The Adventures of Henry Thoreau

 The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond
© 2014 Michael Sims
384 pages

Shortly before retreating for two years to his self-built cabin at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire. A simple attempt at having fish for lunch reduced 300 acres of woodlands to charcoal, and very nearly ignited Concord.  The village pariah would eventually be pardoned, for the town had known him before his attempt at civic ignition;  they knew his reputation as the nice if odd boy from a respectable family of teachers and pencil merchants. Before Henry David Thoreau loomed large over American literary history,  eventually helping inspire the environmental and civil rights movements, Henry was that nice if odd boy. The Adventures of Henry Thoreau examines Henry's life outside of Walden,  giving a history of his life as he lived it -- as a boy, as an awkward, courting teenager, as a adventure-thirsty young man who explored the whole lengths of rivers with his brother.

Michael Sims puts a human face to the man who has cast such a long shadow over American history. Here, Henry is no icon, but a frequently distracted student who barely gets into Harvard and who itches to escape it. Throughout his life, his abiding passion is the outdoors. Raised a Unitarian, Henry was already predisposed to look askance at traditional religion. For him, spirituality was an individual journey, and he communed with God best in the outdoors, skipping church to take long walks in the wilderness. He idealized Nature, and revered the native Americans as having lived more closely connected to it. But his lust for the natural wasn't limited to getting "moony-eyed over mountains";  his mind also had a scientific cast, and those long hours of meticulous study resulted in one work of technical import.  These aren't solitary quests, either; young Henry is companionable. He takes long walks into the woods with  remarkable friends, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne;  spends weeks on a river with his brother, and even takes classes of children into the wild to teach them how to observe,  investigate, and come to understand the world around them. As the books wear on, however, these connections fall away; he leaves his work as a teacher, his brother dies, and his object of affection rejects him on the advice of her father that Henry's prospects are too dismal to make him a fit husband. Throughout, he escapes increasingly more into solitude, and though he dies at home, with family watching over him, he seems a lonely figure sometimes substituting philosophy for people. He sought an authentic life free of distractions, and produced extraordinary work as a thinker -- but in light of the ordinary happiness of his early years, one wonders if the later monkishness was truly necessary.

Related:
I to Myself: from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
"On Civil Disobedience", Henry David Thoreau

* "moony-eyed over mountains", as a skeptical professor of mine once described those who identify as spiritual, but not religious

Walking towards Walden

Walking towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place
© 1995 John Hanson Mitchell
301 pages

Just before he set out on his journey to the netherworld, the great pilgrim Dante Alighieri had to pass through a lion-haunted forest where the straight way was lost. Here in twentieth-century America, there is a gloomy forest of hemlocks just below the summit of Prospect Hill in Westford, Massachusetts. As we descend this fertile slope, the great pilgrim Barkley Mason begins quoting from the Inferno. He touches his breast and, with a grand sweep, spreads his right arm toward the dark wood below us. "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai nella selva oscura --'" he declaims.

Kata is used to Barkley's posturing; she interrupts to ask me something about a mutual friend, and in this manner, we three enter the dark forest and enter our journey. (p.11)

While browsing the travel section of my library, I spied Walking Towards Walden, one man's deeply textured account of his pilgrimage trip to Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau once lived and wrote.  Mitchell, accompanied by two close friends, determines to sojourn to Walden through the wilderness: shunning roads and trails, the talkative trio intend to see a glimpse of Massachusets' 17th century wilderness. As this trio of intellectuals and romantics cut their way through brambles, wade across swamps, and wander the courses of streams looking for a crossing, Mitchell muses.

A Walk to Walden tells many stories. From the outset, A Walk is steeped in mythology, both classical and native American: Mitchell likens their quest to find Walden to Campell's "hero's journey", imaginatively interpreting the perils along the way as the hero's challenges a la Don Quixote. As they walk, Mitchell explores inner worlds, pondering the role of nature in mythology and poetry. The trio's pilgrimage to Walden is also historical, for their path intersects with that marched by the Massachusetts militiamen on their way to face British regulars at Lexington and Concord. As the journey develops, Mitchell tells their story, the story of explorers like Ponce de Leon who traveled through the "New World" looking for the fountain of youth,  and the story of the men and women who were displaced and ruined when Europeans began to colonize the Concord area.  At the same time, he also remembers other trips he has taken with his friends -- to the Florida Everglades and Hollywood, with touching and humorous anecdotes.

