I have been reading a lot about Thoreau lately because when writing about people who disappear into the wilderness, Thoreau is generally pretty front and center in their lives. What's interesting though is that once you become aware of Thoreau you start to find him everywhere. I am knee deep in Thoreau lately, to the point that I actually laugh when I find him quoted on the page. At first it was funny but last night when I opened a new book I'm reviewing for Booklist on a lost Amazon tribe I almost threw it across the room when I saw the opening quote - yes, it was all about wilderness and it was from my dear friend Henry.

(Don't worry, I didn't actually toss it and I'm not holding it against the author. It was just momentary wig out.)

In Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury she has a great passage where she describes the annoying American obsession with Thoreau (or what I've come to term "Thoreaumania):

The mention of Walden in polite society inevitably elicits great praise. "My favorite book," someone says. Or "I live by that book." What they mean is that they know about the book and take it to be a handbook for the simpler life they might want to lead, if they ever got tired of making money and going to parties, or if they ever came to believe that the status in their community that makes them comfortable was really not important at all.

I decided we had all jumped the Thoreau shark when I recently read one of the new "Bright Young Thing" interviews in Vanity Fair with a twenty-something debutante I've never heard of who, of course, mentioned Walden as one of her favorite books of all time. (I can't begin to tell you how relieved I was when this month's pick actually mentioned Harry Potter.)

What bothers me about all this Thoreau love is not that I don't like him or what he wrote; after reading The Thoreau You Don't Know I'm even more intrigued then ever by how interesting he was. But I don't ever read about him in other books in anything other than an idealized way. He is always out in the woods - way way way out in the woods - and his quotes are used to sell the idea that only out in the woods far from humanity and technology and any sort of modern society can you truly find out WHAT MATTERS. There is a superiority to many of the ways I see him quoted as in, "just like Thoreau I get what life is all about and you people, who are reading about my perfect life, don't."

It makes one want to grab a copy of Walden and go smack someone with it.

As annoying as this can be (and it really does get annoying); it has also been very interesting to see how Thoreau has become short hand for a trendy life style choice. People throw out his name or quote from Walden to attach their own words to an ideal they think he espoused. Basically, you slap his name into a book and that is short hand for "serious nature writer" or "true nature lover" or, when used more than once, "wilderness guy or girl lives here". When I saw it in the Amazon book though I wondered if this was all the author's fault or if editors were part of the problem as well. Have we all become so used to the lazy name dropping of Thoreau that we expect to see it in any book that might be about wilderness and thus publishers make sure it is there? On some level it's like he's become the fast food element of nature writing - the fries with your story of inner peace and beauty in the woods.

The thing is, I remain deeply impressed by Thoreau. It's everybody else I"m starting to have issues with.

[Post pic of Walden Pond.]