The Journal of Henry David Thoreau

The Quarterly Conversation has published my review of the new edition of Thoreau’s Journal, edited by Damion Searls and published by New York Review Books. Here’s an excerpt from the review:

Best known as a translator and fiction writer, Searls has an extraordinary sensitivity to Thoreau’s language and to his intentions for the Journal. The Journal, he writes, “is above all a book of rhythms: the long ebb and flow of the year and the quicker rhythms of Thoreau’s roving from topic to topic . . . . Seasons mattered deeply to Thoreau and I have tried to preserve the balance between the seasons, from his long summer walks to his heavier reading in the snowed-in winters.”

Because months mattered too, Searls made the creative decision to include “one set of months less abridged than the rest, a representative Thoreau calendar with an extra March to fetch the year around.” He lists these special months in the introduction, noting that they “constitute a sort of book within the book and might fruitfully be read on their own.”

My only complaint was that although Searls included passages that seemed to foreshadow the explosion of the local gunpowder factory, and others that seemed to show its impact on Thoreau’s sense of mortality, he didn’t include the description of the terrible day itself—surely one of the most dramatic in Thoreau’s life and the life of the town of Concord.