As the narrative matures, Mitchell compares their journey less to a pilgrimage and more to a quest to find a sense of place, a sense of belonging. He uses a Hopi word, tuwanasaapi, to describe a place where the soul of an individual is "centered":  where they are truly home. James Howard Kunstler decried the lack of "place" in the United States, criticizing the boundless expanses of subdivided homes and commercial strips. Mitchell and his friends are likewise bothered by this lack of community and place in modern America:  traveling to Walden allows them to connect to Thoreau's own decision to live deliberately, to find

From the very moment I started reading the book, I wanted to see Concord. Mitchell's affection for the town and the sense of place and community he derives from it are obvious. The day's journey there from Prospect Hill is lush, rich with detail and stories, abounding in tales of interesting people. Mitchell links all of his various trails of thought together, which would have been distracting were the stories themselves not so thoughtful and enjoyable.  Most curiously, the trio never seem to reach Walden Pond proper: the book ends with their eating a period meal at the Colonial Inn, the only hint that they might have gone to the pond and Thoreau's cabin being "So we saunter to the Holy Land...". (Mitchell periodically paid homage to Thoreau by referencing his "sauntering" walks around Concord.) Walking is one of the most enjoyable books I've yet read, and I heartily recommend it -- especially to those partial to Thoreau.

Walden

Walden

© 1854 Henry David Thoreau

I remember staring up at Walden on my high school library's bookshelf, wondering if I should check it out. I knew it was famous: it was one of those books I'd heard of in the light of being a classic. I didn't check it out, but some years later I decided to try Thoreau out based on his WikiQuote page and found him to be enjoyable and exceedingly thought-provoking. Having read his essay on civil disobedience and portions of his journals, I decided this past week to read the work for which he may be best-known: Walden.

Walden is Thoreau's account of his first year spent living at Walden Pond, just outside of Concord. From what I've read, Thoreau seemed ill at ease living in society -- which to him is unnatural, with people obsessing over trivial matters and ignoring the more important ones, like the cultivation of the inner spirit. In order to think about things and to pursue a life of simple living -- in which he was able to live off of six weeks' labor -- he travelled into the woods and began making a home for himself. Although I had expected social criticism, philosophical musings, and a journalistic account, I was not expecting the latter to dominate the former. The bulk of his criticism is contained within the opening chapters, in which he explains why he left. Although musings (mostly related to transcendentalism) are woven throughout, the book is mostly a straightforward account of his life spent in the woods. He writes about building his home, seeing the seasons changes, and working in his bean-field. A friend warned me that Thoreau spent a lot of time writing about the details of his life -- details like the width between lines of his bean crop -- but I didn't expect quite so much. Then again, based on such a warning I might have focused more on the details when they occurred.

Thoreau is poetic at times, and quotes often from the Hindu scriptures as well as from his own tradition's text of the bible. The book is littered with 19th century references (helpfully explained by my book's editor), giving the impression that Thoreau is a very well-read man. This might be emblematic of the print culture that Neil Postman and Susan Jacoby are so enamored of, or it may point to the fact that Thoreau delighted in gleaning wisdom and inspiration from the products of the human spirit. He saw philosophy as using wisdom to live one's life well. His style has the vague formality you might expect of 19th-century work.

I suspect the book may have been spoiled for me by his journals: first-time readers to Thoreau may find it more enjoyable than I did. I didn't dislike reading it, but it didn't grip me the way I expected Thoreau to. He has a droll wit about him: at times he seems like a man who could fascinate you with his ramblings at the same time he annoys you by constantly complaining. Although I didn't expect it -- but should have -- is that this book offers a look into a different time -- a time in which people come to Walden Pond to cut blocks out of ice to use in icehouses. (The first three or four times Thoreau mentioned ice-cutters, I thought they were cutting holes in the ice to fish. Only later did it occur to me that this is the mid-19th century and people use icehouses for refrigeration.)

Although the details could get wearisome at times, I am glad I read it and would like to discuss it further with people who have likewise read it.

