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References
Walls, Laura Dassow. Henry David Thoreau: A Life. First edition, University of Chicago Press, 2017.
p. 4
This choice will set him off from family, friends, and neighbors—unlike them, Henry David Thoreau would be a writer. This meant taking up the writer’s double consciousness, splitting the self who lives from the self who writes, opening up a double vision: present and past, white and Indian, civil and wild, man and nature.
p. 9
No American writer is more place centered than Thoreau.
He learned this himself when he moved to New York City and tried to be like other writers, mobile and market driven. It was a disaster. But back home the smallest things—like the way the sandy soil breaks through the grass, “the naked flesh of New England her garment being blown aside”—moved him to rhapsody
What the Indian had by birth, Thoreau claimed through art, a spiritual rebirth for himself and his own immigrant people. His longing for a deep connection with the land would make Walden into the great American fable of alienation, regrounding, and rebirth.
Thoreau used the specifics of place to embody deeper and more universal truths.
To grasp Thoreau means grasping where he was and how it became that way.
p. 62 (Commonplace books)
There in the stacks Thoreau began his lifelong habit of keeping a permanent record of his reading by copying extracts into commonplace books. He developed a passion for English poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare
p. 75 (Reading list)
When Thoreau arrived back at Harvard, he began working through Brownson’s reading list: the latest European literature and philosophy—Goethe and Coleridge, Heine, Cousin, Constant. He bought Brownson’s New Views and Emerson’s Nature for his personal library
p. 117-118 (poetry)
The poet Emerson had hailed as America’s purest and loftiest had published, at the end of two years, exactly four poems.
A lesser writer would have been discouraged. But Fuller’s real point, that his talent was far greater than his execution, was not lost on Thoreau. He was a genius, no doubt, but he had yet to learn his craft. This was precisely the lesson Thoreau needed to hear, and it was Fuller who gave it to him.
The challenge she offered was tremendous: no models existed for what Thoreau was attempting. He was on his own, bearing the potential for greatness but also the knowledge that getting to that greatness meant a leap to originality—a leap he didn’t know how to make.
p. 122
Clearly Thoreau had confided to Fuller what he had barely confessed to himself: he longed to go away and live by the pond and be the writer he dreamed of becoming.
Under Emerson’s roof, Thoreau consolidated his sense of himself as above all a writer—not a dilettante who published occasionally, but a true and focused professional patterned after Emerson’s own model, which Thoreau now witnessed daily.
p. 123
So Emerson had another idea: Thoreau would go to Harvard, ransack the library, and select the best of British poetry for an anthology—the “old” to America’s “new”—learning his craft by total immersion in the discipline of poetry.
They all seemed so tame and civil, as if not a one of them had seen so much as “the west side of any mountain”
Thoreau felt more “kith and kin” with the lichen on the bare winter branches than with anything in these books. His yearning for wildness struck him as peculiar, his one redeeming quality, even as it isolated him from all of literary history.
p. 144 (Thoreau’s poetry)
Henry’s limitations as an editor were one thing; his shortcomings as a poet were another. Fuller had rejected almost all his poetry
This, too, pained Fuller, who complained that Thoreau’s tin ear had ruined his best poem
This, the peak of Thoreau’s career as a poet, was the beginning of the end. An embarrassed Emerson sat him down and critiqued his poems, pulling no punches. For all their “honest truth” and “rude strength,” they lacked beauty. “Their fault is, that the gold does not yet flow pure, but is drossy & crude. The thyme and marjoram are not yet made into honey; the assimilation is imperfect.”
After five years dedicated to poetry, Thoreau was devastated. Emerson never printed another Thoreau poem. Thoreau himself slipped in three more when he edited the April 1843 issue, including two of his greatest, “Smoke” and “Haze.” But from then on, Emerson’s designated poet would be Ellery Channing.
p. 157 (experience as a writer at New York)
To his family he spilled out the grim details: he was pounding New York’s streets without effect, pushing into the offices of every bookseller and publisher, only to be told they had no money to pay contributors, or if they did—like the Harper brothers, on their way to founding a publishing empire—they were unwilling to chance an unknown writer.
