The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan: 02/10/09

Thoreau was a practical philosopher, a practical activist. When he wrote about his stay in jail he talked about not paying a tax not because he rejected the government but because he wanted the government to work better—he made himself a friction, a principle that Thoreau the mechanical engineer knew as necessary for a machine to work. (Yes, folks, Thoreau enjoyed technology as much as the next guy.) A book that describes the simultaneous practical simplicity and radicalness of what “Civil Disobedience” is talking about is Breach of Peace, by Eric Etheridge, which contains portraits of the Freedom Riders today, accompanied by mug shots of them when they were jailed for riding a bus in Mississippi at the beginning of the civil rights movement, a collection of practical philosophers: “I can’t speak for nobody else,” one Freedom Rider recalls. Etheridge is currently on tour in Mexico, where the war that Thoreau protested was waged illegally by the U.S. After Thoreau wrote "Civil Disobedience," he was read (and reprinted, in a fair use kind of way) by Ghandi, whose practices were in turn taken up in part by the Freedom Riders. Full circle.

In Mexico City promoting Breach of Peace, courtesy of the US ... on TwitPic

Etheridge tours Ohio and Michigan this week:

Cleveland Public Library
Sunday, Feb. 22
2PM
325 Superior Ave. N.E.
Cleveland, OH 44114

Flint Public Library
Monday, Feb. 23
7PM
1026 E. Kearsley St.
Flint, MI 48502

Kalamazoo Public Library
Tuesday, Feb. 24
6:30PM
315 S. Rose St.
Kalamazoo, MI 49007

More info here.

Reasons that Thoreau is maybe more applicable to these troubling times than you may imagine

¶ He was living not in a peaceful time where he could just sit there and look at a pond but at a time of financial crisis, panics, even, when unemployment was first being recognized as a crisis, when people began to think that the economic system was broken—to wit, there were unemployed workers often living at Walden Pond.
¶ He was not just writing about butterflies (though he uses one to excellent, redemptive effect at Walden's end) but about how work was taking over our lives, how play was disappearing, how things like conversation were disappearing, along with sympathy, empathy and gratitude.
¶ He was very interested in gadgets, being an engineer himself--no technophobe--and living at a time of intense technological excitement.
¶ He was big on tunes, as in music, as in having a playlist, though in those days it was called a repertoire—he played a mean flute.

A Review

A mischievous reporter on the universe, Sullivan has found beauty in a notorious swamp in The Meadowlands (1998) and wisdom in an alley in Rats (2004). In his latest slyly philosophical inquiry, he endeavors to free Henry David Thoreau from his calcified reputation as a cantankerous hermit and nature worshipper. Sounding like your favorite teacher who manages to make history fun and relevant, Sullivan vibrantly portrays the sage of Walden as a geeky, curious, compassionate fellow of high intelligence and deep feelings who loved company, music, and long walks. An exceptional writer mad for puns, Thoreau
was also a bold social critic and—the crux of Sullivan’s stimulating argument—a brilliant, tongue-incheek
humorist. Sullivan, himself plenty saucy, also elucidates Thoreau’s radical focus on “man’s
interaction with nature.” In command of a great diversity of fascinating material, Sullivan succinctly illuminates the striking parallels between Thoreau’s time and ours—foreclosures, lost jobs, and rapid technological change. Thoreau remains vital and valuable because of his acute observations, wit, and lyricism and his recognition that the “force of life is everywhere,” a perception even more essential now that the consequences of the societal choices Thoreau prophetically critiqued have reached staggering proportions.--Donna Seaman, in Booklist

More from the publisher:
Henry David Thoreau is one of those authors that readers think you know, even if they don’t. He’s the solitary curmudgeon with the shack out in the woods, the mystic worshipping solemnly in the quiet church of nature. He’s our national Natural Man, the prophet of environmentalism. But here Robert Sullivan—who himself has been called an “urban Thoreau” (New York Times Book Review) presents the Thoreau you don’t know: the activist, the organizer, the gregarious adventurer, the guy who likes to go camping with friends (even if they sometimes accidentally burn the woods down). Sullivan argues that Walden was a book intended to revive America, a communal work forever pigeonholed as a reclusive one, and that this misreading is at the heart of our troubled relationship with the environment today. Sullivan shows us not a lonely eccentric but a man in his growing village, a man who danced and sang, who worked throughout his short life at the family pencil-making business, and moved into his parents’ house after leaving Walden Pond, but always paid his father rent. Passionate yet whimsical, The Thoreau You Don’t Know asks us to re-examine our everyday relationship with the natural world, and one another.

The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan

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