`Write with Gusto'

More than 20 collections of passages from Thoreau’s journal have been published since Francis Allen and Bradford Torrey put out their standard 14-volume edition in 1906, 42 years after Thoreau’s death. Some have been selected thematically – birds, the natural world, the year 1851. Yale University Press has just published I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer, who in 2004 edited an annotated Walden. At almost 500 pages, his journal selection is generous and, though he announces no thematic emphasis, his edition seems to concentrate more on Thoreau the writer and naturalist, not the political thinker and Yankee crank.

Cramer’s annotations are prudently brief and generally non-insulting to the common reader (no “A. Lincoln, 16th president”), often linking a passage to others in the journal or elsewhere in Thoreau’s work. I’m in the minority who, if forced to choose, would read the journal over Walden and certainly over A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, though I love both. I like the wildness of the journal, Thoreau’s unrelenting experimentation with ideas and language, his deployment of the vernacular – a proto-blog, if you will.

My loyalty is to Thoreau the writer, and writing (with its partner. reading) is among the themes he revisits regularly for 25 years. Here are some selections on the subject from Cramer’s edition, starting with this from Sept. 2, 1851:

“We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.”

That passage always energizes me and focuses my attention – “that our speech may be vascular.” It reminds me of Thoreau’s great contemporary, Whitman, but also of Les Murray, the Australian poet I’ve been reading of late. To read Thoreau as a cool customer, a repressed bachelor, is to seriously misunderstand him. Like Murray, he writes, at his best, with his entire being, mind, body and spirit. Take this, from Nov. 1, 1851:

“First of all a man must see, before he can say. Statements are made but partially. Things are said with reference to certain conventions or existing institutions, not absolutely. A fact truly and absolutely stated is taken out of the region of common sense and acquires a mythology or universal significance. Say it and have done with it. Express it without expressing yourself.”

And this, from Feb. 10, 1852 (156 years ago Sunday):

“Write while the heat is in you. When the farmer burns a hole in his yoke, he carries the hot iron quickly from the fire to the wood, for every moment it is less effectual to penetrate (pierce) it. It must be used instantly, or it is useless. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”

Taken literally, this is wrong-headed. The heat of the moment too often burns away the capacity for critical judgment. But again, I like Thoreau’s physical metaphors for writing. And here, on March 18, 1861, less than 14 months before his death, he echoes a similar thought of Melville’s:

“You can’t read any genuine history – as that of Herodotus or the Venerable Bede – without perceiving that our interest depends not on the subject but on the man, -- on the manner in which he treats the subject and the importance he gives it. A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of other, but a genius – a Shakespeare, for instance – would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the world.”

In Chapter CIV of Moby-Dick (1851), Melville wrote: “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”