The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan: 03/04/09

Wise Investments

Is it just us over here at The Thoreau You Don't Know or is this cool? (Can't find your glasses?) Our favorite letter at this particular moment is V for Vocation, a word that seems like it might be proposed as an alternative to career. And now, some of the accompanying text from the designer, P.J. Chmiel: Life in years to come may not be the same life we enjoy today, at least in a material sense, but it can be a lot more rewarding than the work/shop/TV/sleep/die life that most of us now lead. The key to weathering the storm lies in joining together in closer-knit groups of family and community; the solutions will not be coming from the top-down, they will be happening from the ground-up...

Biker Byrne

From David Byrne's always bike-friendly journal, at the point where he is talking about meeting the mayor of Vancouver, B.C., after a show there:

After the show, I was told that the mayor was backstage. Keith, Mauro and I hauled a bucket of beers and wine into the green room, where the guests were waiting. The mayor, Gregor Robertson, and his wife Amy chatted with most of us, and it turned out they had arrived on bikes! At one point they seemed slightly antsy, so as an out I offered that they probably had to get going, but they hung around — and after a bit, we all went to a nearby bar-rest for local wine and mussels. I chatted with Robertson about my own bike rides around Vancouver, and how NYC has made great strides in becoming more bike-friendly. I mentioned the efforts of Enrique Peñalosa, Janette Sadik-Kahn and Jan Gehl in transforming some cities into more livable places.

Robertson said that there has been a radical transformation of the land and cityscape in a generation. Vancouver is no longer a small city, and having seen all the new condos and office buildings here, I wondered aloud if developers were simply unstoppable; if the city might lose some of its charm and character; that the human scale of the city will be lost if profit is left as the prime force determining urban texture. In Peñalosa’s terms this means that people with lots of money determine how everyone else lives, and what kind of city we all live in — which, he feels, is undemocratic.

Robertson responded,
“I don't really see them as unstoppable. I'm doing the aikido thing, moving that drive for building and profit into the most positive outcome possible for the community. Not a simple thing. But my hopes are high.”

Photo from Byrne's journal, of a sculpture by Bill Reid, the great Haida artist. The staff of the Thoreau You Know has spent a lot of time in Pacific Northwest Coast Canoes and they are solid! They are also semi-public transportation.

Bus Chick

Buses are cool, even if they are the public transportation most disdained by the drivers of the car. Buses are fun, and even hand-held communication friendly, as opposed to say driving and Blackberrying in a car. Bus Chick, whose column for the Seattle Post Intelligencer is here, proves it, having taken a bus to the hospital when her named-for Rosa Parks child was born. Like the staff of the Thoreau You Don't Know, she is car free, as you can see:

Via Clarence Eckerson Jr. on the most excellent Streetsblog.

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.