I to Myself

I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau
© 2007 editor Jeffrey Cramer
429 pages

I've known the name Henry David Thoreau since high school, when I gazed up at Walden. I did not read from him, however, until this past summer when I read On Civil Disobedience, which I found to be thought-provoking. I decided to read a little more of Thoreau this week and went with annotated selections from his journal. The actual collection of journals spans fourteen volumes, according to the editor of this book, which is quite impressive. Although Thoreau begins the book as a twenty year old, his thoughts are much different from the thoughts I wrote in my own journals at that age. His thoughts and how he expresses them are deeper and more eloquent than any others I have read or can imagine reading. I imagine this is a result of a more literary society.

The selections from his journal are organized by year, and comments by the editor on every page explain allusions Thoreau is making or add more detail. The editor was thorough enough to include reproductions of drawings Thoreau made in his journals. The character who rises from these pages is interesting: the editor comments that he is a man of contradictions. He writes to himself that the value of our thought-life is more valuable than the value of our emotional life, as emotional states are transitory -- yet he exults reason and scoffs at science. His distaste for science especially emerges in his forties. Thoreau is often a man alone: he seems to spend the majority of his time outside in the woods, walking and contemplating life. He cares little for company on this walks, although he does seem to admit it in small amounts once he returns. Money seems to be of secondary importance: every so often he will reference doing building work for someone, or surveying land, but the Thoreau in this book is a man of the wilderness. I can see him in my mind's eye, his hands clasped behind his back, strolling through the woods with a funny gait and a curious expression on his face. Here is a man who spends a lot of time in thought, but who doesn't hesitate to fold his arms into a shape resembling that of a chicken's so that he may more properly imitate a bird call when he is vocalizing.

Through Thoreau's life, we can see life changing. Railroads intrude into the woodlands: men wielding axes approach Walden Pond, his sanctuary. The great tide of immigration from Europe will sweep through Concord: he often mentions Irish immigrants. Although these things trouble him, he seems to rise above them, taking heart in thoughts of greater truths. "There is nowhere any apology for despondency," he comments, "[As] always there is life which rightfully lived implies a divine satisfaction." Religion, like society, is of little concern to him. Although he seems to see religious philosophy of all kinds as divinely inspired, he heaps contempt among preachers and organized religion. At a younger point than that, he comments that "I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another. I have no sympathy with the bigotry and ignorance with make transient and partial and puerile distinctions between one man's faith or form of faith and another's. [...] I pray to be delivered from narrowness, partiality, exaggeration, bigotry. To the philosopher, all sects, all nations, are alike."

The book was quite a read. Thoreau is an interesting character to contemplate, and I do believe this annotated selection helped me to get a better feel for who he was -- as well as providing me with a few quotations. I will end this entry with a prayer Thoreau wrote down.

"May I go to my slumbers as if expecting to arise to a new and more perfect day. May I so live and refine my life as fitting myself for a society ever higher than I actually enjoy. May I treat myself as tenderly as I would treat the most innocent child whom I love; may I treat children and my friends as my newly-discovered self. Let me never go in search of myself; never for a moment think I have found myself; be a stranger to myself; never a familiar, seeking acquaintance still."

This Week at the Library (7/8)

Books this Update:

• Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
• The Age of Synthesis, Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser
• Foundation, Isaac Asimov
• Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau
• I, Robot; Isaac Asimov

I began this week with Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire. Rice is a well-known author, but one I’ve never read before for the reason that I’m not much for fantasy and horror. Despite that, I do like vampires -- go figure. Since Rice has written a host of vampire novels, I decided to try one. The one I’ve heard about is Interview with a Vampire, mostly because there’s a movie based off of it -- and so I checked it out and began to read.

