The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan: Subway

Showing posts with label Subway. Show all posts

The L Train, as in Labrador

Thoreau famously said, “I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord...” I think that an art exhibit on a subway platform of stuff on a subway platform is an example of the Labradorness that can be found in some recess of New York City.

(via Swissmiss)

A Good Point

This subway poster commentator--commentating on the poster at a time when police seem to be watching for people writing on or approaching in any way the advertisements that litter the subway system in New York as well as many other subway systems around the world--makes an excellent point. His or her hand written comment is in the upper left of the poster shown above right, and it is enlarged below right. We are rarely right, so please keep that in mind. Meanwhile, for more information see more information on Poster Boy.

88 Keys Below W 4th

This is what we at The Thoreau You Don't Know are talking about, and it comes via Flicker as first spotted on Gothamist.

Sounds of the Subway

A subway sound that is reminiscent, or even more than reminiscent, of the song "Somewhere," from West Side Story--that's, in part, what Thoreau is talking about. The New York Times' Jim Dwyer notes:

To hear a love song from the undercarriage of a train, even fleetingly, qualifies as a found moment. But like Ms. McLaurin, not everyone is listening for it.

"It's hard to pick out a song in the midst of all the din down here," says Jim Dwyer. But it's like a breeze coming in here, these three notes. It's unmistakable. Once you've heard them once, you will hear them again and again. He says this in the audio portion of today's Times' column, About New York. For the record, research at the Thoreau You Don't Know indicated that the wind speed of a train entering the 4,5, and 6 strain station at Union Square is 7 m.p.h., thanks to the hand-held wind measuring device that can measure breezes coming into the station.

More from the column:

The playwright Tony Kushner told New York magazine last year that it was his favorite New York noise. Riders often ask transit officials about it, and readers still write to the City section of The Times to report their discovery. The filmmaker Julie Talen told me about it months before I finally caught it.

A little from Thoreau, from the journals, 1841:

Unpremeditated music is the true gage which measures the current of our thoughts - the very undertow of our life's stream.

Photos, New York Public Library, here & 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.