Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

February 2008

The last issue of Thoreau Today reported on references to Henry David Thoreau in contemporary obituaries. Subsequently Henry David Thoreau himself has died—H. D. Thoreau, Jr., that is, in Palo Alto, California, a "former San Francisco businessman who had significant roles as an official of two Olympic Games," and is said in a San Francisco Chronicle obit dated January 5, 2008, to have been "a distant cousin of naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau."

The November 2006 issue of Thoreau Today covered references to "the Thoreau of [fill in the blank]" (such as "the Thoreau of the suburbs" and "the Thoreau of the West"). Here's a new one: The December 12, 2007 issue of the Globe and Mail describes someone as being "the Thoreau of Gibraltar Point" ("a scruffy-looking loner, most often seen skulking outside a schoolhouse portable he has converted")

The third part of Justin Maseychik's Waldo County Citizen piece on Thoreau (the first part of which was described here last month) absurdly states, "Thoreau was not a big fan of winter and spent many lonely and sick hours convalescing in Concord. . ." As for "not a . . . fan of winter," Maseychik clearly hasn't read Thoreau's winter journal entries. As for the sick hours, Thoreau's last winter—his sick-in-bed time—was peopled, probably more than he wished, with family and friends.

Maseychik sums up: "Perhaps this is his great theme: The belief that one can change one's 'mind' for the better. . . . For Thoreau, bare attention (in nature) led to a greater awareness of self. An awareness of self led to an acknowledgment of impertinent forces at work in the world." Quoting Thoreau on death ("When we look over the fields we are not saddened because the particular flowers or grasses will wither — for the law of their death is the law of new life … So it is with the human plant"), he immediately asserts contrarily, "But Thoreau was saddened by death, and ultimately his drive to describe a universal force in nature was a drive to relinquish any lingering fears he might have had about his own early demise at the hands of tuberculosis." Maseychik concludes, "Thoreau was a religious seer to the extent that he accepted his worldly experience with reverence and awe. It is hard for us today to show reverence for much of anything. In addition, we all tend to idolize Thoreau just a little (take ownership of him greedily like any other commodity) and ignore his moral injunction to become aware of life's web. Thus we buy his books . . . and refuse to change our hearts whatsoever — in the final analysis then we lack Thoreau's backbone and we lack his humility: From the Latin humilitas, meaning 'nearness to the earth.'"

Sara Wheeler reviews I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D Thoreau in the January 19, 2008, issue of The Telegraph. Calling Thoreau a prophet who if he were alive today, he would be labeled an ecologist ("though not of the Zac Goldsmith variety"), Wheeler notes that Thoreau's journal amply represents "the quotidian" ("the problem of shoelaces that insist on untying themselves; how to discern if a watermelon is ripe; the cat refusing to go out because it's too cold"), close observation of nature and seasonal changes, and poetic expression. Thoreau reveals, says Wheeler, "that he despises money, parties, the popular press and people who go on holiday. He likes thinking, solitude and, above all, local topography, flora and wildlife. He conjures the eructations of flatulent bullfrogs, the flavour of a freshly picked cranberry, the fragrance of a half-bushel of grapes stowed in the bow of his boat as he rows home." Wheeler sees Thoreau "wrestling with contemporary issues, from the poll tax to the abolition of slavery and the advent of the railways," noting that "[c]ivic life fails to impress him, exemplifying as it does an omnipresent tension between nature and the world," and asserting that his observations "are as fresh today as they were in the mid-19th century." Wheeler notes Thoreau's comments on church hypocrisy, says that "[h]e can be priggish" (and that there are few jokes in his journal [he developed those in his books]), and observes that he "grows more confidently moralistic in his forties, and more splenetic with middle age (who doesn't?)."

In a blog called "The Weedpatch Gazette" and an entry titled "Of Bugs and Men", Samuel Health writes, "Henry Thoreau was well aware of intestinal worms, and mentioned these inhabiting our bodies, that while we may be healthy we are not pure." Later he writes, "[S]ome have thought it odd that Thoreau would conclude 'Walden' with the story of a bug chewing its way out of a farmer's table, suggesting the egg may have been deposited in the original tree from which the table had been made some sixty years previously. But Henry was using this as an example not only of our hope of immortality, but suggesting that perhaps there might yet come from some unknown seeming trivial source a 'beautiful and winged life' giving hope for humankind. The problem with Henry was his ego, and one can be excused for believing he thought he was an example of this future beautiful species and this was the reason he chose this story to conclude his book notwithstanding his being aware of the stories crediting the longevity of beetles and the high esteem in which some cultures held them."

