Dark Thoreau

Those of us who are readers and admirers of Thoreau have to find ways to come to terms with the less likable aspects of his life and work. For me, those aspects include the stilted, bookish passages in the early Journal, most of the poetry, and much of what Thoreau wrote about the Irish, about the need for purity, and about friendship, for which (though he did have good friends) he maintained impossibly high standards.

Some of these matters are taken up in the 1982 book Dark Thoreau by Richard Bridgman, who has read Thoreau closely and often intelligently. But along with Thoreau’s genuine shortcomings, Bridgman sets up a number of hoary old straw men and proceeds to beat them vigorously.

It is generally accepted, he writes in his preface, “that Thoreau is the rhetorically powerful advocate both of the supreme value of the individual and of the benign glory of nature ... but to verify these ideas in Thoreau one must read him very selectively.”

True enough. But the clever placement of the words “supreme” and “benign” gives Bridgman free rein to attack Thoreau whenever he suggests that the individual is not supreme, or that nature is not benign. Dark Thoreau reads not so much like an attempt to add shading and dimension to our understanding of a great writer, but an attempt to blast him from his pedestal. Bridgman has a gimlet eye for every contradiction, or apparent contradiction, in Thoreau’s work. He fails to understand, or professes not to understand, a couple of basic points:

1. Thoreau is grappling with some of the most complicated questions of how we should live and how we should relate to nature and society. He is quite deliberately examining these issues from a variety of points of view. To demand simple, consistent positions is, to say the least, unreasonable. Thoreau could defend himself in the same words that Whitman did: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

2. Many of Thoreau’s more high-flown statements, especially in Walden, are aspirational. They do not reflect Thoreau’s sober assessment of himself, nor do I imagine he ever thought anyone would claim that they did.

As I have argued myself, Bridgman finds that Thoreau often writes better in his Journal than when he reworks entries as tiles in the mosaic of a larger work: “In his revisions, Thoreau tended not to rewrite much ... but to change a word here and there, not necessarily for the better, and to eliminate phrases and sentences until his original version was weakened or beclouded.”

But in other ways, Bridgman is jaw-droppingly wrong. He greatly overemphasizes Thoreau’s desire for solitude (though Thoreau concentrated in his Journal on observations of nature, there are still enough encounters with neighbors to fill the book Men of Concord). And he writes, “Winter was especially attractive to Thoreau,” a statement belied by many passages on the bleakness of the season, and an almost-obsessive hunt for hints that spring might come at last.

Bridgman does, though, come up with a unified explanation for a number of the subjects that made Thoreau (and continue to make his readers) a little uneasy.

My argument here has been that much of Thoreau’s twisting obscurity was due to his inability to come to terms with the quite powerful feelings that were tormenting him; that he tended to associate the soft, wet, and messy with moralists, slaughtered animals, and women, and to experience revulsion when confronting them; and that although Thoreau’s suppressed and confused sexual feelings sometimes discovered an outlet, more often they did not, whereupon they turned to animus; and finally that Thoreau’s inability to reconcile these feelings in turn bore on his conception of the world, producing aggressiveness sometimes, sometimes melancholy.

I Do Not Come to You by Chance

Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy tries to win girl back by getting rich as an email scammer.

That’s the plot of I Do Not Come to You by Chance, a 400-page first novel by the Nigerian author Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, published last year by Hyperion.

It’s fast-reading pop fiction with few literary pretensions—much lighter than recent fiction by Abani, Chimamanda, Habila, or Oyeyemi, not to mention elders like Achebe and Soyinka. But it’s smart and absorbing, and Nwaubani throws off some nice turns of phrase. Here is the meeting of the hero’s parents, told in a prologue:

As soon as Augustina caught that first glimpse of him, she decided that even if Engineer’s steps had not been leading to their courtyard, she would have crawled over broken glass, swum across seven oceans, and climbed seven mountains to see him that day. He was as handsome as paint.

For a glimpse inside modern Nigeria as experienced by a bright and ambitious teenager—from bring-your-own-IV hospitals to the lurid lifestyle of the “419” con artists—I Do Not Come to You by Chance is well worth reading.

Some favorite books of the decade

Inspired by Jenn, I’ve made a list of some favorites among the books I’ve read that have been published since the year 2000. It’s not a list of the best books of the decade, or even the best books I’ve read myself—just those that I remember having read with particular pleasure.

Several of these books are here because they made me laugh. It was a tough decade.

Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje (2000)
The story of a woman forensic scientist in Sri Lanka. Gorgeous descriptions of temples and tropical landscape

A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky (2001)
A smart and funny account of life among the baboons of Kenya.

Notes from the Hyena’s Belly by Nega Mezlekia (2001)
A pungent Ethiopian memoir.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young (2002)
One of the funniest books I’ve ever read (and smarter and funnier than the movie).

Purple Cow by Seth Godin (2002)
A must-read for anyone in marketing and communications.

Instruments of Darkness by Robert Wilson (2003)
The first of a series of sharp neo-noir mysteries set in and around Benin.

Rats by Robert Sullivan (2004)
So good it inspired me to find the L-shaped alleyway downtown where Sullivan spent hours watching rat behavior. (And no, there are not actually more rats than people in New York City.)

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (2005)
Cerebral riffs, footnotes within footnotes, and a good case for not eating lobsters.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2007)
A moving memoir of an odd and troubled family—told in pictures.

The Wild Trees by Richard Preston (2007)
Worth reading if only for the description of what it’s like to fall from a giant redwood (and survive).

The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford (2008)
Strange, eerie examples of “autobiographical fabulism.”

