Thoreau’s Christmas

Thanks to Calliope, Inc., we have a glimpse of how Christmas was celebrated at Thoreau’s household. As the site says, “Here is a Christmas memory that Henry’s brother John wrote to a young boy in 1839, when John and Henry Thoreau were in their twenties--”

When I was a little boy I was told to hang my clean stocking with those of my brother and sister in the chimney corner the night before Christmas, and that ‘Santa Claus,’ a very good sort of sprite, who rode about in the air upon a broomstick (an odd kind of horse I think) would come down the chimney in the night, and fill our stockings if we had been good children, with dough-nuts, sugar plums and all sorts of nice things; but if we had been naughty we found in the stocking only a rotten potato, a letter and a rod. I got the rotten potato once, had the letter read to me, and was very glad that the rod put into the stocking was too short to be used.

Baboons for Christmas

I’ve been thinking of what to post as a holiday message that also relates to the concerns of this blog, and while listening to NPR I was given the answer. I think.

It’s a story told by Barbara Smuts, a primatologist who spent years following and observing baboons for eleven hours a day, seven days a week. She did this in Kenya, where Robert Sapolsky, author of the wonderful book A Primate’s Memoir, also studied baboons. I don’t know if they ever worked together, but he mentions her book Sex and Friendship in Baboons in his own.

One day, while following her baboon troop, Smuts saw something no one had ever observed before.

All of a sudden, Smuts says, “without any signal perceptible to me,” every one of the baboons, the adults, the little ones, all of them, stopped walking and sat down on the edge of a pool of water. They not only stopped walking; they stopped talking. “Even the little kids, and you know kids are always making noises, but even they got quiet.”

The quiet was total. “I really wondered what was going on,” says Smuts. The baboons didn’t focus on any one thing. They all, or most of them, gazed down into the little pool right below them and hardly moved. There was no fidgeting, no touching or grooming, no discernible activity, just a communal “almost sacramental” contemplation. Smuts calls it a “sacred” quiet.

Were the baboons having a a spiritual moment? A kind of Quaker prayer meeting of communion and reflection? Given the range of their behavior and emotional lives, as described in Sapolsky, I wouldn’t rule it out.

Thoreau’s questions

In an interview with NYRB Classics, the publisher of his new abridged edition of Thoreau’s Journal, Damion Searls remarks on the many questions Thoreau puts to himself.

“Speaking of self-questioning, the Journal has great questions in general. Why are mountains pointy? Why are the shadows on snow blue? Why do rivers wind back and forth? The ones he doesn’t answer are sometimes the most poetic.” A bit later he remarks, “I think a book made up of all the questions in the NYRB Journal would be great, like Neruda’s Book of Questions.”

What would a book like that look like? Leafing through the new edition, it seems that some of Thoreau’s questions are rather pedestrian, and others depend on context for their force or meaning. But there are many others that hold up well on their own. Here are a few:

Shall I transplant the primrose by the river’s brim, to set it beside its sister on the mountain? If sun, wind, and rain came here to cherish and expand it, shall not we come here to pluck it? Shall we require it to grow in a conservatory for our convenience? (2/6/41)

Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons? (12/24/41)

Is not my life riveted together? Has not it sequence? Do not my breathings follow each other naturally? (3/20/42)

If I cannot chop wood in the yard, can I not chop wood in my journal? Can I not give vent to that appetite so? (3/28/42)

How is it that man always feels like an interloper in nature, as if he had intruded on the domains of bird and beast? (3/31/42)

Why have we not a decent pocket-map of the State of Massachusetts? There is the large map. Why is it not cut into half a dozen sheets and folded into a small cover for the pocket? Are there no travellers to use it? (8/1/51)

To have found the Indian gouges and tasted sweet acorns, — is it not enough for one afternoon? (10/8/51)

Would it not be worth the while to describe the different states of our meadows which cover so large a portion of the town? (4/16/52)

Would it not be worth the while to devote a day to collecting the mountain mint, and another to the peppermint? (8/7/53)

May not this season of springlike weather between the first decidedly springlike day and the first blue-bird, already fourteen days long, be called the striped squirrel spring? (3/4/55)

If there are missionaries for the heathen, why not send them to me? (1/1/57)

What is the relation between a bird and the ear that appreciates its melody, to whom, perchance, it is more charming and significant than to any else? (2/20/57)

What right has my neighbor to burn ten cords of wood, when I burn only one? Is he so much colder than I? (4/26/57)

Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? (10/21/57)

Might not the graveyards of the just always be hills, ways by which we ascend and overlook the plain? (10/29/57)

Why is it that in the lives of men we hear more of the dark wood than of the sunny pasture? (10/29/57)

My thoughts are with the polypody a long time after my body has passed. Why is not this form copied by our sculptors instead of the foreign acanthus leaves and bays? Are not the wood frogs the philosophers who walk (?) in these groves? (11/2/57)

(The photo of the polypody fern is from the website Dorset Walks.)

McPhee and Thoreau

I was pleased to see, at Anecdotal Evidence, a celebration of John McPhee that begins with an appreciation of one sentence: “Junipers in the mountains were thickly hung with berries, and the air was unadulterated gin.”

McPhee, like John Updike, has been so prolific, so consistently excellent, and so well exposed in the pages of The New Yorker, that he is danger of being underestimated.

I was especially tickled that Patrick Kurp uncovers a link between McPhee’s work and Thoreau’s Journal that I had never suspected. (See also ”Now I Am Ice, Now I Am Sorrel” and Henry and John.)

McPhee admires competence and problem-solving in his subjects, qualities embodied in his prose. Among American writers he most resembles the Thoreau of the journal, not in “philosophy” (a dreaded word in this context) but in his regard for craft.

Thoreau and the hornets’ nest

On a walk near Vischer Ferry in upstate New York, my mother took this picture of an abandoned and half-ruined hornets’ nest. Thoreau wrote about hornets’ nests several times, including this entry on September 25, 1851.

Examined the hornets’ nest near Hubbard’s Grove, suspended from contiguous huckleberry bushes. The tops of the bushes appearing to grow out of it, little leafy sprigs, had a pleasing effect. An inverted cone eight or nine inches by seven or eight. I found no hornets now buzzing about it. Its entrance appeared to have been enlarged; so I concluded it had been deserted, but, looking nearer I discovered two or three dead hornets, men of war, in the entryway. Cutting off the bushes which sustained it, I proceeded to open it with my knife. First there were half a dozen layers of waved brownish paper resting loosely on one another, occupying nearly an inch in thickness, for a covering. Within were the six-sided cells in three stories, suspended from the roof and from one another by one or two suspension rods only, the lower story much smaller than the rest. And in what may be called the attic garret of the structure were two live hornets apparently partially benumbed with cold, which in the sun seemed rapidly recovering themselves, — their faculties. Most of the cells were empty, but in some were young hornets still, their heads projecting, apparently still-born, perhaps overtaken unexpectedly by cold weather. These insects appear to be very sensible to cold. The inner circles of cells were made of whitish, the outer of grayish, paper. It was like a deserted castle of the Mohawks, a few dead ones at the entrance of their castle....

The hornets’ nest not brown but gray, two shades, whitish and dark, alternating on the outer layers or the covering, giving it a waved appearance.