The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan: April 2011

Toil

Field Trips

I wonder if people know that Thoreau and his brother are sometimes said to have pioneered the idea of a school field trip, at least in and around Concord, Massachusetts? Pioneered, that is, taking young people out of the school room, out to see a boat maker make a boat, out to see a surveyor survey? The Thoreau brothers were both teachers, and of course, the Transcendentalists in general thought that schooling needed reform—take Alcott, who saw the poetry of kids, the poetry that, I would argue, is often schooled out of them, even today, instead of encouraged. Even at Harvard, which Thoreau attended, things were bad, students rioting, standards low. Thoreau used to say that Harvard taught all of the branches of knowledge and none of the roots. Being a teacher, he supported teaching, and education was less a chore and more of a joy.

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The Highway Tax

Thoreau is often portrayed as a man against taxes. This is wrong. People who believe Thoreau to be anti-tax cite his essay, “Civil Disobedience.” Far from being a split from society, “Civil Disobedience” is a bold statement of citizenship, of the necessity of putting in your share, and it’s part of the formulation of the utopian vision of Walden. It is almost not about avoiding taxes. Even in skipping some taxes, Thoreau emphasized that there are other taxes he needed to pay, that he was too civil to resist. One of the best lines (or one of my favorites, anyway) has to do with the road. You wouldn’t know it in the way it has been given over to the automobile today, but the road is a public space, perhaps the first public space, and when Thoreau talks about the road in “Civil Disobedience,” the road is the connection to everything and everyone outside of himself—the road concerns the importance of staying connected. To wit: “I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my fellow countrymen now.” Speaking of community, here is a passage from President Obama's recent speech, at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C.:

But there’s always been another thread running through our history -– a belief that we’re all connected, and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation. We believe, in the words of our first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves. And so we’ve built a strong military to keep us secure, and public schools and universities to educate our citizens. We’ve laid down railroads and highways to facilitate travel and commerce. We’ve supported the work of scientists and researchers whose discoveries have saved lives, unleashed repeated technological revolutions, and led to countless new jobs and entire new industries. Each of us has benefited from these investments, and we’re a more prosperous country as a result. Part of this American belief that we’re all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security and dignity. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff may strike any one of us. “There but for the grace of God go I,” we say to ourselves. And so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, those with disabilities. We’re a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further. We would not be a great country without those commitments.

Community: can't live without it, can't live without it.

The Harbor with Accompaniment

See the harbor as it was. Sure, it was polluted as hell; swimming houses, sometimes floating docks in the harbor, mostly closed up show by the 1930s. But there was lots of economic activity. Stuff being moved that would today be moved on the highways that help us keep our locally driven mileage high, as well as our asthma and obesity rates. Imagine if the harbor was this full with ferries now? Imagine if we worked with it, rather than against it. Imagine if we included in our definition of the environment something that was along the lines of health, or, more precisely, a larger consider of the public health. And then—and this is just to much imaging, but it is spring, after all—imagine if these jobs were jobs again, and jobs with OSHA regulations, with health care? (video via Rogert Ebert's Journal)

And speaking of Tom Waits, as The Suite 16 was...

Great News

From the Times: The Great Lakes. The Mississippi River. The Chesapeake Bay. The Everglades. And now, ladies and gentlemen, the New York / New Jersey Harbor. The area’s aquatic network has been designated one of the nation’s Great Waters by a consortium of conservation groups called the America’s Great Waters Coalition .

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.