Tuesday, January 14, 2025

 

 

 Reconstructing Henry: Or Why Thoreau Deserves Our Admiration


(Note: This is an obvious change of pace from Palestine, etc. It's been in progress for a while.)


 

 

 

In October of 2015, the New Yorker magazine ran an article by award-winning journalist Kathryn Schulz ttitled “Pond Scum: The Real Henry David Thoreau.” As you surmised, it was unflattering. The “real” guy behind Walden and Civil Disobedience was, said Schulz:

 

in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world. From that inward fixation flowed a social and political vision that is deeply unsettling.

The “Pond Scum” title was catchy, for sure, and the piece was noteworthy for having appeared in a publication aspiring to the highest standards of advertisements for cashmere watchcaps.

Content-wise, though, it was just another in a long line of modern attempts – still underway -- to dismiss Thoreau. Besides Schulz’s accusation of colossal self-absorption, Henry has been found wanting on many another standard. He's been pigeon-holed and dismissed as a mere “romantic” by opponents of landscape protection.  He’s been accused of hypocrisy because he walked into town from Walden Pond several days a week and because he waxed eloquent about wildness but seldom left suburban Concord.  His writing, though good enough for Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Ghandi, and Martin Luther King, seems to be increasingly dismissed or misrepresented.

And then there is the “laundry sneer.” It has become the very height of fashion in theThoreau-bashing literature to point out that, while living at Walden, his mother may have once -- or sometimes, or maybe often, nobody really knows --washed his clothes for him. This, we are to think, is the ultimate hypocrisy, what with his boasting about independence and “essential living.” As one critic, who seems to have confused Thoreau with a Rocky Mountain fur trapper, put it, “Even I could be a mountain man too if my mother did my laundry for me.”

Well, nobody ever confused Henry with Mother Teresa, and his literary style isn’t for everybody. Yet a great deal of the current Thoreau criticism has a certain meanness to it – a kind of quiet desperation to make him irrelevant

Myself, I always found Thoreau to be a pretty darn good paragrapher who both amused me with his ironic humor and challenged me with the questions he raised. I find his eccentricity refreshing, and his overall approach to life admirable. I’m a member of that group for whom, as M. Allen Cunningham put it, “Thoreau’s writing was a drug. It knocked my neurons around.”

I have, therefore, selected a handful of the major charges frequently made against Thoreau, and will try to explain why, to me, they do not hold up to any serious inspection.

 

Self-Obsession. Thoreau does talk a lot about the importance of the individual, and he writes in the first person because, as he says in Walden, “I should not talk about myself if there were anyone whom I knew as well. I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.” Much of his writing, especially in Walden, is an effort to better understand himself, a project recommended by philosophers reaching back at least as far as Socrates.

As for seeming to put his own interests ahead of the community’s, I always found his discussions about the importance of the individual as a legitimate warning against the State (or the corporation, or the Empire) making us all mere cogs in its massive machine. Events since Thoreau’s time would seem to justify his worst fears.

More specifically, by many accounts Thoreau was extremely unselfish.  At Walden, he left his cabin unlocked and encouraged people to go in and borrow his books. He hosted a meeting at the cabin for the Concord Women’s Anti-slavery Society. When his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne moved to Concord, Thoreau planted a garden for him as a welcoming gift.

Speaking of friends, he had many more than you might expect of a guy who believed he “required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world.” Some were intellectuals of note: the poet Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s wife, Lydian, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott and the entire family Bronson Alcott family, including Alcott’s daugher Louisa May. There were others less formally educated, including a Concord farmer named Pratt, at whose home Thoreau was a frequent visitor, and a French Canadian “woodchopper” named Alek Thieren, who frequently dropped in on Thoreau at Walden. Thieren, Thoreau noted approvingly, was gifted with “a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction…” (Thoreau, 1854, 136-137).

Thoreau’s closest friend in his youth was probably his brother John, younger by two years. Not long after the two brothers took a little expedition on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, John cut himself shaving and contracted tetanus, often then called “lockjaw.” Henry spent a great deal of time nursing John as the latter became increasingly unwell. Henry’s grief was so powerful that his own jaw literally froze up in a kind of involuntary sympathetic reaction (Harding, 136).

There’s more. When Thoreau noticed a five-year-old neighbor walking to school in the snow with inadequate clothing, he delivered a coat to the boy’s home and became friends with his Irish-immigrant family. He loaned money to another impoverished immigrant family, the Flannerys. He took up collections for Irish immigrants, wrote letters for immigrants who couldn’t write.  And, as Harding reports” (313):

When he learned that [an Irish immigrant] was trying to raise money to bring his family across the Atlantic to join him, Thoreau got up a subscription paper and went from door to door asking for contributions and loans.

