“Anecdotal Evidence” on Thoreau and Emerson

Using Alfred Kazin as his starting point, Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence has written one of the nicest short appreciations of Thoreau’s Journal I’ve seen.

Thoreau was never in the banal sense an autobiographer – first this happened, then that, on and on in tedious lockstep. His experience—“a man walking about all day long”—was raw material, the stuff he molded into precise, elegant sentences. In the hands of a clod unable to write he might have produced another pious nineteenth-century diary, of documentary worth or none. Instead he made a great American poem, one man’s small-town epic, in prose (“of exceptional vibration,” Kazin writes). Thoreau saw and heard more than most of us will, though his life by twenty-first-century standards was brief, difficult and circumscribed. But his vision was acute and disciplined, like a dragonfly’s or hawk’s. He looked where others saw.

Kurp is less enthusiastic about Emerson’s Journal, but does take a moment to talk about Emerson’s entries on the death of his son Waldo, age five, from scarlet fever.

“Yesterday night at 15 minutes after eight my little Waldo ended his life,” Emerson wrote on January 28, 1842.

The second of the [Library of America] volumes includes a photograph of this entry, the words written in Emerson’s clean hand at the top of an otherwise blank page, as though only silence can do justice to his grief.

A few days later, Emerson wrote this:

It seems as if I ought to call upon the winds to describe my boy, my fast receding boy, a child of so large & generous a nature that I cannot paint him by specialties, as I might another.

As Kurp, writes, “‘My fast receding boy’ are the most desolate words I’m able to imagine.”

When Thoreau’s father died, on February 3, 1859, Thoreau too made a record in his Journal and left the rest of the page blank. But when Thoreau’s brother John died of lockjaw, two weeks before the death of young Waldo Emerson, the impact was so devastating that Thoreau wrote nothing at all for well over a month.

Scott Adams on the BP disaster

Even Stephen Colbert has been having trouble squeezing any humor out of the oil spill disaster in the Gulf. Some of his lines have been getting more pained groans than laughs.

But Scott Adams has somehow managed it. A colleague alerted me to to Betting on the Bad Guys, in which Adams views the disaster through the lens of the investor. Some of his descriptions of investment methods are painfully on the mark. (But funny!)

Henry David Thoreau: An American Landscape

As I try to do every time a family visit takes me upstate, I recently stopped at Dove & Hudson Old Books in Albany.

There I found a Thoreau volume I’d never seen before: Henry David Thoreau: An American Landscape, edited and illustrated by Robert L. Rothwell. It’s a lovingly chosen collection of writings on landscape from Thoreau’s Journal, and it gives a compelling picture of the woods, ponds, and marshlands of Concord as Thoreau observed them through the course of the year. (One sign that it was lovingly chosen is that there are several passages, including some on the art of writing, that really have nothing to do with landscape and are presumably here because Rothwell liked them.)

An American Landscape includes some of Thoreau’s best writing on trees, including the extraordinary entries from October 1858 on the fall foliage of Concord. And I was pleased that the book includes, and the introduction singles out, a complete version of the beautiful and melancholy passage that comes a little later that same year and begins like this: The November twilights just begun! It appeared like part of a panorama at which I sat spectator, a part with which I was perfectly familiar just coming into view, and I foresaw how it would look and roll along, and prepared to be pleased.

I was happy to find this book even though it knocked down a project of my own on Thoreau and landscape (not the first time I’ve discovered that someone else has acted on what I thought was my idea.)

Wildflowers on the High Line

The last time I went up to the High Line park (the same day I visited the Monet paintings at the Gagosian gallery) there were more wildflowers to be seen there than at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. (The rose garden at the BBG, however, has been in its prime.)

Tom Sawyer as rewritten by Proust

Not every publisher would be happy to see the work of their Nobel Prize-winning author described as reading like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer rewritten by Proust, but the folks at Godine took it well.

In the meantime (while I’ve been on vacation in upstate New York), my review of A River Called Time by Mia Couto has appeared at The Quarterly Conversation.