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

Showing posts with label Wind. Show all posts

Seeing the Wind

As readers of The Thoreau You Don't Know know, the staff of the The Thoreau You Don't Know is very interested in wind and windstorms, especially in the city--which is why we were elated to receive the following e-mail from an alert reader, in particular alert novelist Matthew Sharpe (Stories from the Tube, Nothing Is Terrible, The Sleeping Father, Jamestown), who came across this wind description from Charles Dickens, in Our Mutual Friend:

The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and as it sawed, the sawdust whirled about the sawpit. Every street was a sawpit, and there were no top-sawyers; every passenger was an under-sawyer, with the sawdust blinding him and choking him.

That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind blows gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass, seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails.

Nice wind quote. (We put it in italics, because italics look windblown.) When the BBC did "Our Mutual Friend," they also ran a scholarly article archive, which can be found here. As far as Dickens and Thoreau goes: we are reminded of Dickens tour of The Five Points, the notorious so-called slum of New York City. (Photo NY Public Library Digital Collection.)

We am reminded that he liked to go slumming. We are reminded that the Five Points was exploding due to the sudden influx of immigrants, running from famine. We are reminded that Dickens did not have a lot of nice things to say about the Five Points residents, comparing them to the pigs.

Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of those pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting?

We recall that Thoreau came to New York City the following year, living in Staten Island, and had some not nice things to say about the very same immigrants. Then he returned to Concord, MA, where there were also a lot of immigrants all of the sudden. In fact, Thoreau lived with some of the immigrants at Walden Pond, using party of a Irishman's shanty to build his house. Sometime after living at Walden, Thoreau's attitude changed. He began to have nice things to say about the immigrants--about their work habits, their fence building skills, their kids. In other words, Thoreau stayed loose; he was flexible. Kind of like Matthew Sharpe, seen here on the Today Show:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

In closing, note that one of the BBC's scholarly articles--Choi, Tina Young. "Completing the Circle: The Victorian Sanitary Movement, Our Mutual Friend, and Narrative Closure." A paper originally delivered at the Dickens Project Winter Conference, UC Davis, February 19-21, 1999--refers to the great English sanitarian Edwin Chadwick and says this:

Dickens's massive novels about urban life, such as Great Expectations and Bleak House, elaborate upon a similar conception of nationhood, where both narrative and nation, in spite of seeming novelistic excess with respect to characters and pages, actually exemplify remarkable economy. But his last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, might provide the most fitting example of this emergent sense of nationhood, if only because here, Dickens overlays an almost Chadwickean vision of narrative and national closure with a pervading narrative thematic of sanitation, waste, and recovery.

Æolian Art

Tonight, in Brooklyn, at Third Ward, there is an inflatable sculpture show. Inflatable sculpture is a lot like an Aeolian harp. Thoreau talked a lot about Aeolian harps. He loved Aeolian harps. The transcendentalists all seemed to love Aeolian harps, in fact. The Aeolian harp--the instrument of the god Æolus, god of wind--is a harp of just a few strings that makes sounds as a result of wind. Often, the Aeolian harp was placed in a window, the way we would fit a small air conditioner in a window today, and the wind running through the window would vibrate the strings, which were tuned, which would in turn vibrate the wooden base, which would in turn vibrate into the wall of the house, the wind making music with the house, the house a musical instrument. Thoreau liked to joke about how the telegraph wire running through the woods around Walden Pond was like a giant Aeolian harp. Here is another version of an Aeolian harp, using the wind of the subway to charge the art with life, or our street life with art:

The challenge that Thoreau sets in Walden is to figure out how to make your self into an Aeolian harp, rather than just an airconditioner. From Walden: There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Æolian music to a healthy and innocent ear.

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.