“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.