Ian Sansom's December 22, 2007, review in The Guardian of Ken Albala's Beans: A History begins: "'I was determined', writes Henry David Thoreau, in Walden (1854), 'to know beans.' But not as determined, perhaps, as Ken Albala. Self-reliant Thoreau merely sowed and hoed and picked his two acres of beans (making a profit, he records, when he came to sell them, of exactly $8.711⁄2 cents). Academic Albala has gone much further and written a complete history of what George Gissing called 'those pretentious cheats of the appetite, those tabulated humbugs, those certified aridities calling themselves human food!'"

An article in the New York Times on October 23, 2007 (John Hanc's "On the Trail Again With Creature Comforts") reports on the Appalachian Mountain Club's new 50+ Adventure Camp and their outings in the White Mountains. Thoreau is invoked from the start: "In July 1858, Henry David Thoreau traveled to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. As was his custom he walked through the woods at every opportunity ('Yo have to sacrifice so much to the horse'), marveled at nature ('The wood thrush sings almost wherever I go, reconsecrating the world'), and with some companions undertook an arduous climb up Mount Washington. Almost 150 years later, in June 2007 and again in September, two groups of Thoreau's spiritual children retraced his steps--or at least some of them. Members of a generation that had once been inspired by Thoreau's 'Walden' and other writings to reject the material world and seek 'the tonic of wildness,' these baby boomers embarked on their own walk in the woods. . . ."

The article comes back to Thoreau at the end, describing a September hike up Mount Jackson, "daunting but certainly not as high as Mount Washington. . . . Considering Thoreau's experience [on Mount Washington] in 1858, this may have been a good idea. While exploring a ravine on Mount Washington, Thoreau sprained his ankle, couldn't walk and spent most of the next 24 hours as an easy target for flies and insects. ('Anything but mosquitoes by night,' he lamented in his journal.) His miserable experience was enough to drive even the baby boomers' patron saint back inside--where, one suspects, he too might have enjoyed salmon, chardonnay and a warm bed at the Highland Lodge."

I can see it now, David Henry quaffing chardonnay. Not.

Thoreau Yesterday

Reunion (Collier Books, 1988), the memoir of Tom Hayden, cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society, mentions Thoreau a couple of times. The first is when Hayden describes a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee convention speech by Sandra Cason, who would become his first wife. Cason ended her speech with the old canard: "When Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay taxes to a government which supported slavery, Emerson went to visit him. 'Henry David,' said Emerson, 'what are you doing in there?' Thoreau looked at him and replied, 'Ralph Waldo, what are you doing out there?'"

Later, in describing his rationale for traveling to Vietnam in 1965 to engage in citizen diplomacy, Hayden writes, "[T]here was an ethical imperative, the same one which Thoreau had argued with Emerson during the Mexican-American War (and which Casey [Cason] had cited in the speech that affected me so deeply five years before): Jailed for refusing to pay taxes in support of a war against Mexico, Thoreau spoke of the need to be 'citizens of the world.'"

Tom Hayden's "The Politics of Nature" in The Soul of Nature (Continuum, 1994), edited by Michael Tobias and Georgianne Cowan, refers to Thoreau several times, calling him and Emerson "nineteenth-century Romantics . . . whose visions ultimately animated John Muir," saying that "Thoreau adopted self-reliance and self-sufficiency as goals for the individual and the community," noting that Aldo Leopold wrote "in the spirit of Thoreau," and wrongly stating that Thoreau "dropped out of Harvard." (Thoreau graduated from Harvard in four years.) Hayden writes, "Some like Thoreau dropped out of Harvard and identified with the victims of expansion, the Native people, Mexicans, and African slaves. All of them wanted to preserve wilderness for its own sake, but also because they recognized in wilderness the essence of the human spirit. In wilderness was the preservation of the world." Thoreau's words, of course: "[I]n Wildness is the preservation of the world." Hayden ends by quoting Thoreau, as Hayden envisions a politics that "overcomes the love of power with the power of love . . . but also with millions of people ready to vote, as Thoreau did, 'not with a mere piece of paper, but your whole life.'"

Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours (Viking, 1985), by Frederick Turner, notes that Muir read Thoreau widely and deeply. A footnote here (page 230) says that Muir purchased the 1906 edition of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau "and heavily marked the essay ['Walking'] there . . . By the end of his life Muir knew Thoreau so well he could quote whole passages from the works, especially Walden. Bailey Millard, who knew Muir in his last years, reported that Emerson had said Muir would be the perfect man to edit Thoreau's works (Bailey Millard, 'A Skyland Philosopher,' Bookman's, February, 1908)."

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