 

In the fall of 1844, the year before Thoreau moved to Walden Pond, his family bought some property in town to build a house on. The supposedly self-absorbed Henry immediately upped his working hours at the pencil factory to help finance the project, cutting back on the precious hours he otherwise spent daily walking the woods and fields. And then, as Hardy writes:

‘Henry … dug the cellar, and stoned it himself. Then with his father he did the actual building (177-8).’

He wasn’t done there, though. The house at first, says Harding,

… looked bare and lonely, so Thoreau set to work again, made a bank around the house, and then planted about forty trees, including fourteen apple trees, a grapevine, and a syringa bush among others (178).

It’s true of course that Henry benefitted from helping his parents get their own house. He himself lived in it later, though never for free – he meticulously paid his father for “board.”  But these actions and others demonstrate that he was nothing like the self-obsessed slacker he has sometimes been depicted as.

 

One paragraph in one of the best Thoreau biographies further blows away the idea that Henry cared little for anyone but himself. Walter Harding, in The Days of Henry Thoreau, cites testimony from a Concord contemporary of Thoreau named Mrs. Edwin Bigelow. She happens to have been “the acknowledged leader of Concord’s participants in the Underground Railroad.” Bigelow, says Harding, has “testified”:

… that rarely a week went by without some fugitive [slave] being harbored overnight in town and sped along his way before daylight. Henry Thoreau more than any man in Concord looked after them, she said, caring for them for the night, purchasing their tickets, escorting them to the station (316-17).

 Thoreau, furthermore, often took the runaways to a station away from Concord – in West Fitchburg – because it was smaller and they would feel safer. And even more, “for further protection,” Thoreau was known to

… accompany them on the trains for a while, although taking care to sit in separate seats so as not to attract attention (p 317).

None of the above strike me as the behavior of a man obsessed only with his own interests.
 

As noted above, Schulz allows that Thoreau’s self-obsession led to “a social and political vision that is deeply unsettling.” Thoreau certainly did have opinions that related to politics, but I’m not sure he ever had anything like a political or social vision. He despised politics, was never associated with any political “isms.” Some of his statements about government and do-gooding have been snatched up by disciples of the Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand school of “free-market” economics. It seems doubtful, though, that, given his abhorrence of human exploitation and disdain for money grubbing, he would have had any sympathy with their cause.

If Thoreau did have an official political platform, it might be boiled down to a few basic tenets:

1.    Opposition to slavery per se and other forms of human exploitation.

2.    Opposition to nationalism, militarism, and countries -- especially his own --invading one another.

3.    Support for the preservation of wildlands.

As regards a “social” platform, most of his commentary here is by way of advocating certain habits of living that worked for him. These included finding time to meditate, walk outside, and write. Foregoing a lot of material wealth was a way he could make these things happen.

How any of this could be categorized as “alarming,” remains unexplained to me, despite the efforts of Shulz and others to make it clear.

Humorlessness.  Thoreau is frequently portrayed as a puritanical “sore head” (that’s Garrison Keillor) in great need of lightening up. Yet a very large portion of what he wrote was intended – and, in his time, greatly appreciated -- as ironic humor. Walden is full of wry references to events and people that were in the news at the time, much like the material of late night talk show hosts nowadays. He developed essays and Walden chapters by reading them as lectures at the Concord Lyseum and similar venues. These were well attended and much appreciated for their jokey references. His mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, noted about one of them that the audience "laughed till they cried" (Hohn).

 

At another lecture, Thoreau read from a draft of what would become the first chapter of Walden. That chapter has been described by Shulz as "dry, sententious,

[and] condescending." But the attendees don't seem to have agreed. A Salem newspaper said that the talk was "done … in a strain of exquisite humor, with a strong undercurrent of delicate satire against the follies of the times.” It kept the audience, the reviewer notes, “in almost constant mirth.”

 

References to Queen Adelaide having “the whooping cough,” or to a nineteenth century explorer who traveled the world, as Thoreau said, “to count the cats in Zanzabar” were funny at the time. It’s easy to see why they don’t seem as much today. But just because his jokes are outdated doesn’t mean Thoreau was humorless.

 

 Hypocrite. His writing has been misunderstood – or misrepresented – in other ways too. His critics love to point out that even as he posed as a hermit immersing himself in wildness, he walked into town several times a week to dine out with friends, hang out at the post office, and visit his family.