“Literature comes to a poor market here, and even the little that I write is more than will sell.”
p. 175-176
Thoreau had been gone for weeks, measuring the land from Concord to Monadnock in the north, then to Greylock far in the west: now his feet knew the breadth of Massachusetts, step by step. It had been a test of his physical endurance, his resourcefulness alone, his inner reserves of strength, and of his literary reserves as well. Walking was becoming synonymous with writing, the measure of his steps with the measure of his prose. Thoreau’s first great excursion never made it into a separate essay, but out of it came many rich and lyrical pages.
p. 190-192 (writing at Walden)
But now, instead of claiming a little space in a communal house, an alcove or attic, he would claim an entire life, and declare that writing would be not an occasional hobby but the central hub of his whole being. From now on, Thoreau would be a writer in an entirely new sense: instead of living a little, then writing about it, his life would be one single, integrated act of composition.
“I wish to meet the facts of life—the vital facts … face to face, and so I came down here. Life! who knows what it is—what it does?”
This declaration of purpose has the force of a vow, a sacred commitment to confront, “face to face,” the conditions of possibility for life itself.
“Nothing so sudden, nothing so broad, nothing so subtle, nothing so dear, but it comes therefore commended to his pen, & he will write. In his eyes a man is the faculty of reporting, & the universe is the possibility of being reported.”
Thoreau had no guarantee that his experiment would work. He knew only that he had to try. This was literally his last move. “If I am not quite right here I am less wrong than before,”
His purpose was profoundly religious.
And writing? After the long lapse of centuries, it was time “for the written word—the scripture—to be heard.”
Instead of collating scriptures, now he would write one, a new sacred book for the modern age.
p. 196-197 (A Week and Walden)
The immediate result of all this was that Thoreau, who went to Walden to write one book, instead wrote two.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
As A Week grew in range and depth, so did Thoreau’s understanding of the ways the Industrial Revolution was already
For years Thoreau had been collecting passages for it in the “Long Book,” adding paragraphs as they came to him, building it up piece by piece like a mosaic.
Into A Week, this intensely personal and private work of his Walden days, Thoreau poured all the best of his younger self, all the passion and poetry of three decades.
Walden
It was born on July 5, 1845, his first morning at the pond, when he opened a new journal by announcing why he’d come there to live.
bold, lyric, yearning, prophetic, confrontational. It’s the voice not of a confiding poet but of a prophet, a teacher discovering how—since, it turns out, he’s up on a soapbox—to speak in a way that others will hear.
From then on, there were two Thoreaus: one quiet, introspective, self-questioning, intensely private, occasionally depressed, and often in poor health; the other brash, boastful, self-certain, loud, and healthy as the rooster crowing to bring in the dawn.
Modulating between these two self-extremes would open up, in the years to come, the full resources of Thoreau’s artistry. He would ever after wrestle uneasily with this new creation, “Thoreau,” this outsize doppelgänger born in those first conversations over the pine timbers of a house still raw with pitch and splinters, who would grow up to narrate his creator’s life to the entire world.
p. 242
Blake gave Thoreau what he most needed: the conviction that he had something to say and an audience to whom he could say it.
p. 243
At Walden, Thoreau had learned how to live a writer’s life; now at Emerson’s, he was living it still, surrounded by manuscripts in various stages of composition, a different project for every mood and interest, each one finding its unique voice and stance relative to the others and all of them together composing a literary ecology.
What was really at stake was Thoreau’s own pen, Thoreau’s own style. The essay he finally published, “Thomas Carlyle and His Works,” reads like a final exam in a long, self-taught course in how to stop sounding like a Harvard graduate, how to start reaching farmers and mechanics as well as preachers and professors.
Defending Carlyle gave Thoreau permission to sound like himself.
p. 273-276 (walking)
he inventoried all the places within a day’s walk
It was an inventory of possibility. Transitions are hard to mark, but one can take this list as the moment when Thoreau began to reinvent himself as the writer of world fame.
Thoreau had always walked; it was how a man without means got from here to there. But in the previous year, he realized, “my walks have extended themselves,” and after his morning work, almost every afternoon, he visited “some new hill or pond or wood many miles distant.”
