Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

September/October 2008

"The Boldness of Her Brush Strokes"-- an essay by Anne E. Carroll about her artist grandmother Betty Madden-Work (Washington Post, September 8, 2008)--describes (and reproduces) a painting titled Thoreau's World. Carroll writes, "One of my grandmother's paintings now hangs in our living room. It's one of the first she painted in her later style. She had started by dropping rich maroons and a few pinks and browns onto the paper. Turning it around one afternoon, she focused on a spot that had the shape of a man. She made the spot into Henry David Thoreau and the painting into 'Thoreau's World.' Thoreau is only half visible; his torso floats in the center of the work, and he looks off into a maze of trees and vines and flowers. It's certainly not a realistic rendering of the Massachusetts woods. But it is a perfect evocation of Thoreau's spirit, of the courageousness of his act of heading off into the wilderness to thrash out his own truths."

From smalltown Minnesota (Park Rapids) comes a report on high school social studies teachers' summer travels "to help broaden their teaching base" ("Teachers' summer trip brings history lessons to high school, Park Rapids Enterprise, September 06, 2008). Mike Cool, for one, went to Massachusetts--and Concord. Holly Roepke writes, "Walden Pond proved to not be the serene spot Thoreau had written about in his poem. 'What was striking about Walden was Thoreau's description of the natural setting wasn't the appearance at all today,' Cool said. 'The "pond" looked pretty much like a public beach and subdivided lake home property. So much for Thoreau's "green" vision!'"

A piece titled "Serve others, be lifelong learner," by Bebe Green, in the Desert Sun (Palm Springs, California), August 30, 2008, purports to quote Thoreau: "Henry David Thoreau said, 'In some way, every man and woman is my superior, and I can learn from them.'" The sentiment seems Thoreauvian enough, but what is the source?

NPR's All Things Considered reported on Augist 23, 2008, on a new album by twenty-five-year-old South Africa-born musician Johnny Flynn ("A Larum"), saying that "Henry David Thoreau's Walden inspired [the song] 'The Box.' 'Thoreau's saying that somewhere along the way we've gone horribly wrong in collecting all this stuff,' Flynn says."

A new book from the UK: Robert M. Abbott's Uncommon Cents: Thoreau and the Nature of Business (Sheffield: Green Frigate, 2008). Thanks for the head's up, Jim Dwyer.

The back page of each issue of North Carolina–based monthly The Sun, titled "Sunbeams," is devoted to quotations, though sources aren't cited. The editor of that page ought to verify sources: the July 2008 issue misquotes famous lines from Walden, attributing to Thoreau the lines, "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail."

Thoreau's actual words in chapter 2 of Walden ("Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"): "Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail."

The next quote on the page is attributed to singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III: "It's hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn't own water skis or a snorkel."

Thoreau Yesterday

From Alaska author Nancy Lord’s "Native Tongues,", Sierra Magazine, November/December 1996: "On his trips into the Maine woods, Thoreau made a point of learning the Penobscot and Abenaki names of birds, plants, and places from his Indian guides. He learned that the native name for the fish he knew as "pout" described its habit of leading its young as a hen leads her chicks-- something he had himself observed but never found in any book. From the Abenaki words for fir branches (sedi) and the act of spreading fir branches on the ground for a bed (sediak), he understood not only a relationship, but a different way of seeing.

'It was a new light when my guide gave me Indian names for things for which I had only scientific ones before,' Thoreau wrote in his journal. 'In proportion as I understood the language, I saw them from a new point of view. . . . A dictionary of the Indian language reveals another and wholly new life to us.'"

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