For the last several months, I’ve been doing a deep dive into Thoreau, alternating the Journal with Laura Dassow’s excellent biography. It’s a hefty project, since both are fat books, and now, nearly finished, I might be nothing close to a Thoreau scholar, but I know the man as more than a guy who lived by a pond for awhile.
I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that while baking in Thoreau’s ideas and hijinks (he climbed a tree and caught an owl in his bare hands — and later released it; in order to understand geese better he would sometimes flap his arms and honk like them), I frequently irritated my family with stories (“Did you know that Thoreau’s home was a stop on the Underground Railroad? That he was one of the first and most vocal supporters of John Brown?). My daughter would groan and say “Thoreau — again?” though she’d pronounce it “throw” as if she wanted to throw me across the room.
Reading them both together — I would focus on several years of the journal followed by the corresponding chapter of the biography — has given me an even deeper appreciation of how humble the guy was. His neighbors bemoaned his lack of ambition (one made fun of him for standing by a pond for hours observing frogs), they failed to notice that he was also lecturing, building houses, making crucial observations about levels of the river and its flow, surveying property and, oh yes, writing several books and magazine articles. He did all those things yet there was little mention in his diary, which instead was filled with pages and pages of birds and frogs and meticulous descriptions of plants, all of which sounds very boring, but absolutely was not, as he tied all that observation into the relationship between man and the natural world and to what it means to live a good life.
In my twenties I once tried to tackle John Cheever’s short stories alongside his journals. I was far too young and narcissistic to understand the struggles of an older man. Now might be the time to go back to it, though my interests have changed and I’m more attuned to the world of a nineteenth century nature lover than a twentieth century suburban writer, no matter how brilliant his stories.
Still, I might give it a shot. Along with Dawn Powell, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf….a new reading project.
Kate Staples 