So why did I read Walden earlier in the year? I’d gotten it in my head that it was for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge–I said as much in another book report in April, but I didn’t actually slot it into any of the categories. Huh. Perhaps I was just reading it to race my youngest to whom I recently gave a copy and who might have had to read it for school. Regardless, I did not do a book report on it when I finished it because it’s in this omnibus three-books-in-one edition. And the omnibus only counts as a single book in the annual count because my rules are so arbitrary that Calvin has said to me, “Hey, how about a little consistent structure to your framework, buddy?”
At any rate, I’m not going to go into too much detail. This is a blog and not a paper for a college grade, gentle reader. But I will say something about each.
The Maine Woods chronicles several trips that Thoreau made into Maine; once to visit the largest mountain in the state and a couple other trips up and down the rivers and lakes just to take in the scenery and to enumerate and describe all the birds and the flowers and the trees found along the way. Actually, I found it tedious because that’s what it is. He tells about traveling by water, a little about the swamps along the way, and not much narrative flow. We get small asides about his philosophy, how man is changing the landscape, but the land is pretty wild and pretty much untouched except for logging. I mean, even events that could be exciting, such as a companion getting separated from the party overnight, is told pretty laconically. It was only 185 pages, but it took me a long time to slog through it. The book qua book was published after Thoreau’s death; I expect he would have tightened it if he meant it for print as a book. The book is structured in long chapters for each trip and subsections for days on the trip. Which is fitting, as people put it together from his journals after he died.
Walden chronicles the time that Thoreau spent in a small shack on Walden Pond (not On Golden Pond, which is different, you damned kids). Thoreau spent over two years there, but he condensed the journal entries into topical chapters and kind of made it seem like only a single year as he kind of follows the seasons–but the text is pretty clear that he’s talking about multiple years, so I’m not sure why current exegesists (current being late 20th century insist he pretended it was only a year.
At any rate, this is one of the two “books” that Thoreau published in his lifetime (the other, A Week on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers, was much shorter, so one might think it’s only a long essay). So it represents what Thoreau wanted published and a degree of refinement you don’t get in the posthumous works.
Themeatically, he muses on living the simple life, paring one’s needs down to the bare minimum, and rhapsodizes about nature and decries man’s progress in building things and destroying habitats and whatnot in the name of progress. It is strangely approachable not only because this was a theme popular even in the latter half of the 20th century, but the words he uses–cars for rail transportation, for example, or “”Who would live there where a body can never hear the barking of Bose.” (which is a brand of speaker and headphones today)–make it seem like he’s almost writing it in the middle 20th century and not the middle 19th century.
And I am sure it hit the Greatest Generation and early Boomers differently than someone today. I mean, they had exurban woods, at least in the north and northeast and parts of the south, where they rambled as kids which were developed for suburbs. So they knew what the loss of the wild places they played felt like. But here in the 21st century, kids have far diminished room to ramble even if they can be torn from devices long enough to do so. My boys played a bit in the wood break behind our house in the brief gap when they were old enough to play unsupervised and the time the oldest got his first phone because he was going into high school and might need to be in communication with his folks. And although I was kind of limited to the (big) block of the housing project or the trailer park or whatnot, my father told stories of hopping on a train as a kid with a gun to go hunting. So I knew what this felt like if only by proxy, the loss of those “wild” spaces (ours were not really wild, the old edges of the Army Reserve base in Milwaukee or the wooded hills above the trailer park or, it turns out, the toxic creek below it). But they’re gone now, too, lost in the past.
So it’s clear why it was a college favorite back then. It’s not a bad read; a bit more poetical in tone than what we would prefer today (or at least what I prefer in my paperback fiction selections). And it provides some things to think about. But more archaic now than it would have been in 1990.
Cape Cod is another book drawn from his journals and published after his death. It covers a trip that Thoreau and another took walking Cape Cod to Provincetown, a several week journey of 60+ miles. He talks about the sea, seamen, lighthouses, and living on this rural sandbar where not much grows. It starts of with a bang, a chapter on a shipwreck and the aftermath, talks about “wreckers” who gather jetsam and floatsam. And most of the wood for home fires comes from driftwood. Back then, the Cape did not have roads or rails, so they walked. An interesting excursion, and a little better than The Maine Woods, but still gets into the weeds, literally. At the end, they take the ferry back to the mainland. I was reading Jes’ Dreamin’ about the same time as this book-within-the-book, and I noted that both depict eras in areas which have been heavily developed since the authors wrote about them as bucolic and/or backwater rural areas.
SO: I guess the whole thing is worth reading if you’re in an English department somewhere focusing on mid-19th century American literature (c’mon, man, they’re still got to be one somewhere, maybe Hillsdale or something) and you need to read it for work and for your dissertation or continued non-perishing publishing. But these are not for everyone. I’m not even sure they’re for me in retrospect. But I’ve read this bonzer of a book, and it’s good for me to read bonzers of a book from time to time since I have so many, and reading them clears more space than paperback originals.
Oh, and Thoreau did not think much of the Irish. He dings them several times. So some small inclusions in the diamond of his thought. He was imperfect, and unfortunately undoubtedly the complete works of Thoreau, including, what, fourteen or fifteen volumes of a journal (not available at Nogglestead, and not on order), will undoubtedly prove it more clearly.