 

Well, he did indeed write about the solitude he enjoyed at Walden.  But he never claimed to be a complete hermit or survivalist of the kind now shown on popular "reality TV" shows.  An entire Walden chapter is devoted to the people he ran into or who came by the cabin; another is devoted to “The Village.” In the latter he freely admits to walking into town regularly, never guessing that he would, a century and a half later, be pilloried for it. These visits even lead to one of his most eloquent passages, a discussion of his meditative walks back to his cabin from town after dark:

 

It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, … with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm if it was plain sailing. (Walden, 165).

 

 

We don’t demand of anyone else that they be either a complete hermit or a social butterfly, choose one or the other. We all need our own personal ratio of solitude to human interaction. Thoreau relished solitude more than most do. But he also enjoyed socializing, even if for him it was best done in smaller doses than many prefer. His critics demand more than is possible. If he is overly solitary, he’s a selfish misanthrope; if he’s not hermitic enough, he’s a hypocrite.

 

Hypocrite About Wildness

 

 

  Much has been made in recent times of the fact that, while extolling “wildness,” Thoreau never lived farther than a mile from town. He almost never left New England, and never went farther west than Minnesota. And this, to many, makes him a phony.

 

It’s true enough that the landscape around Concord was far from a pristine wilderness in the mid-1800s.It was, however, very much wilder than it is now. And it was perhaps as wild as many places we have officially designated as “wilderness” today, with their detailed maps, their trail signs every few miles, their designated campsites, their permit systems, and their trained teams of rescuers ready to save adventurers from their own bad decisions.

 

Said Henry himself:

 

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant.

 

This was plenty of wildness for a man with Thoreau’s imagination and powers of observation. Never tiring of it, he was out and about in the woods, fields, and wetlands virtually every day, in every season, for years on end. And as a result he became an advocate for something still critically important for the sanity of humanity: the protection of pockets of wildness, even if small, right in and around our towns and cities. “every town should have a park,” he says,

 

 or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several, where a stick would never be cut for fuel, not for the navy, not to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses - a common possession for instruction and recreation.

 

As for Thoreau’s trips further afield, they were no luxury tour. His three trips to the “Maine Woods” are the most well-known, and the central Maine of the mid-1800s was still, in most respects, an extremely vast and wild place. His trips were strenuous and gave him a rather thorough immersion in ….. And they inspired in him a couple of sentences well worth our appreciation today. 

 

 

 

Two Kinds of Wildness

This brings us directly to what may be Thoreau’s most famous line: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” What is it about that simple sentence that appeals to so many of us today? I believe the appeal is in Thoreau’s double-meaning of “wildness.” Thoreau here is referring to both the wildness of landscape and of the mind. Or, in other words, to the wildness that is lost when we over-civilize the land, and the wildness that is lost when we over-domesticate our own selves.

When we over-domesticate ourselves, we become like fenced-in cows as opposed to their wild cousins, the deer or the caribou. There is a certain physical fitness that is lost, but also – and more importantly -- a mental alertness. The more domesticated we are, the more we think like the herd. We become indoctrinated to the prevailing way of thinking, which often involves the preservation of the social order above all else. Or, to put it more simply, domestication turns us into cowardly, lazy conformists without us even knowing it.

 

This, I think, is Thoreau’s point in the essay, “Walking,” from which the famous “wildness” quote is drawn. In the very first paragraph, he says he wishes to make an “extreme” statement for “absolute freedom and wildness” (my italics). So he’s a self-admitted extremist. But only an extreme statement will do because:

 

 “…there are enough champions of civilization; the minister, and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that.”

One of my own favorite passages in that essay is this:

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights, — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes, — already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

 

 

And so, for Thoreau, freedom and wildness are inseparable. Free thinking, free speech, freedom from slavery, and freedom from conformist thinking all require both an internal and an external wildness.

 At the same time, he wanted nothing through the sacrifice of someone else. As he put it in “Civil Disobedience,” 

 “If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.”

Mama’s Boy (The Laundry Sneer).

I would bet that fewer Americans have read Walden than have heard that Thoreau’s mother did his laundry.’ So observed Jedediah Britton-Purdy in The New Republic in 2017.

Another commentator, the gifted essayist Rebecca Solnit, put it this way:

There is one writer in all literature whose laundry arrangements have been excoriated again and again, and it is not Virginia Woolf, who almost certainly never did her own washing, or James Baldwin, or the rest of the global pantheon. … Only Henry David Thoreau has been tried in the popular imagination and found wanting for his cleaning arrangements, though the true nature of those arrangements are not so clear.