In another year, these long walks would no longer be a diversion from work; they would be the work itself, his major literary project. He was, for the first time, really free: free of Emerson’s expectations, free of the literary marketplace, free of all hopes for travel abroad. With roads to a conventional literary career closed, Thoreau veered off-road, learning to see familiar landscapes with a traveler’s eye
Thoreau’s long years writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers helped him craft that insider’s outside view of American history and society. Now he hungered for a wider view of the universe
For Thoreau, though, preaching and river parties were not two things but one—not a vague religious pantheism, but a serious attempt to reach beyond the traps of unthinking social convention to true “geo-graphy,” earth-writing, inscribed not in the leaves of dusty books but in the strata of the planet itself.
The present is the key to the past, and to the future as well; the pulse of the universe is beating still.
Reading Lyell had changed how Thoreau understood the world. He extended Lyell’s insight to the human world as well
Thoreau longed to understand the workings of things, and, like Emerson, he believed this was poet’s work: “The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.” But unlike Emerson, Thoreau calibrated those insights with the instruments of science and engineering.
As his eye searched out causes and processes, his hand grasped with equal ease pencil and foot rule, compass and thermometer, earth and world.
This didn’t mean giving up on Transcendentalism, but it did mean giving Transcendentalism a fresh spin.
After sketching his list of wild places that he could walk to any day of the week, Thoreau added his reason why: “How near to good is what is wild. There is the marrow of nature—there her divine liquors—that is the wine I love… . A town is saved not by any righteous men in it but by the woods & swamps that surround it.”
At the far end of this, thought Emerson, was madness. Thoreau, with nothing more to lose, would defy Emerson and pursue his madness to the end of wisdom.
p. 278
“You must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body, for it is at home there, though you are not.”
without matter, soul is without life; but to be a soul, embodied, means that only through a mortal body can soul “contact” the world.
This experience should be the source of your writing, he told Blake: return to it again and again, until your essay contains all that is important, nothing that is not. This can be done only afterward, at home
“It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do?”
It would take Thoreau the rest of his life to “go over” this particular mountain, to put on paper what it said and what it did. For a decade he kept returning to Cape Cod. It would be published only after his death.
p. 289
This became another figure for Thoreau’s own artistry: if he arranged his materials just so, nature would speak through him in a voice that carried to town, where even people in the streets would stop to listen, to hear something higher, beyond themselves.
Thoreau needed this breakthrough insight for his own kind of Transcendentalism. Science showed him how to see the Cosmos in a grain of sand or the ocean in a woodland pond, a mountain range in Fairhaven Cliff, a glacier in the cobblestones of Walden Pond. Poetry gave him a voice to show the world why this mattered.
What the world explorers of his day were doing writ large, he could do in microcosm, traveling and writing about the earth as a planet whose smallest and most local features illuminated, and were illuminated by, the Cosmos itself. To the leading edge of science, Thoreau could add his own “home-cosmography.” By November 1850 he had caught hold of the method, and by September 1851 he captured it in a phrase: “A writer a man writing is the scribe of all nature—he is the corn & the grass & the atmosphere writing.”
p. 300-303 (Thoreau’s larger vision)
For while writing up the excursion, Thoreau began to envision something wider and deeper than a mere traveler’s tale; he plunged into a new course of research, sketching a kind of sweeping, cosmopolitan, longue durée history, a “Seven-mile Panorama” of greater New England conceived across deep time and planetary space.
Thoreau’s notes and observations convinced him that the great era of New World exploration, settlement, and industrialization had produced a historic shift to the modern world. He knew he was a child of this world, even as he seemed born to stand outside it and resist it; perhaps, with his learning, energy, and deep gift for languages, he could understand the causes of the changes happening around him.