Interview with a Vampire begins with a young man sitting down with a vampire to interview him. The story of the book is the vampire’s story. The vampire’s name is Louis, and he lived in pre-Revolution New Orleans as an indigo planter. In 1791, another vampire named Lestat turned him into a vampire as payment for Louis allowing Lestat and his mortal father to stay at the plantation and enjoy Louis’ profits. This is where the story begins, as Louis finds himself for the first time really enjoying life, through the heightened sensibilities of vampires -- who have superhuman hearing, sight, and smell. I wonder how this is accomplished without having longer noses and larger ears. (Book-magic, of course, is the answer.) Louis’ newfound appreciation for life (now that he’s undead) is tainted with confusion about where he fits into the scheme of things, and he racks his brains with questions of evil, good, God, and the devil. (I wonder if there is any correlation between vampire stories and Christian mythology: do Aztec and Chinese legends have vampires, I wonder?) Lestat does not appreciate his fledgling’s attitude and behavior: he grows bored of the philosophical questions and makes fun of Louis’ habit of losing himself in watching people or observing the night. Because of this, Louis eventually leaves to find out more about himself: his travels lead him to Europe and beyond.

Rice’s vampires seem to be mostly rooted in popular myth, but there are exceptions. Her vampires are unbothered by garlic, crosses, holy water, or “Get thee behind me, Satan!”-type utterances from her characters. They can see themselves in mirrors, and they can’t change their form into steam or bats or wolves or anything of the like. They do die when exposed to sunlight, sleep in coffins, and say ‘Bleh!” all the time*.

I have only ever read one another serious vampire novel, and that is Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ In the Forests of the Night. Atwater-Rhodes’ vampires have a much easier time of things, though: they don’t have to sleep in coffins, they don’t turn to dust in the sun; and they can change their form willy-nilly. In addition to this, they also are unbothered by crosses, holy water, and “Get thee behind me, Satan!”-type utterances. They do object to sunlight and garlic, but only because they have heightened senses of sight and smell. There are similarities in the two stories, through. The way a vampire turns a mortal human into a vampire is very similar -- draining the human victim of nearly all blood, and then replacing it with vampiric blood.

It was an intriguing book, although for whatever reason I began losing interest in the story after two hundred or so pages. The first part of the story was interesting, because the world the book is set in was being slowly developed. It’s difficult to pin down why exactly I started losing interest in the story, but there are some things I can say. The themes penetrating the book -- existentialism, despair, question of evil, etc -- seemed to be too obvious, and they were rather boring themes to me. I like my themes to be more subtle. The ending of the book was rather obvious, and it didn’t leave me with the desire to read more. I think I’ll stick with Amelia Atwater-Rhodes for my vampires. Her In the Forests of the Night is much shorter, but the atmosphere is not only better but developed more quickly. I don’t see myself pursing Anne Rice further, although I may read one of her recent Jesus books to see how her style has changed.

Next I read The Age of Synthesis by Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser. It’s a re-write of their The History of Science in the 19th Century. The nineteenth science was a formative era in the history of science -- for instance, John Dalton reintroduced atomic theory and the team of Charles Darwin and Wallace introduced the theory of evolution. Electricity and magnetism are brought together, and electricity and atomic theory both help revolutionize chemistry --hence why the authors chose to call the book The Age of Synthesis. Like The Rise of Reason, this book is divided into three sections: the Physical Sciences, the Life Sciences, and Science and Society. In Science and Society, the authors comment on the rise of psuedosciences and pure bunk like homeopathy and spiritualism. They also explore the ways that science effects the lives of everyone. Interestingly, many of the United States’ founding fathers were members of the American Philosophical Society. While rationalists like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were members, I was surprised to learn that men like George Washington and John Adams were as well. (Washington’s philosophical attitudes are especially ambiguous.) As it turns out, Lewis and Clark’s expedition was financed by this society, and there were nearly fifty people involved -- not just Lewis, Clark, Sacajawea and York. One of the more amusing stories in this book concerns John Dalton: it seems he realized he didn’t see colors the same way as the majority of people, so he had his eyeballs donated to science after his death. Some morbidly curious personality in the mid-90s examined them with an microscope and found that his corneas responsible for seeing the middle of the light spectrum were missing.

Next I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Although Asimov is one of my favorite authors, I have not read the work he is most famous for -- until this week. Foundation is set many years in the future, when the human race has spread throughout the galaxy, courtesy of hyper drives that allow us to get past that annoying speed-of-light speed limit that Zeus so thoughtlessly imposed on the universe. (This is a common element of science fiction, and I wonder who started it. Star Trek has “subspace”, Star Wars and Foundation have “hyperspace”, and one science-fiction series I read in middle and high school had “zero space”.) The empire is very old, and one scientist who uses statistical analysis believes that it will decay into irrelevance, leaving anarchy and a galactic dark ages in its wake. Hari Seldon is this scientist’s name, and he is a “psychohistorian”. He can somehow predict how people will respond to social changes using statistical analysis, and so can predict the future.

