The Writer and Her/His Thoughts

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.

Forever Young

A year into my self-directed immersion course on Thoreau, I still find, almost daily, some observation or thought that resonates. Many I wish I’d read (and actually heeded — two different things) in my twenties. Like all of us, he is trying to find out how to be in the world. He points out that the “real jobs” held by neighbors would drive him bananas, and despite days filled with hard work and observation he is constantly fighting off accusations (often from friends like Emerson) that he is lazy. Take it from me, lying on the couch on a sunny cold afternoon, he was nothing close to lazy.

He worked in the pencil factory, he helped neighbors raise houses, he kept this incredibly meticulous journal filled with scientific observations, he wrote many books, he lectured on many things, including abolition, his house was a stop on the Underground Railroad. And, one of my favorite things about him, he played. Constantly. In some ways like a kid. He would ice skate for hours at a time, he climbed trees (well into his 30s). In one tree, he caught an owl in his bare hands (and later let it go), he found dragged snapping turtles home (at great risk to his fingers and toes) to observe them and dug up turtle eggs then buried them outside his house so he would watch them hatch.

Having read a number of books written by great observers of the natural world, I’ve noticed many have this sense of almost childlike wonder and adventure in common. In Vesper Flights, Helen MacDonald finds meaning in birds and trees and takes cues from the natural world on how to live. she talks about hunting for mushrooms:

“Searching for chanterelles, I’ve found myself unconsciously walking on tiptoe across mossy stumps, as if they might hear me coming. It doesn’t work well if you walk around and try to spot them directly. They have an uncanny ability to hide from the searching eye. Instead, you have to alter the way you regard the ground around you, concern yourself with the strange phenomenology of leaf litter and try to give equal attention to all colors, shapes and angles on the messy forest floor.”
Vesper Flights

In his book, The Stars in Our Pockets, Howard Axelrod says, “Attention span isn’t a matter of willpower, or even necessarily of intellect. Attention span comes from curiosity” and goes on to praise the sort of curiosity that “carries you branch to branch.”

I don’t know why it surprised me so much to think about Thoreau climbing trees or skating on the frozen rivers. Maybe I think of him, and everyone from that time period, as sort of old and fusty and missing a sense of whimsy. So it’s strange to think that this is something he could actually teach those of us who are too preoccupied to find some joy in shimmying up a tree and observing a turtle.

Lit Meds

Over the past year I’ve wavered between relief and a sense of survivor’s guilt that COVID has not wreaked havoc in my life. Of course it’s been wrenching to read about so much death and illness and general suffering, but other than my kids being cranky and a bit gloomy and taking over the kitchen like marauding colonizers, everything has been okay. At least I thought.

Then I took a closer look at the books I’ve been reading. I’ve always been a fairly instinctual reader. I drift towards what feels right at the time (unless I’m swept up in the hype over a new book, something I try hard to avoid). Apparently what feels right at this time has been a stack of soothing philosophical books and appreciations of nature and the simple life.

All have been great reads — each snuck up on me with its own slice of wisdom or guidance or appropriate escapism. Here are a few samples:

“Maybe this was what I should have said to the boys: How do you find your own way of looking at things? How do you take off your socially preapproved glasses, so that in every glance at the world around you, you feel a part of the world around you, even saved by your sense of belonging in it — a belonging rooted not in your wearing the same glasses as everyone else, but precisely in having taken them off, in feeling your common solitariness with everyone?”

“What I want us to protect isn’t just the distinctive range of consciousness within each of us but also the ability to share that distinctiveness with each other. That’s the only way I’ve found to feel less alone. That’s the deepest way to look at the stars together. To recognize how fundamentally alone each of us is, locked in a separate body and a separate mind, and in that recognition to have the chance to feel all that reaches across that space between us, all the earth-deep connections that are real.”

“Watching the flock has brought home to me how easy it is to react to the idea of masses of refugees with the same visceral apprehension with which we greet a cloud of moving starlings or tumbling geese, to view it as a singular entity, strange and uncontrollable and chaotic. But the crowds coming over the border are people just like us. Perhaps too much like us. We do not want to imagine what it would be to have our familiar places reduced to ruins. In the face of fear, we are all starlings, a group, a flock, made of a million souls seeking safety.”

“I’ve valued deer for their capacity to surprise and delight me, which is why I’ve resisted learning more about them. The more you know about something, the less it can surprise you. But it’s hard to feel sympathy with a thing whose reality you have chosen to ignore, which makes my attitude not so different from those who would write approvingly of the physics of a dying deer, or how the best thing about a deer collision is how funny it can be.”

“Science showed him how to see the Cosmos in a grain of sand or the ocean in a woodland pond, a mountain range in Fairhaven Cliff, a glacier in the cobblestones of Walden Pond. Poetry gave him a voice to show the world why this mattered.”

“It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country — in his native village.”

“Hence, emancipation must begin with self-examination: ‘What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.’ Or, as Saint Augustine wrote in his Confessions: ‘I was held back not be the fetters put on me by someone else, but by the iron bondage of my own will.'”