The Blog of Henry David Thoreau

My copy of The Blog of Henry David Thoreau arrived the other day, and I spent the long weekend reading it. The selections, which I’ve been enjoying on the blog itself, are well chosen and work well together, and the book itself is quite handsome. The front cover features an old engraving of an aspen leaf, and in a good light you can see that the textured background on the back is actually an electronic circuit board: signaling, I suppose, Thoreau’s relevance to the modern world.

The book is subtitled “a transcendental day book,” and editor Greg Perry favors the more speculative and “transcendental” of Thoreau’s writings. There are a number of passages about rivers and skies, about music and the colors of the earth, about the turn of the seasons, and about sleep and dreams (but not the haunting passage where Thoreau dreams he is climbing an unknown mountain that rises where the real-life Concord has a graveyard). There are also several passages about clothes, including a description of Thoreau’s new clay-colored corduroy pants. “Most of my friends are disturbed by my wearing them.”

Perry has included some of my favorites, including a partridge’s lucky escape from a train, Thoreau’s attempt to revive a frozen toad, his long description of the death of a lofty pine, and his lovely, melancholy passage in which the coming of the autumn is likened to one of the 19th century traveling panoramas painted on canvas, which slowly unrolls to show the banks of the Mississippi or the Nile.

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.

Some of the passages from the Journal that I have found most memorable aren’t here, perhaps because they don’t fit the transcendental lens. Missing are some of the darker scenes: the grisly aftermath of the explosion at the gunpowder factory, the carnage wreaked by the muskrat hunters, and even the time Thoreau set the woods on fire. But missing also are Thoreau’s taming of a woodchuck and the call of the mysterious “night warbler.”

Well, you can’t have everything. Each reader of the Journal might create his own version of this “blog.” Greg Perry has done a fine job with his, and has highlighted some passages whose beauty I had never noticed before. Here are two of these, each one from January:

The sun has been set some minutes, and as I stand on the pond looking westward toward the twilight sky, a soft, satiny light is reflected from the ice in flakes here and there, like the light from the under side of a bird’s wing. It is worth the while to stand here at this hour and look into the soft western sky, over the pines whose outlines are so rich and distinct against the clear sky. I am inclined to measure the angle at which a pine bough meets the stem. That soft, still, cream-colored sky seems the scene, the stage or field, for some rare drama to be acted on.

This is a very mild, melting winter day, but clear and bright, yet I see the blue shadows on the snow at Walden. The snow lies very level there, about ten inches deep, and for the most part bears me as I go across with my hatchet. I think I never saw a more elysian blue than my shadow. I am turned into a tall blue Persian from my cap to my boots, such as no mortal dye can produce, with an amethystine hatchet in my hand. I am in rapture at my own shadow. What if the substance were of as ethereal a nature?