Foundation is a collection of five short stories, each set at various periods of the Empire’s advancing decay. In the beginning, Seldon puts a plan into action that will bring about a new Empire -- a better empire. His plan begins with sending a group of a hundred thousand people to a world devoid of resources, called “Terminus”. They establish the Foundation to carry out Seldon’s plans. I won’t divulge much more for fear of spoiling the book for those who want to seek it out. As it is Asimov’s most famous work, it may be easier to find than the Black Widower stories. One of the causes for the Empire’s stagnation is that intellectualism is gone: no one is really thinking anymore. The Emperor is never questioned: people just assume that he’s right, that he knows what he’s doing, and that he can take care of everything. Scientific advance is essentially nonexistent -- for that matter, advance of every sort. One of the plot elements is hilarious, and it penetrates most of the stories in this book. I can’t explain it without giving anything way, so I’ll leave it at this: Asimov thought of Clark’s third law before Clark did and his characters made it practical.

I thought this book was part of a trilogy, but according to the Fount of All Knowledge, it’s part of a series of fifteen novels and dozens of short stories. I took a peek at the list of books, and I doubt I will EVER find all of those. I’m not sure where to go from here, but it’s an interesting series and I want to continue. I want to comment on a couple of things. Asimov describes the Imperial capital planet as a planet covered by the metal of the imperial city, where the inhabitants can go their entire lives without seeing the sky. The capital of the Galatic Empire in George Lucas’ Star Wars universe is intended to be an illustration Asimov’s of city-planet -- quite the nod considering Star Wars’ popularity.

After reading Foundation, I turned my attention to Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. It is an essay, written in 1849, written to express his views on government and the people’s relation to it. “The government that governs best governs least,” he says, and an ideal government governs not at all. Governments, while a necessary evil, are still an evil and an evil with effects that must be mitigated as much as possible. Even in a democracy, people have little actual power over the government. Actions are taken by the government before the people can voice their consent or disapproval, and those in the government will often undertake those actions for their own aims. The example Thoreau is thinking of is undoubtedly the Mexican War, which he saw as an expensive endeavor of the United States that was done simply to further the expansion of slavery. President Grant was of this opinion as well: he saw the Civil War as a direct consequence of the Mexican War, because the new states extorted at gunpoint from Mexico aggravated the slavery issue in the country when they were being admitted.
Thoreau states that when the government errs, it is not likely to offend the majority of voters, who may be apathetic. The few who do vocally object to courses of action undertaken by the government are in actuality powerless if they cannot overcome their countrymen's apathy. Even if they vote, those votes will be ignored. The problem lies in the apathy of the majority, of people who are content to obey the government without questioning what laws being passed actually mean. Here are two quotations to illustrate Thoreau's thoughts:

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing,; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and as it may be, fall asleep over them both. What IS the prices-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. IT makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its own faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

I enjoyed the essay. After I read it, I read Asimov’s I, Robot, which is a collection of short stories about robots. The stories are all related, and are presented in the book as being the recollections of Dr. Susan Calvin, a prominent character in Asimov’s robot-related works. As she plays an important part in Earth’s major robot manufacturer (US Robots and Mechanical Men), her stories are of great importance to the fellow interviewing her. Several of the stories featured the same two likable characters testing robots, so there’s not a lot of jumping around. I, Robot is supposed to fit into Asimov’s Foundation universe in some way, but I’m not sure how. The only thing I can think of is the invention of hyperspace in one of the later stories. Curiously, though, robots seem to have vanished by the time of the Galactic Empire. I enjoyed the book immensely, which is par for the course for Asimov.

Pick of the Week: Foundation, Isaac Asimov.

Quotation of the Week: “I think we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the ‘law‘, so much as [a respect] for the right.” - Henry David Thoreau

Next Week:

• Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov
• Firestarter, Stephen King
• Technopoly, Neil Postman
• The Ascent of Science, Brian Silver
• Hard Call: Great Decisions and Extraordinary People Who Made Them, John McCain

* Not really.