Like every other kid in America I learned about Thoreau and Walden in high school. I never really "got" him. So he went to the woods and he wrote about it. That was it. I can remember my tenth grade teacher going on and on for days about the beauty of his nature writing but it all went right past me. I was actually in nature, at the beach, constantly. Reading about someone else's view of nature was boring compared to being bumped by sharks and catching waves with the mullet jumping around you. (We did not however linger long when the mullet were jumping as that was when the bigger sharks usually showed up to eat them.) As to the civil disobedience bit about taxes - that didn't seem like much of anything compared to what Adams, Henry and the rest of the patriotic crew were willing to do for their principles. It was like Thoreau showed up to late for the Revolution and was ticked about it. He went looking for a battle and found a night in jail (and Emerson paid his fine). Not so dramatic when you think about it.
So, my name is Colleen, I'm an American and I've never been a big fan of Thoreau.
However, when it comes to Concord in the pre Civil War era there is one resident I adored: Miss Louisa May Alcott. Miss Waslewski (can you believe I remember that?) in the tenth grade did not tell us that Alcott lived near Thoreau and had a childhood crush on him - or that Laurie might very well have been based on an idealized version of him. She also did not tell us that Thoreau was half in love with Emerson's wife or that Emerson was big time in lust with Margaret Fuller (a more realistic version of Jo March then Louisa) and that Nathaniel Hawthorne also had the hots for Fuller (basing several books on versions of her including The Scarlet Letter) or that Bronson Alcott, Louisa's dad was a great big baby who talked big but did little.
Actually Miss Waslewski didn't say beans about Louisa May Alcott at all but that was not unusual - we never talked about a single female author in her class. What's pitiful is that it did not occur to me back then to be disappointed by this.
It is because of all these somewhat tawdry revelations that I found Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury to be quite an easy read. All the marriages are bad in one way or another, there's lots of tragedy (Poor Emerson!) and the story of Louisa's mercury poisoning is epic. It's unreal and really makes you appreciate Little Women on a whole other level. That poor woman. And don't even get me started on Margaret Fuller. I can't believe I've never heard of her! Must read more about Margaret Fuller immediately.
A lot of people who go into the wilderness quote Thoreau however and feel a strong kinship to him and his decision to go to Walden. So I need to revisit Thoreau myself and reconsider him - or actually consider him for the first time since I spent most of Miss Waslewski's class writing angst-ridden poetry and turning in my brother's best friend's old papers to cover up the fact that I was bored out of my mind. What I have learned from Cheever and others is that Thoreau did indeed go into the woods, but those woods were less than two miles from Concord. He went back into the village at least every week, sometimes several days a week and he visited Emerson and his other friends and ate dinners with his family and pretty much had the same life he had always had - he just spent a chunk of it in the woods. This is not at all to minimize Walden, which is truly wonderful, but I think that a lot of people who read it think he was more in the wilderness then down the road. It's sort of like thinking Jack Kerouac hitchhiked cross country rather than drove or took the bus most of the time. (Again, not to minimize his multiple crossings.)
I just don't think Thoreau would have climbed a mountain in the winter without a coat, or wandered off a trail in the summer in New Mexico without water, or parked himself in a bus with a bag of rice. He wanted to observe nature but he wasn't antisocial. Thoreau was not a hermit intent on suffering for nature, he was a man who went into the local woods and spent a lot of time thinking and appreciating what was around him. Barry Lopez? Yes. On top of Everest with no clue how to get down? No. He was actually a really interesting guy when you stop considering him one of the most significant writers in American literature. He's even a guy I can identify with. So chalk one up for the local library - victory over Miss Waslewski has finally been achieved!
[Post pics of Henry David Thoreau; Margaret Fuller]
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November 9
2009
03:29 AM
We were told pretty clearly in school that Thoreau was kind of a wuss, going home to his parents' house to sleep at night, etc. Of course, our school was ten minutes from John Muir's house, and any dude without the ZZ Top beard and the national park credentials wasn't that much of a naturalist to us. ;)
In all seriousness, I agree that it doesn't detract from Thoreau's role as an early naturalist; he went to the woods deliberately during a time when tons of people were just coming away from thinking that the woods were where the Devil lived (good old Puritans!) and getting into Utopian societies where they wanted to live on the land and had no clue what they were doing, and inevitably failed. Thoreau paved the way for simple observation and enjoyment, and empowered the more lavish expressions of joy in nature of Walt Whitman, which, no matter how I feel about Thoreau, will always be a WIN for me.