Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

June/July 2008

A new Library of America edition has been published: American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (Library of America, 2008), edited by Bill McKibben. Despite its subtitle, the chronologically arranged book starts with Thoreau, and includes excerpts from his journals, Walden, and "Huckleberries," the latter taken from Collected Essays and Poems, the 2001 Library of America edition of Thoreau's writings. The book also ends with Thoreau, in a way, reprinting Rebecca Solnit's smart essay "The Thoreau Problem" from the May/June 2007 issue of Orion, an essay which criticizes those who see Thoreau primarily as a hermit naturalist and cranky individualist. "This compartmentalizing of Thoreau," Solnit asserts, "is a microcosm of a larger partition in American thought, a fence built in the belief that places in the imagination can be contained." Solnit quotes an unnamed author of an introduction to her paperback copy of Walden who wrote, "As much as Thoreau wanted to disentangle himself from other people's problems so he could get on with his own life, he sometimes found that the issue of black slavery spoiled his country walks." About this Solnit says, "If 'black slavery spoiled his country walks,' it spoiled the slaves' country walks even more. Thus the unresisting walk to jail. . . . [Thoreau's] thoughts on the matter might be summed up this way: You head for the hills to enjoy the best of what the world is at this moment; you head for confrontation, for resistance, for picket lines to protect it, to liberate it. Thus it is that the road to paradise runs through prison, thus it is that Thoreau went to jail to enjoy a better country."

Let it be said that this volume's foreword by Al Gore compartmentalizes Thoreau in the way that Solnit decries, when Gore notes that many writers have been spurred to "emulate the idealism and solitary self-reliance of Thoreau at Walden Pond," then adds, "But just as he could not completely shut out his neighbors. . . ." As if he Thoreau wanted to do this.

McKibben's introduction plagiarizes himself when he refers to Thoreau as being "Buddha with a receipt from the hardware store" (McKibben used this line in his introduction to the Beacon Press 1997 and 2004 edition of Walden), and aptly notes that Thoreau "saw so far into the future that it took decades for other writes to catch up with him and the questions he raised. It's as if Picasso had suddenly appeared in the mid-19th century—the history of art would not have been ready to make full sense of him."

Indeed, "Huckleberries" here sounds entirely modern, and as I read it I heard Edward Abbey's voice, as if it were he who had written it, influenced by Thoreau, writing 120 years or so later: "All our improvements, so called, tend to convert the country into the town. . . . [W]e behave like oxen in a flower garden. . . . Let us try to keep the world new, and while we make a wary use of the city, preserve as far as possible the advantages of living in the country. . . . Be blown on by all the winds. Open all your pores and bathe in all tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons. . . . Grown green with spring—yellow and ripe with autumn. . . . For nature is doing her best to make us well. Do not resist her. . . . [N]ature is but another name for health."

"Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around." Does that sound like Thoreau to you? No. But it's attributed to him in a chapter 4 epigraph to Joelle Jay and Amy Kovarick's Baby on Board: Becoming a Mother Without Losing Yourself—A Guide for Moms-to--Be (AMACOM, 2007). And over 3,000 Google hits, though none (that I could see) with a source cited. How about a contest for the most trite and inane "quotes" attributed to Thoreau? Starting now, send me your nominations.

The first issue of Thoreau Today, August 2006, noted the common attribution, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go the grave with the song still in them" and other variants of this. (In Walden, Thoreau asserted, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," but not the second clause of that sentence.) Reader John Allen notes a similar line attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Many people die with their music still in them." But which Oliver Wendell Holmes, if either? The fuller quotation usually attributed to "Oliver Wendell Holmes" is this: "Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out." On May 27, there were 2,220 Google hits on "Many people die with their music still in them"; 1,450 when "Holmes" was added to that search; and just 99 when "Holmes Jr." was added to the search.

Where do people get these lines? Here's the latest "quotation" I've seen attributed to Thoreau, with no source given: "The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness." It sounds rather banal and unequivocal, to me, not very Thoreauvian. Can anyone find it's source? On the morning of May 13, 2008, there were 339 Google hits for this exact line, 275 when Thoreau's name was included. Stacey Lawson begins her essay "What is Faith?" published on Huffington Post, "Henry David Thoreau once wrote, 'The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.'" Did he? Where?

From Jon Spayde's How to Believe: Teachers and Seekers Show th Way to a Modern, Life-Changing Faith (Random House, 2008): "Everyone in this book plays the music of faith with somewhat different instrumentation, and following his or her own different drummer as well as the musical score they have inherited from their traditions."