His grand and unifying vision pointed to that deeper, wider reality he’d called “the frame-work of the universe.” When one surveys the dozens of research notebooks, scores of meticulous Journal volumes, the maps and surveys and thousands of pages of natural history notes and unpublished manuscripts, one begins to comprehend the scope of his vision; but to see the full picture, one must also examine the hundreds of books he annotated and the hundreds of charts and graphs where he pooled and organized his growing data. It was a staggeringly ambitious vision—impossible, really—but Thoreau embarked on it with ferocious energy. Nearly all of this activity dates from 1850. Out of this vast front, particular nodes crystallized into a series of books and projects: “Cape Cod” and “The Maine Woods,” taken together, explore the two ultimate poles of wilderness, ocean and mountain and the rivers that connect them. A third node took shape in the Indian Books, Thoreau’s attempt to document indigenous alternatives to European narratives of social and economic life. Connecting them all was natural history, the basic environmental framework on which he could weave his portraits of social and historical change—rather as the Concord and Merrimack Rivers had given, in A Week, a unifying natural baseline, the thread for his golden ingots of study and reflection. Had Thoreau lived long enough to make that western journey through “the wilds of Canada,” it would be easier to see how his brief excursion to Canada fit—even precipitated—his larger vision.
Thoreau plunged into his ambitious research program instead
No other publisher would touch the aborted series. “Excursion to Canada” was a flop. Nor would this be the last time an adversarial Thoreau crossed pens with an editor too afraid of public outrage to print his words unexpurgated: “Cape Cod” and “Chesuncook” would meet the same fate, with similar results. The more Thoreau knew his own mind and spoke it aloud, the more the era’s outraged guardians of public morality sought to cut off his tongue.
But in Thoreau’s defiant mind, the closed-door Sunday Cosmos had exploded, which meant that if God was anywhere, God was everywhere, including right underfoot at home in Concord. Call it pantheism, call it heresy, but the question remained: how to live this truth, there on Main Street in full view of everyone, as well as how to write it—and in living it and writing it, to show it forth to others.
p. 303-304 (Journal as primary work)
But on November 8, 1850, he wrote up everything he noticed and thought during his daily walk as one long entry.
filling pages with a stream-of-consciousness flow of words as if he were writing while walking: “I pluck,” “I heard,” “I saw yesterday,” “I notice.”
Thoreau’s new experiment made the very act of writing visible on the page
And this is what truly staggers the mind: from this point, Thoreau did not stop doing this, ever—not until, dying and almost too weak to hold a pen, he crafted one final entry.
Until November 7, 1850, he had treated the date as incidental. Starting on November 8, 1850, he treated the day and the date as essential to his artistry.
The date, and what he can write of his life on that one day, is no longer incidental to some larger quest—it is the quest. Virtually every day from then through the end of his life, with few exceptions, Thoreau wrote a dated entry that explored whatever caught his mind that day. Whereas before he had scissored out entire chunks of his journal, sometimes leaving little behind but ribbons and fragments, from then on he cut out very little, and soon, he would cut out nothing at all, carefully preserving each Journal volume intact. In short, without announcing it, Thoreau simply stopped using his Journal as the means to the “real” work of art somewhere else, and started treating the Journal itself as the work of art, with all the integrity that art demands.
in this new mode, his Journal volumes were something like scientific notebooks, laboratory records whose value lay precisely in their regularity and completeness.
p. 304-305 (walking)
Reorienting his writing required reorienting the pattern of his daily life. Thoreau’s new protocol required a high degree of focus and discipline, for its value depended on consistency: going out every day, and every day pressing language to find something new to see, making studies, noted an early biographer, “as carefully and habitually as he noted the angles and distances in surveying a Concord farm.”
Thoreau developed the practice of walking with pencil and paper and scribbling notes on the spot, brief names and phrases that he wrote up the following morning in long, often lyrical Journal entries—sometimes, when he got backed up, writing out two or three days’ worth at a time—then setting out that afternoon for another three- or four-hour walk.
Sometimes he varied it, walking abroad in the morning and writing in the afternoon; sometimes he unsettled his senses by walking before dawn or staying out well past midnight. But he must go out, he told Channing, every day, to see what he had caught in his traps set for facts; as Emerson remarked, “The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing.”
