The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan: 02/27/09

Talking Transportation With the Times

A member of the Thoreau You Don't Know team talks about shutting down the Times Square area to cars and, thus, opening it to people here.

Railroading

People think Thoreau was against the train. Personally, we at the Thoreau You Don't Know don;t get that feeling. He took the train to hike in the hills. He took the train to lecture. He used to hang out by the train tracks to check out the nature--kind of like looking at plants on a highway median, in terms of today. One of our favorite reporters is Sarah Goodyear at Streetsblog.org, and she recently had this to say about trains and the United States and today--she is following the people following high speed rail as it relates to the stimulus bill.

In Common Parlance

According to the New York Times Book Review's blog, Paper Cuts, the discussion between Lawrence Lessig and the artist Shepard Fairey. (Jennifer Schuessler wrote the post, "Steal This Blog.") Here's the moderator's Twitter feed. All I want to say is they talked about the commons. Thoreau talked a lot about commons, pitching himself as what he called an extra vagrant, a phrase that, if you think about it, gets better and better. Here's this about the idea of commons:

Speaking of Unemployment

A lot of people think that Walden is a paean to nature. And it is pro-nature. On the other hand, it is an economic analysis--or an analysis of the culture that thinks only economically. The goal, of course, is to mend the rift between thinking economically and thinking nature--"healing the false binary" is a phrase the the staff at The Thoreau You Don't Know have seen in academic papers. It seems relevant to point out that times were not good when Thoreau was setting out as a writer, as this brief excerpt from The Thoreau You Don't Know indicates:

Violent class warfare was more of a possibility than the typically genteel study of the Transcendentalists’ time would indicate, or marketers who invoke Thoreau’s namenowadays might imagine. Union membership had taken hold on a mass scale—in 1834, New York City’s General Trades Union created a National Trades Union, and had a march a mile and a half long—but the layoff s zapped their power. In the winter of 1837, as theaters were deserted and markets empty, renters were planning a mass action in New York City; landlords collectively held back on their attempts to collect. For the first time in U.S. history a president, Andrew Jackson, used federal troops in a labor dispute—against the immigrant Irish workers on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal who had attacked scab workers. The Workingman’s Party was agitating in Boston, while women working in the mills in Lowell went on strike, what they then called a “turn out,” singing, “Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I/ Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?” Philip Hone, the former New York City mayor and diarist, wondered how a workingman fed his family, given that Hone’s upper- class friends were in dire straits. “What is to become of the working classes?” he wrote. That spring, Emerson wrote in his journal: “Cold April; hard times; men breaking who ought not to break; banks bullied into the bolstering of desperate speculators; all the newspapers a chorus of owls. . . . Loud cracks in the social edifice.—Sixty thousand laborers, say rumor, to be presently thrown out of work, and these make a formidable mob to break open banks and rob the rich and brave the domestic government.”

In other words, there was a great recession, a depression, in fact-—that's what Thoreau was thinking about. And it should also be noted that Thoreau survived. It was a lot of work, but he and his contemporaries figured out ways to get by.
(Library of Congress photo of Big Bill Heywood leading strikers in Lawrence, MA.)

Available now from Robert Sullivan, the New York Times best selling author, and published by Harper. A description from the publisher:

What if Henry David Thoreau—America’s pioneering nature lover, the man who famously lived in a little house of his own construction—was actually pro-city rather than just a monkish introvert who wanted to be left alone in the woods? What if the man we think of as so serious and introspective was really a joker, a bit of clown, a kind of stand-up comic in his day? And what if the fact that he often went home to his family or into town for supper didn’t show him to be a cheater or a fraud as far as self-reliance goes? What if spending time with his friends and family—i.e., community—was his point all along?

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.