Thoreau’s horned pout

Thoreau’s World is a lovely book, though it contains some incorrect dates and an unusual error or two. For example, the editor, Charles R. Anderson, gives the source of “the winter of our discontent” as Henry VI, Part Three, V.5.81, whereas it’s actually from the famous soliloquy that begins with the very first line of Richard III. 

I’m grateful to Anderson, though, for noting that the horned pout, one of the fish Thoreau pulled from Walden, is none other than the common catfish (or brown bullhead, if you want to be technical). In college I once wrote a paper that took a close look at a single sentence about fishing for pouts in Walden Pond, yet I never realized this.

This doesn’t seem to be explained in Jeffrey Cramer’s annotated Walden, either, though Cramer does quote a passage from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers where Thoreau describes the horned pout in a way that provides some strong clues: “a dull and blundering fellow, and like the eel, vespertinal in his habits and fond of the mud.”

Thoreau’s moonlight walk

At the monthly book group I belong to, each of of us talks about a book we’ve been reading, then reads aloud a paragraph from the book. I’ve been reading Thoreau’s World, a long-out-of-print collection of “miniatures” from the Journal. These are some of the longer and more self-contained passages, and they include some of my favorites: Thoreau taming a woodchuck, Thoreau setting fire to the woods, Thoreau at a party with young women, and the passage about the “gone-to-seed country” that contains what I think is the longest sentence in Thoreau’s work.

I thought of reading that sentence, which takes up more than a page in the book, but chose this passage instead, from June 18, 1853 (though the editor of Thoreau’s World gives the date as 1852). It’s a beautiful example of how Thoreau wrote about animals — nighthawk, beetle, fireflies, bullfrogs, and more — in the context of a particular mood and surroundings.

Moon not quite full. Going across Depot Field. The western sky is now a crescent of saffron inclining to salmon, a little dunnish, perhaps. The grass is wet with dew. The evening star has come out, but no other. There is no wind. I see a nighthawk in the twilight, flitting near the ground. I hear the hum of a beetle going by. The greenish fires of lightning-bugs are already seen in the meadow. I almost lay my hand on one amid the leaves as I get over the fence at the brook. I pass through Hubbardston along the side of a field of oats, which wet one leg. I perceive the smell of a burning far off by the river, which I saw smoking two days ago. The moon is laboring in a mackerel cloud, and my hopes are with her. Why do I hear no bullfrogs yet? Do they ever trump as early and as universally as on that their first evening? I hear the whip-poor-wills on different sides. White flowers alone show much at night, — white clover and white-weed. It is commonly still at night, as now. The day has gone by with its wind like the wind of a cannon-ball, and now far in the west it blows. By that dun-colored sky you may track it. There is no motion nor sound in the woods (Hubbard’s Grove) along which I am walking. The trees stand like great screens against the sky. The distant village sounds are the barking of dogs, that animal with which man has allied himself, and the rattling of wagons, for the farmers have gone into town a-shopping this Saturday night. The dog is the tamed wolf, as the villager is the tamed savage. But near, the crickets are heard in the grass, chirping from everlasting to everlasting, a mosquito sings near my ear, and the humming of a dor-bug drowns all the noise of the village, so roomy is the universe. The moon comes out of the mackerel cloud, and the traveller rejoices. How can a man write the same thoughts by the light of the moon, resting his book on a rail by the side of a remote potato-field, that he does by the light of the sun, on his study table? The light is but a luminousness. My pencil seems to move through a creamy, mystic medium. The moonlight is rich and somewhat opaque, like cream, but the daylight is thin and blue, like skimmed milk. I am less conscious than in the presence of the sun; my instincts have more influence.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

I was in high school when the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago was published, and when Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union and took up residence in Vermont. I burrowed through each volume of Gulag as it appeared, and sought out everything else I could find — even his plays and prose poems. The ferocity of the writing in The Gulag Archipelago and the moral impact of the work made an enormous impression on me. Reading Solzhenitsyn made it clear to me that a commitment to human rights was far more basic than a commitment to any ideology of the right or left.

In 1978 I happened to be working as a student porter during the Harvard commencement, and I had the chance to hear Solzhenitsyn deliver his controversial speech. A cold drizzle was falling, and as the translator rolled out one section at a time, it took a while for the listeners to take in how radical it was. “This is terrible!” a middle-aged woman near me finally burst out.

As for me, I didn’t agree with everyone Solzhenitsyn said, but it was bracing to hear him inveigh against Western complacency and materialism from the same platform where President Derek Bok had been proudly announcing how much money each Harvard class has donated to its alma mater. It’s helpful now and then to have a Thoreau or a Solzhenitsyn remind you that a university is not primarily a money-making venture.

Governors Island

Last Saturday I visited Governors Island for the first time since 2006. Not too many visitors were out there, perhaps because a thunderstorm earlier in the day discouraged them. I was amazed at how much it cleared my head to spend a couple of hours spent wandering along the waterfront, peering in the windows of deserted officers’ houses, and listening to the cicadas.

Since my last visit, more ferries have been added, so you can stay on the island until 7 pm on the weekends. The ferries are also running later in the year, until early October. And more areas of the island have been opened up. You can now get close to this monumental structure, which looks rather beautiful and stark, like a Holocaust museum, but is actually the ventilation building for the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. You can walk through the admiral’s house, inaccessible before, and some interesting outdoor sculpture is on display in Nolan Park, near the house.

A solar breakthrough?

Andrew Tobias, whose outlook is not always very cheerful, recently featured this encouraging story about a “simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.”

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, [MIT’s Daniel] Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.