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009)
A moving, unsettling, and ambitious addition to an impressive body of work.

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Damion Searls (2009)
A canny, creative abridgement of the 14-volume original.

Thoreau’s handkerchief

Thoreau must have had a large and sturdy handkerchief, because in 1855 he used it to capture a flying squirrel and a screech owl…

March 22, 1855
Going [along] the steep side-hill on the south of the pond about 4 P.M., on the edge of the little patch of wood which the choppers have not yet leveled,—though they have felled many an acre around it this winter,—I observed a rotten and hollow hemlock stump about two feet high and six inches in diameter, and instinctively approached with my right hand ready to cover it. I found a flying squirrel in it, which, as my left hand had covered a small hole at the bottom, ran directly into my right hand. It struggled and bit not a little, but my cotton glove protected me, and I felt its teeth only once or twice. It also uttered three or four dry shrieks at first, something like cr-r-rack cr-r-r-ack cr-r-r-ack. I rolled it up in my handkerchief and, holding the ends tight, carried it home in my hand, some three miles. It struggled more or less all the way, especially when my feet made any unusual or louder noise going through leaves or bushes. I could count its claws as they appeared through the handkerchief, and once it got its head out a hole. It even bit through the handkerchief.

October 28, 1855
As I paddle under the Hemlock bank this cloudy afternoon, about 3 o’clock, I see a screech owl sitting on the edge of a hollow hemlock stump about three feet high, at the base of a large hemlock. It sits with its head drawn in, eying me, with its eyes partly open, about twenty feet off. When it hears me move, it turns its head toward me, perhaps one eye only open, with its great glaring golden iris.... After watching it ten minutes from the boat, I landed two rods above, and, stealing quietly up behind the hemlock, though from the windward, I looked carefully around it, and, to my surprise, saw the owl still sitting there. So I sprang round quickly, with my arm outstretched, and caught it in my hand. It was so surprised that it offered no resistance at first, only glared me in mute astonishment with eyes as big as saucers. But ere long it began to snap its bill, making quite a noise, and, as I rolled it up in my handkerchief and put it in my pocket, it bit my finger slightly. I soon took it out of my pocket and, tying the handkerchief, left it on the bottom of the boat. So I carried it home and made a small cage in which to keep it, for a night. When I took it up, it clung so tightly to my hand as to sink its claws into my fingers and bring blood.

Three years earlier, Thoreau even thought he might have been able to do the same with a woodchuck, but he didn’t make the attempt.

April 16, 1852
As I turned around the corner of Hubbard’s Grove, saw a woodchuck, the first of the season, in the middle of the field, six or seven rods from the fence which bounds the wood, and twenty rods distant. I ran along the fence and cut him off, or rather overtook him, though he started at the same time. When I was only a rod and a half off, he stopped, and I did the same; then he ran again, and I ran up within three feet of him, when he stopped again, the fence being between us. I squatted down and surveyed him at my leisure....

We sat looking at one another about half an hour, till we began to feel mesmeric influences. When I was tired, I moved away, wishing to see him run, but I could not start him. He would not stir as long as I was looking at him or could see him. I walked round him; he turned as fast and fronted me still. I sat down by his side within a foot. I talked to him quasi forest lingo, baby-talk, at any rate in a conciliatory tone, and thought that I had some influence on him. He gritted his teeth less. I chewed checkerberry leaves and presented them to his nose at last without a grit; though I saw that by so much gritting of the teeth he had worn them rapidly and they were covered with a fine white powder, which, if you measured it thus, would have made his anger terrible.... If I had had some food, I should have ended with stroking him at my leisure. Could easily have wrapped him in my handkerchief. He was not fat nor particularly lean. I finally had to leave him without seeing him move from the place.

A Nigerian smoke monster

I’ve been rereading Forest of a Thousand Daemons, a Nigerian novel published by D.O. Fagunwa in 1939 and translated from Yoruba to English in 1982 by Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. Forest of a Thousand Daemons is thought to be the first novel written in the Yoruba language and one of the first to be written in any African language.

In its English translation, the language and supernatural events of the story echo passages in the Bible, Shakespeare, Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost, and Sir Richard Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights. But on page 11, I was startled to find a passage that reminded me more than anything else of the TV series Lost. Akara-ogun or Compound-of-Spells, the great hunter who is the protagonist of the novel, is speaking:

It happened one day that my father prepared himself and set off to hunt. After he had hunted a long while, he felt somewhat tired and sat on a tree stump to rest. He was not long seated when, happening to look up, he saw the ground in front of him begin to split and smoke pour upwards from the rent. In a moment the smoke had filled the entire area where my father sat so thickly that he could not see a thing; all about him had turned impenetrably black. Even as he began to seek a way of escape he observed that the smoke had begun to fuse together in one spot and, before he could so much as blink, it fused completely and a stocky being emerged sword in hand and came towards my father. My father took to his heels instantly but the man called on him to stop and began to address him thus:

‘Can you not see that I am not of the human race? I arrived even today from the vault of the heavens and it was on your account that I am come hither, my purpose being to kill you. Run where you will this day; kill you I most resolutely will.’

In Lost, too, the smoke monster boils out of a vent in the ground. It is the alter ego of the malevolent Man in Black (who appears in the current season in the form of the late John Locke), and it can take human form. In a recent episode, one scene is shot from the point of view of the monster itself, whose reflection you can see in the window of a house. When it take the form of John Locke, the first thing it does is to bend over and pick up a machete.

Mr. Eko, a Yoruba man from Nigeria (played by the Yoruba actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), is killed by the smoke monster in a previous season. Just a coincidence? Hmmm.