There is even a play about this supposed outrage: “Laundry Day at Mrs. Thoreua’s” -- “based on the fact, confirmed in many places, that Henry David Thoreau brought his laundry home to his mother while he was living at Walden Pond.”

Alas, however, the “fact” about Mrs. Thoreau, though probably true, has not been “confirmed in many places”. It has never been confirmed at all, but rather repeated in many places. There is only one contemporary source for the laundry sneer, and that is from Thoreau himself. In Chapter One of Walden he says:

“washing and mending . . . for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills have not yet been received.”

Thoreau scholars seem to agree that Henry was most likely referring to his mother, even though, as mentioned, there exists no absolute proof of this. But the really important question is, simply, Who cares?

Well, it seems that for about 150 years, nobody did. A Thoreau scholar named Renalli conducted an exhaustive examination of all things laundry as they might relate to Thoreau. He found not a single reference to Henry’s mom doing his laundry until well into the twenty-first century. This was by the writer Paul Theraux, who in an introduction to a new edition of The Maine Woods, in 200_, said that Thoreau “did not mention that he brought his mother his dirty laundry and went on enjoying her apple pies.”

From there the laundry sneer spread like a modern pandemic, showing up even in the most unlikely places. You might not think, for instance, that the Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy would have little interest in Thoreau’s dirty socks. You might think that that guy, one Peter Kareiva, would be too busy trying to conserve nature. Kareiva has actually moved on from that job, but while holding it he developed a Power Point presentation in which he seems to have enjoyed denigrating Thoreau for outsourcing his laundry and Edward Abbey for once admitting to feeling lonely in his fire tower.

Why the Animosity?

As mentioned, the most important question in this discussion might be: Why the downright meanness toward Thoreau? It’s easy to see why anyone might not enjoy reading his work, and there are reasonable rejoinders to any of his many strong opinions. But why the need to create hypocrisies that are not really there and to paint him as a virtual sociopath?

Solnit has one answer that probably covers a lot of it: that “pretending to care” about his trivial inconsistencies is “a way of not having to care about Thoreau.”

Most importantly, Thoreau is subversive. His constant calls to question authority  and to re-think received wisdom are dangerous to our youth.  Socrates was executed for similar crimes.

 In “Civil Disobedience,” for one example, Thoreau calls for an outright revolt:

… when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.

People that subversive are not likely to be left alone. They need to be taken down a peg or two. Malcolm X has been permanently labelled as a violence-endorsing extremist. Martin Luther King’s sex life will continue to be scrutinized, and his objection to his country’s brutal violence against poor people around the world has been effectively censored from the TV ads celebrating his greatness.

Returning to Thoreau, I find remarkable the number of people I talk with who have “heard” of his various hypocrisies. They haven’t read much of his work, nor even much about his life, but they have a vague feeling he’s not to be much admired.

They are missing out on a lot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Friday, January 10, 2025

 Dazzling Feats of Hypocracy!


Trying to return to this little outlet after being knocked around by Flu Virus.

 I see that in my absence the U.S.-based Empire continued to perform dazzling feats of hypocrisy.

 Antony Blinken announced there was a genocide going on in Sudan, even as the U.S. continued to pretend it was not carrying  out its own genocide in Palestine.

With a straight face, Blinken described what is happening in Sudan as if the exact same words could not be applied to Iraael's psychopathy in Gaza. Referring to a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, Blinken lectured:     

 "The RSF and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians.  The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys—even infants—on an ethnic basis... Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies.  Based on this information, I have now concluded that members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan.'   


Lancet Report on Gaza Deaths. Speaking of genocide, the highly respected journal The Lancet just published a peer-reviewed study that estimates the violent deaths in Gaza are being under-reported by a factor of 40 Percent. This is not surprising at all, since it is difficult to count bodies lying under rubble.

Two specific findings by The Lancet researchers ought to give us pause. One is that their estimate only includes deaths by violent  trauma. It does not include deaths by illness, starvation, and hypothermia -- all of which are being deliberately forced upon Gazans.

The other sad  finding is that of the traumatic deaths in Gaza, just under 60 percent are women, children, and adults over age 65.


Biden Goes Down Swinging.  Around the same time Antony Blinken discovered there was murder going on, the Biden administration announced a brand new sale of weapons to Israel worth a whopping $8 billion.

No doubt our man over there, Benjamin Netanyahu needs the new toys. He's going through his current supply like a drunk going through a bottle of MadDog. Well Benny, be of good cheer. There's always more where that came from.

Thursday, December 26, 2024

 Happy Saturnalia!


