by David Gessner, author of Sick of Nature in which he says
Edward Abbey "led a very un-Thoreauvian life, with many offspring from
many wives," another a December 15, 1975, review of John McPhee's
The Survival of the Bark Canoe, in which
Henri Armand Vaillancourt , "a 25-year-old bachelor who lives in
Greenville, N.H., and thinks and talks exclusively about canoes," is
described as being "[r]efreshingly un-Thoreauvian" ("he prefers Tang
to spring water when eating his homemade beef jerky").
A search for "unThoreauvian" results in four hits, one from the
October 19, 2005, column by Washington Post books editor,
Michael Dirda ("Dirda on Books"), who fields a question from
Minnetonka, Minnesota: "What thoughts do you have about copyright and
public domain?" Dirda responds: "My sense is that copyright and usage
isn't a battlefield for physical books but for digital ones. That
said, my sense is that copyright should extend for the life of an
author, and perhaps for a bit longer, but that literature, like
information, wants to be free. Of course, as an erstwhile scholar, I
worry about the corruption of texts. Not long ago I googled a sentence
by Thoreau, just to check my memory, and discovered that the hits
showed five or six different wordings, some patently unThoreauvian.
This is worrisome. What we need is to establish a way of preserving
accuracy when people start flinging stuff around the internet. I
gather there is a site where one can find facsimiles of book pages,
and this is certainly a good starting point."
I find five hits after googling "non-Thoreauvian" (including a
quotation from Gary McIlroy's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the Burden
of Science," from the March 1987 issue of American Literature
("[U]nderlying even the romanticism of Dillard's book there is always
a trace of non-Thoreauvian dread") and none for "nonThoreauvian."
Thoreau Yesterday
In Fatal Mountaineer: The High-Altitude Life and Death of Willi
Unsoeld, American Himalayan Legend (St. Martin's Press, 2002),
author Robert Roper asserts that Unsoeld "stands squarely" in
transcendentalist tradition "associated with Emerson and Thoreau," and
quotes Walden where Thoreau "advised his readers not to
'underrate the value of a fact [as] it will one day flower into a
truth," adding, "Willi understood this sort of thing." Much later in
the books Roper comes back to this, writing, "Willi's love of nature
is similar to Thoreau's and Emerson's, and like the American
transcendentalists he stands in a line of direct descent from German
Idealism by way of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Carlyle." Then Roper
brings up John Muir, who, he says, "achieved a nature-is-my-cathedral
epiphany fully as sublime as Thoreau's" and did so while climbing
mountains in California, "solo and with little equipment." "Compare
his adventures in the Sierra Nevada with Thoreau's gentle walks in the
Concord woods," Roper says. Describing Muir's field observation and
"scientific bent," Roper writes that "unlike the down-to-earth Thoreau
he worked hard to introduce a kind of experimental rigor into his
writings."
From Robert Bruegman's Sprawl: A Compact History
(University of Chicao Press, 2005): "Among the best documented
inhabitants of exurbia are a number of the early American prophets of
what we now know as environmentalism. Henry David Thoreau, in his
shack at Walden Pond just beyond suburban Boston, John Muir, in house
across the Berkeley Hills from San Francisco, and Aldo Leopold, at his
weekend retreat just north of Baraboo, near Madison Wisconsin, were
actually exurbanites, individuals who loved what they considered a
rural life but who also wanted ready access to the city."
Mark David Spence's Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian
Removal and the Making of the National Parks (Oxford University
Press, 1999) contains a couple of pages about Thoreau's ideas
regarding wilderness, a straightforward and apparently accurate
summary, with an examination of the famous "Contact! Contact!" lines
and Thoreau's "high estimation of Native Americans." "When Thoreau
made his famous statement that 'in Wildness is the preservation of the
World,' he did not equate protection of vast landscapes with the
preservation of the world," Spence writes. "Instead, Thoreau spoke of
wildness as a quality that all people should possess, a quality he
felt was most clearly understood and appreciated by native peoples."
Spence notes Thoreau's influence on John Muir, but also says that
Thoreau was "[l]argely unread in his own lifetime" and that "his
conception of what constituted wilderness and the significance of its
preservation simply did not translate over to the latter decades of
the nineteenth century."
Kaaterskill Falls (Dial Press, 1998), a multi-part novel by
Allegra Goodman, contains epigraphs by John Keats, Oscar Wilde, Edna
St. Vincent Millay, Thoreau, and others. The Thoreau, from
Walden, with Goodman's ellipses: "In my front yard grew the
strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod,
shrub oaks and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut. . . . The sumach
(Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house. . . . In August, the
large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many
wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue. . . ."
(This is from the fourth chapter, "Sounds," though that fact isn't
mentioned.)
Rebecca Solnit's Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars
of the American West (Sierra Club Book, 1994) contains a number of
Thoreauvian references. Indeed, the book jacket says "[this] is a
story about civil disobedience, landscape painting and photography,
Indian wars, place names, Henry David Thoreau, many heroines, a few
conquistadors . . ." Solnit quotes Thoreau on the westward movement of
Easterners ("Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free . .
."), and later discusses Thoreau's address and essay on the topic of
walking, quoting the same passage at more length and noticing how
"Thoreau in his rhapsody about the wild and free suddenly joins forces
with the march of progress which will spread cities, railroads, mines,
and military bases across his vision of the West." "Amnesia made
belief in progress possible for Thoreau," Solnit later asserts
(p.128), and she writes,
"There are two reasons to go walking. One is to get somewhere. The
other is to walk. Thoreau displays for us both ways of walking, and
the kind of thinking behind each one, the ways I have been calling
Utopian and Acadian." The book has no index, unfortunately.
The last paragraph of Theodore Steinberg's Slide Mountain, or The
Folly of Owning Nature (University of California Press, 1995)
brings in Thoreau for the first time in the book: "Even Henry David
Thoreau, nature lover that he was, could not help dreaming about
owning a slice of the earth he loved so much. Many times he imagined
what it would be like to own land near his home at Walden Pond. He
wandered the neighborhood, weighed the possibilities of each parcel,
pictured in his mind what it would be like to live in one spot or
another, to build a house, improve the land. Then he ventured on
before his fingers got 'burned by actual possession.' As he wrote,
'Man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to
let alone.' By Thoreau's standards, the modern American landscape is a
very poor one indeed."
The second paragraph of the second chapter of Walden reads, "My
imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several
farms — the refusal was all I wanted — but I never got my fingers
burned by actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual
possession was when I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to
sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a
wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a
deed of it, his wife — every man has such a wife — changed her mind
and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him.
Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it
surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents,
or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However, I let him
keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had carried it far
enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for just what I
gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten
dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a
wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich man without any
damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and I have since
annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With
respect to landscapes, 'I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute.'"
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