Ah, gentle reader, I won’t be taking the crown from Joe Kenney for the longest time between getting a book and reading it since I only got this book probably 31 or 32 years ago whilst in college and when I had a class for which I had to read Walden (although I cannot remember exactly which class that would have been–a philosophy class? A middle American literature class?). So I would have bought this at Waldenbooks (which would have been meta, would it not?) or B. Dalton’s at the Northridge mall (and not the university bookstore where it would have been for a few dollars more). So I read Walden in it and I started A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers judging by the era-appropriate bookmark, but since I just read The Maine Woods / Walden / Cape Cod, I figured I might as well knock out this book as well. Originally, I’d thought that I’d pulled it from my read shelves when I tried to encourage my son or sons to read this book, but it is not in my read book database, so perhaps it has been on my to-read shelves for these thirty years.
At any rate, it contains a couple of things which I had not read before, including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers which Thoreau self-published. He had 1000 copies printed in the days way before print on demand, and he did not sell them all–this is the book about which he quipped about having a library of over 1000 books, 700 of which he wrote himself. It chronicles, in Thoreau’s fashion which means several years after the fact cherry-picking some bits from his journals and inserting some philosophy in them. It describes, theoretically, a boat trip he and his brother made down the local river to the port on the ocean (I was going to say sea, but can one ever pair those two in prepositional phrases again?), but it’s laden with his philosophical asides. I can see it as a precursor to Walden where he blends to two better. It’s not too long, though, and it was what Thoreau wanted to publish unlike posthumous works which were culled from his journals and not pored over or refined by Thoreau himself.
The book also contains, in addition to Walden (which I did not read in this volume this time, but I read it in this book in college and I read it in the other volume earlier this year, so no double-dipping), “On Civil Disobedience” and “Life Without Principle” as well as excerpts from The Maine Woods, Cape Code, and Thoreau’s journals. I read the essays and the excerpts from the journals, but not the excerpts from the things I’d already read.
So: “Civil Disobedience” is his diatribe against an overarching government that takes from citizens to do things that are not in their interests. Based on a single night he spent in jail for not paying a tax that supported the Mexican-American War (although his refusal to pay the tax was longer than the war itself), it really only documents that one night in a couple of pages near the end. The rest of it is pretty free-wheeling anti-government abolitionist almost stream of consciousness.
“Life Without Principle” is described as a talk or lecture he gave on several occasions but only was published the year after his death. I guess it sums up his philosophy as succinctly as possible where Walden did not. Basically, it’s about living life according to the individual’s needs, according to nature, and with minimal interference from government and society. It denigrates people who, getting and spending, lay waste their hours (to be honest, it does read a bit like Wordsworth themeatically) by actually earning a living and making money–which would provide for families, a problem Thoreau didn’t have, of course. He argues against many contemporaries and their tracts/books, but all the names are unfamiliar to us now (and given this is 2025 and not 1993, perhaps the name Thoreau is lost to most)
And the entries from Thoreau’s journal are a couple of paragraphs each, some nice little poetic moments capturing a bit of nature with the flair and philosophizing that is Thoreau at his best and are mercifully briefer than The Maine Woods.
So, now, at the end, what do I think of Thoreau?
As I have mentioned (I think), I can see why he hit differently in the mid-to-late 20th century, when the Baby Boomers were coming up through the college ranks. Thoreau was a Harvard man himself who never really grew up–he did not really have to work for a living nor support a family, so he was enabled to live the “life of the mind” and continue his concordance with nature up until his early death in his early 40s. His themes of non-conformance and the loss of the wild areas (which would have also, been metaphorically, youth to professors who did end up with families to support by professing) aligned with that fin-de-middle-siecle sense of the 1960s turning into the 1970s turning into the 1980s which would have been the lives my professors had known.
But aside from Walden, Thoreau is…. meh. “Civil Disobedience” wanders a bunch as does “Life Without Principle”. We get that Thoreau didn’t like the Mexican-American War. Or slavery. Or the Irish. Or most human development. And the other books and presumably the journals are really just fairly wordy catalogs of daily experience in great detail with some flourishes of interest but mostly just lists of flowers and trees seen in the wild.
So I won’t be getting the complete journals any time soon (unless they’re at the Clever branch of the Christian County Library later this month on bag day).
Ah, but Brian J., you might say. Are you not just slagging on Thoreau as a man-boy who never grew up and had to “adult” as the kids say these days who play-acted at living off the land but really just wanted to make a living from the “life of the mind” by writing his own ill-informed, twee sentiments and lightweight experiences as though they were profound, and that pretty much describes you with a blog twenty-two years on now? A fair cop, gentle reader. Perhaps even true: What I least like about Thoreau might be what I fear I share in common with him. But I’m not boring in detail of flora and fauna. I’m too dull to even know what those birds are in the tree in my back yard that seranade me evenings when I am in the pool. So I don’t even rise to the worst of Thoreau. Thanks for asking.
Oh, and lest I fail to mention it, this book provided me a Found Bookmark of my own. Stuck in the middle of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, I found an index card with three names on it and the words, “Dues From.” This would have been my senior year, ainna, when I was the treasure of Marquette Writers Ink, the writing club at the university. One of the names is a girl (woman, I guess, but a young woman) who might have had a crush on me that I never suspected until the president of the club asked me if there was something going on, as she always came to me first at any event or gathering. Strangely enough, she’s the only one I’m nominally connected to as she showed up as a suggestion on LinkedIn some years ago, and I connected with her–she’s a copywrighter in Minnesota these days. Another, I had been thinking of because he would have been the only Indian-American I knew at the time, thirty-some years ago. Over at a blog I read, commenters disparagingly refer to Indians especially in the ever-growing number in the tech industry as Jeets, as this guy actually went by Jeet. He was at least second generation, though, as he had no accent. And he was a poet in English. I cyber-stalked him and found that he might be living in St. Louis these days. It didn’t catch me by surprise–so I might have looked him up before. I wonder if we overlapped there. I feel bad for JenBen, though, the other woman whose name is on the card: I don’t really think of her at all.
And: I have to say that this might not be the last of my collegiate acquisitions that I read. So I might read the book I picked up on the Chinese tradition of Buddhism sometime. I might actually finish George Steiner’s Real Presences, a textbook for Dr. Block’s class, on my third attempt (the last being about a decade ago). So I might very well have more Personal Records in laziness in reading books I buy to set yet.
