Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

May 2008

Pennsylvania-based Mike Doland writes to alert us about his novel Walden (West Chester, PA : Conversari House, 2006) which a WorldCat notes says is a "[s]tory about the seamier side of campus life, a life far removed from the smiling faces on the college brochures," and which Doland says is "filled with subtle references to Thoreau and Walden." Doland also sends a press release dated April 17 that says that West Chester remodeling company Pine Street Carpenters plans to build a replica of Thoreau's cabin as part of a forthcoming (May 31–September 28) "Totally Terrific Treehouses" exhibit at the Tyler Arboretum in Media, Pennsylvania. (No, the cabin won't be constructed in a tree.)

According to his essay published in Opednews.com, Dave Lindorff was a college frosh in 1968, and on April 4 of that year he hitchhiked from Wesleyan University in Connecticut to Concord, Massachusetts and made his way to Walden Pond, where he was scribbling by flashlight an essay on Thoreau's influence on Gandhi and MLK, prepared to sleep out for the night. Then it began to rain and he began to wish he'd brought a tarp—and his peace was further disturbed by a Concord cop who told him he couldn't camp out there, broke the news that King had been shot, and gave Lindorff the option of spending the night in the Concord jail. Lindorff writes about the experience in "Thoughts on April 4" and comes to the conclusion that "Martin Luther King was right. So were Gandhi and Thoreau before him. Violence is not the answer."

From an article about tax resisters in the April issue of the Brooklyn Rail, Jed Lapinski's "Paying for War": "Hedemann and Benn—who reside together in an invitingly cluttered Park Slope brownstone, and don't appear to be resisting anything so much as embracing a peaceful, conscientious way of life—know their IRS agent by name. They've met with him several times, individually. Benn recently gave him a photocopy of Thoreau's On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. When they next spoke, the IRS man admitted he didn't see how such views apply to the present. In her green-carpeted living room, Benn chuckled at such a notion, as her tortoise shell cat crawled onto her shoulder. She suggested that the agent must not have read it very thoroughly. As one of about a hundred still-relevant sentences from the 1849 essay reads: 'If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.'"

Antonio Trillanes, the first senator of the Philippines ever to be elected while in prison (2007) cites Thoreau as an influence, according to Frank Hilario in the American Chronicle, April 3, 2008, in an opinion piece headlined "Revolution in Prison. Senator Trillanes in jail & in denial": "Was Henry David Thoreau a true revolutionary? He was. Is Trillanes a true revolutionary in the image of Thoreau? He would be. Trillanes has quoted Thoreau saying, 'Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison' (gmanews.tv)."

In the April 14 issue of the Waltham, Massachusetts, Daily News Tribune, Sue Scheible reports: "Henry David Thoreau will make an appearance at Walden Pond on Saturday. Local historian Richard Smith will portray Thoreau at the Thoreau House Replica."

An April 13 article in the Boston Globe ("In tradition of Thoreau, a call to action," by John Dyer) reports briefly on "a push by the scholarly Thoreau Society to expand its outreach programs . . . to show nonscholars how Thoreau's writings have resonance today on issues from global warming to healthcare." Event listings ("City Picks") in the same issue of the Globe include an April 16 talk at the Geological Lecture Hal: "How would Henry David Thoreau view the Cape today? That's what Scot Miller explores in 'Illustrating Thoreau's Cape Cod: A Photographer's Story,' a video of his experiences taking pictures for Thoreau's 'Cape Cod.'"

Thoreau Yesterday

In his book Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), Paul Theroux criticizes aid workers, saying that "only Africans [are] capable of making a difference in Africa," and quoting Thoreau with some elision: "'Be sure you give the poor the aid they most need,' Thoreau wrote in Walden. 'There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve." ("Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind." Thoreau wrote in Walden. Theroux elides the next eight sentences.)

From Sue Monk Kidd's novel The Secret Life of Bees (Viking, 2002): "Next to Shakespeare I love Henry Thoreau best. Mrs. Henry read us portions of Walden Pond, and afterword I'd had fantasies of going to a private garden where T. Ray would never find me. I started appreciating Mother Nature, what she's done with the world. In my mind she looked like Eleanor Roosevelt." Of course Kidd knows that the title of Thoreau's best-known book is Walden, though her character in this novel doesn't. On the author's website she writes: "I love Thoreau best, too. I read Walden when I was fifteen. Along with Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening, it made the biggest impression on me of any book I read in my adolescence. . . . Since fifteen, I've harbored a secret and, I admit, highly romantic fantasy of going off like Thoreau to my own Walden Pond."

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