The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan: 03/03/09

Sledding

Such a stiff! That's all we at The Thoreau You Don't Know ever hear about Thoreau. Meanwhile, his journals talk about skating and boating, and all the fun associated with hanging out outside in the cold. In fact, Thoreau is writing at a time when the ideas of work and play were separating. He makes a long joke about skating and collecting wood on the frozen surface of the pond--sort of killing two birds (work and play) with one stone. Work at a house--the kind of work that he wrote about while at the pond--was being more and more described as "women's work." (See Catharine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy, published just before Walden.) From the Thoreau You Don't Know:

Most radically, while Beecher attempted to change the perception of work from “vulgar” to “noble,” Thoreau aspired to combine labor and leisure, to make vigorous work more like spontaneous play. “Idle time” was the bane of the new industrial economy. For Thoreau work was itself a pastime. In the roots of the word labor, Thoreau saw an opposite. The Latin noun means work, labor, toil. The Latin verb can mean to slip or to fall away or to glide by. In the “House-Warming” chapter of Walden, the narrator skates across the pond, collecting firewood as he glides joyfully. At a time when work and leisure were first becoming separated in America, Thoreau wrote that “men labor under a mistake,” and the mistake he was talking about was that people were confusing work for work when it could also be play. They were becoming obsessed with making a living and forgetting to have a life.

Simply Put

This story (above) is out there a lot these days, which is to say: we at the Thoreau You Don't Know aren't the only one thinking that Thoreau is feeling particularly relevant at this moment in history, or re-history. One of our staff just called from a cell phone to say something along these lines: "Look, think about it. A lot of people who are in their thirties and forties, they have been through the good (economic) times. They are not used to the bad (economic) times. They don't know how to cope. They need a way to cope." The rest of the staff here agrees, but we chafe when we see a headline--RECESSION!--and then a picture of a cabin in the woods, or a description of Thoreau living simply, with no TV. Coping doesn't mean running away; it doesn't call for asceticism. It means sticking around. Thoreau didn't leave town, even when he went to Walden Pond. That was his point. To find Labrador at home, the far magnificent Utopia in your soul, in the sound of the guy whistling down the street.

To wit, from Walden:

What does Africa- what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes- with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice.

Joke

As is well known, we at the Thoreau You Don't Know welcome submissions of all and any kind. Why, just the other day at a staff meeting a bunch of us were saying, Wouldn't it be great if we had nothing to do at all?--at which point a fight broke out between the people who thought they were in change of nothing and those who though they were in charge of all. Here is an old New Yorker cartoon, sent in by an alert reader of the Thoreau You Don't Know:

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.