free Library, of Thoreau's flute, telescope, and copy of Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology). Some assertions herein: Thoreau "drank only water" (note entirely true), "was patriotically lazy, idle in the service of a radical idea of freedom," "was for decades the best-kept secret of the nineteenth century," "is the patron saint of backyard birdwatchers," "realized as far back as 1845 . . . that token activities can have the mythic grandeur of death-defying adventures," and "liked to find things that were far away and bring them near to home." Rosen notes that Thoreau bought a "spyglass" in 1853, quotes at length from Thoreau's June 10, 1853, journal entry about the use of this tool, then writes, "What I especially like about this passage is that Thoreau isn't even outside. He's in his room, looking out the window. And though he crows that his new toy brings faraway birds to him as if they were 'flies on my own premises,' he actually hasn't even seen any birds in this passage. He could, he realizes, easily have seen a hawk, if there was one. But there [wa]sn't. But that doesn't stop him. He imagines what it might be like to see hawks circling above their nests, he knows he could see them, and this makes him happy."

A short piece in Newsweek, February 18, 2008, by Jerry Adler, "Out of the Wilderness," examines "a new study [that] says we're not getting out into nature as much as we used to" and suggests that maybe that's a good thing ("maybe we'd all do better to give the World a break from us, so it can heal on its own"). Adler writes, "In wildness is the preservation of the World. So wrote Thoreau, back when there was plenty of wildness and little reason to think that the world might someday be in need of preserving. Wilderness was a place most people shunned in the 1850s, back before the invention of most of the things that made it even slightly habitable, such as Gore-Tex jackets and aluminum tent poles. But Thoreau's romantic ideal of nature has lived on in the American imagination, even as the reality of it a place without bathtubs, just when you are most likely to be in need of one has become almost unimaginably remote from our daily immersion in climate-controlled, hygienic luxury." To write that Thoreau had a romantic view of nature is to identify oneself as a person who hasn't read much that he wrote.

"[I]s the problem really that too many people are staying home from the wilderness?" Adler asks. "Some, presumably including Thoreau, would say that the last thing nature needs is more people in it. I have, he wrote in Walden, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. In 1850 he was able to find this a few miles outside Boston, but just let him try to duplicate it in Yellowstone park, say, on Memorial Day weekend."

Lewis Lapham's "Blowing Bubbles" in the December 2007 issue of Harper's examines the U.S. economy ("bursting of the home-mortgage bubble," etc.), beginning with a germane quote from Thoreau, though its source (Waldenisn't cited: "[People] have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over,-and it will be called, and will be, 'A melancholy accident.'"

The February 2008 issue of Ecology includes "Global Warming and Flowering Times in Thoreau's Concord: A Community Perspective." Here's a greatly ellided abstract:

"As a result of climate change, many plants are now flowering measurably earlier than they did in the past. However, some species' flowering times have changed much more than others. . . . In order to determine how North American species' flowering times respond to climate, we analyzed a series of previously unstudied records of the dates of first flowering for over 500 plant taxa in Concord, Massachusetts, USA. These records began with six years of observations by the famous naturalist Henry David Thoreau from 1852 to 1858, continued with 16 years of observations by the botanist Alfred Hosmer in 1878 and 1888-1902, and concluded with our own observations in 2004, 2005, and 2006. From 1852 through 2006, Concord warmed by 2.4°C due to global climate change and urbanization. Using a subset of 43 common species, we determined that plants are now flowering seven days earlier on average than they did in Thoreau's times. . . ."

Supara Janchitfah writes in the Bangkok Post, March 2, 2008, about the "ongoing industrialisation of a fragile area of Prachuap Khiri Khan province [which] has prompted a group of environmentalists to go to extreme lengths to protect their community," quoting Thoreau in the process. Janchitfah writes,"The villagers who protest against the iron ore smelting plant in Bang Saphan district of Prachuap Khiri Khan province have never heard of the philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who first introduced the fundamentals of civil disobedience in an essay of the same name in 1849. However, these villagers know, far better than most, what exactly Thoreau was talking about. One of his many memorable passages poses these questions: 'Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavour to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?'"

Thoreau Yesterday

In a 2004 interview on the website of Powell's Books, author Robert Sullivan, who says he is writing a biography of Thoreau, paraphrases both Emerson (source not cited) and Thoreau, writing, "When Thoreau died, Emerson said, 'That guy loved the plot of ground he stood on more than anything.' Thoreau himself said, 'I think that we haven't explored the pellicle'--that's the word he used that I like—'the pellicle of land that we stand on.' You don't have to go to Mount Katahdin, where he went where he may have seen God or may have flipped out, it's not clear which; you can just look where you're standing. That's the amazing thing. We think we have to pay all this money to experience nature, and yet we can probably just go into our backyard." Sullivan was recalling the fourth to the last paragraph in Walden, where Thoreau writes, "We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are."

Charles Ives compares Thoreau to Beethoven in "Essay Before a Sonata: Thoreau".

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