Thoreau's "different drummer" has become part of mass culture, represented now in names of businesses, for starters: a Massachusetts and New York cookware retailer (Different Drummer's Kitchen), an Internet cafe in Watertown, New York (Different Drummer Cafe), a charter fishing outfit in Louisiana, a "global grassroots marketing and media company", a gift shop in Rhode Island, an acupuncturist in Portland, Oregon, a belly dancing company, a wedding planner in Hawaii, a small farm in Edmonton, Kentucky, a florist in Mt. Holly, New Jersey, a llama breeder, a hotel in Buckinghamshire, a San Diego music studio, a scrapbook supply company, and someone specializing in "services for young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and their families".

"Different drummer" has appeared widely in the titles of books and magazine articles (A Different Drummer: Anthropology from a Canadian Perspective, Michael Deaver's A Different Drummer: My Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan) and even titles of journals (the Thoreau Institute's Different Drummer, and names of record labels . And it's used in countless titles of webzines and blogs ( Different Drummer; Nicholas Stix's A Different Drummer; March to a Different Drummer), as well as an Internet radio site.

The twenty-seventh episode of seventies TV show Shazam! was titled "The Sound of a Different Drummer" (first Aired: Saturday October 9, 1976).

Thoreau impersonators are on the loose, this time in Indianapolis. Chris Sikich reports in the May 17 issue of the Indianapolis Star ("Prof portrays Thoreau") that "Henry David Thoreau will be at Carmel Clay Public Library Tuesday, fresh from Walden Pond. Kevin Radaker, 51, Noblesville, chairman of the English Department at Anderson University, will portray the noted American author, who lived from 1817 to 1862 and is perhaps most famous for the 1854 book, 'Walden.' His 1949 essay "Civil Disobedience" inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. during the past century, according to a press release from the Carmel library. Radaker said Thoreau still resonates among a 21st-century audience, as the author urges people to avoid conformity. He has portrayed Thoreau about 300 times, although this is his first stop in Hamilton County since the early 1990s."

His "1949 essay"?

The Akron Beacon Journal on May 16 reported on the status of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team, facing the Boston Celtics in the NBA playoffs. Under the headline, "Cavs' James Still Full of Confidence," Patrick McManamon wrote, "'A LeBron James team is never desperate.' That's what James said to conclude his post-Game 5 news conference late Wednesday night after the Cavs had put themselves in a 3-2 hole against the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference semifinals. James apparently has never read one of Boston's finer authors, a guy named Thoreau who was driven to live by a pond because, he wrote, "most men lead lives of quiet desperation." Thoreau clearly was right about men, and clearly was ahead of his time regarding women, who are much more placid - until it comes to cooking on the grill."

There's more: "'From the desperate city you go into the desperate country,' Thoreau wrote, 'and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.' Hard to think minks or muskrats will be any consolation to Cavs fans if the Celtics end this series tonight."

Literary allusions in the sports section? What is this? England? (Good work, Patrick.)

Luke Clayton leads a piece in the North Texas e-News ("Small boats BIG on fun," May 5, 2008): "When paddling small steams or backwaters, I am often reminded of the words of Thoreau in his famous novel A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers: 'We seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams.'" I wonder how many libraries, if any, classify Thoreau's writings as fiction. A google search indicates that at least one blogger, Amazon.com reviewer, and Wikipedia editor (Herwarth Walden entry, accessed May 13, 2008) consider Walden to be a novel. Is the Bible too a novel?

From an ad in the May 26 issue of High Country News: "Walden: The Earth Song Collection is an 11-song album is an [sic] acoustic song cycle inspired by Henry David Thoreau's stay in his cabin at Walden Pond, full of guitars, mandolins, cellos, string quartets and flutes. Educational liner notes are written by Jeff Cramer of the Thoreau Institute."

String quartets in Thoreau's cabin, eh? Creator Michael Johnathon is also responsible for a "two act, one set, four character play," titled "Walden: The Ballad of Thoreau," according to Waldenplay.com, Johnathon's Web site.

Thoreau Yesterday

In the November/December 1983 issue of Mother Earth News magazine, thirteen people were named to an "Environmental Hall of Fame" (shouldn't that be a River of Fame or a Forest of Fame?). Henry David Thoreau was one of the thirteen, in the company of Barbara Ward, Anwar Fazal, Sir Albert Howard, and the founder of Rodale Press.

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