As High a Heaven

Reading Henry David Thoreau: An American Landscape, with its passages on trees, reminded me of a book I heard about some time ago: As High a Heaven: Meditating on Trees with Thoreau.

Written by Richard Higgins, As High a Heaven was allegedly published by Beacon Press on April 1, 2005. (Is it significant that this was April Fool’s Day?) The jacket looks attractive, and the description at Amazon sounds interesting. The book’s title presumably comes from a passage in an essay on Maine that Thoreau submitted to The Atlantic Monthly. To Thoreau’s fury, editor James Russell Lowell deleted the final sentence, apparently considering it blasphemous.

I have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenter’s shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack-factory, and the turpentine clearing; but when at length I saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, I realized that the former were not the highest use of the pine. It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most. It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.

Yet no one seems to have the book: not the New York City or Brooklyn library systems, not Amazon or Powell’s or Alibris or Abebooks, not even eBay. The book isn’t listed at Beacon’s website, and when I wrote to Beacon to ask about I didn’t get an answer.

I’m assuming, until proven otherwise, that the book was never actually published. Were there permission issues involved in using the Edward Gleason photos? Who knows?