The historical roots of holidays are fascinating to me. Even the word "holiday" has an obvious but interesting root: "Holy Day."

The one known as Christmas and now celebrated all over the world seems to have roots in an ancient Roman festival called Saturnalia. It seems to go back  farther than recorded history as it was, at its core, a celebration by agriculturalists of the winter solstice and the end of the harvest season..



"Originally celebrated on December 17, Saturnalia was extended first to three and eventually to seven days. The date has been connected with the winter sowing season, which in modern Italy varies from October to January. Remarkably like the Greek Kronia, it was the liveliest festival of the year."

Traditions of Saturnalia that have been incorporated into Christmas include gift-giving, decorating homes with evergreen boughs, and a general atmosphere of merryment.


Here are a couple more interesting web sites about the holiday:

https://www.getty.edu/news/the-wild-holiday-that-turned-ancient-rome-upside-down/

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/calendar/saturnalia.html




Tuesday, December 24, 2024

 Voices for Sanity. 

It seems apt today to raise a glass to a group called Jewish Voice for Peace. They have been one of the leading voices against the U.S./Israel genocide in Gaza and the violent theft of land in the other remaining Palestinian enclave, known as the West Bank.

Congratulations also to Taxpayers Against Genocide, a group of about 500 northern Californians who have filed a class action suit against their two congressional representatives for backing military aid to Israel.

The two reps are Democrats Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson. The taxpayers are arguing that Huffman and Thompson's votes for billions for Israel to slaughter Palestinians "illegally forced their constituents into being complicit in genocide."

Thank go out to those two groups and others brave enough to oppose The Empire.

And if anyone out there stumbles onto this blog, Happy Solstice!!!

Monday, December 23, 2024

Another Average Night for the Empire.


 It was an average night in Palestine last night. As cats ate corpses in one location,  the U.S. and Israel violently murdered at least 50 more people. 

The main targets included a tent camp for refugees that had been designated a "safe zone," a school housing displaced people, a vehicle carrying volunteers working to secure delivery of humanitarian aid, and two hospitals.

In other words, we are no longer even pretending to avoid killing civilians. We are going after them.. The world is perhaps becoming accustomed to this.

 It's becoming the norm.

 


Friday, December 20, 2024

 

Auschwitz on TikTok

 

The United States of Israel murdered 77 Palestinians last night, a strong rebound from a mediocre score of 25 the previous evening. The highlight of last night’s bounce-back performance was the killing of 15 displaced citizens at two schools turned shelters.

I know this is an awful topic for a season in which we like to think we celebrate peace. But pretending this tax-sponsored carnage isn’t happening doesn’t exactly seem appropriate either. I doubt peace was ever achieved by ignoring violence.

If you can spare five minutes, you might find the interview below to be insightful. The speaker, one Gabor Mate, is an 80-year-old child psychologist I have come to appreciate. I first saw him on the leftist news show Democracy Now -- which I consider the only such program worth watching any more, but that’s just me.

Anyway, Mate has some rather astute observations about the psychology of both the victims and perpetrators of genocide. Just  click on the item below:


 Gabor Mate ‘It’s like we’re watching Auschwitz on TikTok’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFOTBAiTHZA

 

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Here’s to Human Rights Group DAWN

 

 Today’s accolades go to the human rights group DAWN. The group is sponsoring five Palestinians in a lawsuit against the U.S. State Department for violating a U.S. statute called the Leahy Law.

Passed in 1997, the Leahy law prohibits the United States “from funding foreign military units credibly implicated in gross human rights violations.

Charles Blaha is a former State Department official responsible for implementing the Leahy Law. According to “Democracy Now,” Blaha

“ says there is a mountain of evidence of Israel carrying out torture, extrajudicial killings, rape, enforced disappearances and other abuses.”

The case, then, should be a slam-dunk for the plaintiffs.

Rather incredibly, though, the State Department, under the war-friendly eye of Antony Blinken, claims to have looked into the matter and found no wrongdoing by its customers in the Israeli military. Really – nothing there.

Incidentally, we would like to write about other things. But the US/Israel operation in Gaza is so depraved and relentless that it seems wrong to let it become just another forgotten story.

Speaking of relentless, in the past 24 hours U.S, bombs killed 38 more Palestinians and wounded 200 others. That's a fairly average night in Gaza for the last fourteen months or so. Night after night, it goes on.

There’s a reason, by the way, that Israel mainly bombs civilians at night. As longtime observer Vijay says, it’s because that's the time when:

they are able to strike total fear in the population by killing entire families in their homes and thereby threatening other families with annihilation.