Thoreau usually walked alone, but often Channing came along, though Thoreau could be impatient
Channing’s criticism pushed Thoreau to articulate what he wanted with those heaps of “facts”: not mere data, but “material to the mythology which I am writing”—or, more largely, “facts which the mind perceived—thoughts which the body thought with these I deal.” Thoreau’s walks became a form of meditation, a spiritual as well as physical discipline.
“I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would return to my senses like a bird or beast. What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods.” Animal minds became a model for him; he strove to walk like a fox, mind and senses wholly open.
p. 321-322 (home life)
Yet these quiet years were the most creative of his life. For 1852 and 1853, his Journal alone fills 1,253 rich and provocative pages. He also wrote something over five hundred pages of notes in his Indian Books and two new drafts of Walden, which doubled in size. These pages show his inner life was as extravagant and inventive as his outer life was steady and disciplined. Indeed, his contented homelife provided the stability Thoreau needed to pursue his career the way that he did.
Thoreau bought his freedom by keeping his needs simple and his account books balanced to the half cent.
p. 329-330
Without such a stable and contented homelife, Thoreau could not possibly have pursued his career in the way that he did. His attic chamber in the Yellow House became Walden-on-Main, a room of his own in an equitable and interdependent household in which everyone helped out.
To Thoreau even the most ordinary sounds were music, and his journal records the many “melodies” that reached him, little vignettes of ambience: warm summer evenings when neighbors and farmers “come a-shopping after their day’s haying are chatting in the streets and I hear the sound of many musical instruments and of singing from various houses”
p. 331–332
Under the surface of Thoreau’s placid homelife was a mind on fire. The quieter his days, the more extravagant his pages. The key to creativity, he thought, was to keep writing and not judge or edit too soon: “You must try a thousand themes before you find the right one—as nature makes a thousand acorns to get one oak.” And stay close to the earth, away from books
Didn’t scholars do the same?—muck out in winter the fertile soil thrown up in summer? “My barn-yard is my journal,” he joked, and “decayed literature makes the best soil.”
Once, he had dreamed of buying a farm, and despite his condescension to farmers in Walden, he always felt a kinship with them. They lived on the land; he, too, should “live in each season as it passes—breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit,” give himself to it wholly. Walden must live in season, it must be an agrarian book, close to the earth. To write it, he would dig deep into the muck
The great cycle of seasons seemed to be not merely weather, but the deep metaphysical framework for a spiritual life
Politics and war had drawn Thoreau deep into the newspapers, but now he set them aside: “You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day’s devotion to know & to possess the wealth of a day.”
p. 381 (Wild Fruits)
In these darkening and haunted pages of his Journal, Thoreau began to trace the outlines of Walden’s sequel: he would call it Wild Fruits, and it would be his final harvest.
p. 401 (journal content)
Thoreau had, for all his glacial meditations on solitude, been filling his Journal with canny studies of his friends and neighbors, taking them up quite like leaves.
p. 435
But in this hidden molten core Thoreau was fusing and transforming his accumulated years of scientific study into a new kind of instrument, a musical instrument, where every object was a key that, struck, resonated across hidden chambers of memory and meaning. He called it his “Kalendar,” but it was far more: a symphonic rotation capable of fusing and igniting a lifetime’s immersion in a single, beloved, deeply known New England village. In his youth Thoreau had imagined writing “a poem to be called Concord”; now, on his worn green writing desk, that great poem was taking shape.
The problem was how to be heard when nearly everything he wrote had been rejected, ignored, or censored. While his outer self was professional—dry and workmanlike—in private he was incandescent, phosphorescing in the dark like a stick of Maine foxfire. When he identified a new species of fish, in public he proudly presented it to his scientific colleagues, who duly recognized him while they argued over its taxonomy. But in private he wrote in awe of “those little striped breams poised in Walden’s glaucous water,” unseen since Tahatawan paddled his canoe on those same waters. Walden was wild again, and America was young again. But how could he get beyond mere description? He must poise his thought “there by its side and try to think like a bream for a moment.” He thought of jewels, music, poetry, beauty, the mystery of life: “The bream, appreciated, floats in the pond as the centre of the system, another image of God.” He must convey what mattered most: the bream as “a living contemporary, a provoking mystery.”