`An Irresistible Expedition of the Mind'

The boys and I fly to Seattle on April 19. I’ve never set foot in Washington or its contiguous states and province, and have seen the Pacific Ocean only once, during a visit to San Francisco eight years ago. The only people I know in Seattle are my brother-in-law, his wife and son. I hope to meet some of the region’s serious readers and writers, assuming such exist, especially as I’ve met none in Houston in the last four years. I’m a solitary by nature, rooted in family and work, and accustomed to relying on myself for amusement, but I welcome bookish acquaintances. One of them, Mike Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti, suggested several Seattle area names and passed along this bit of wishful thinking from Thoreau’s journal, dated Feb. 20, 1857:

“I wish that there was in every town, in some place accessible to the traveler, instead [of] or besides the common directories, etc., a list of the worthies of the town, i.e. of those who are worth seeing.”

I laughed out loud. How often, even with the assistance of the Internet, do we ever meet “worthies,” especially given Thoreau’s discerning tastes? True friends, in my experience, are rare and usually encountered through happenstance. One can’t will friendship anymore than one can will, with certainty, health and happiness. Friendship, the way it blossoms, remains a mystery to me.

Most of the rest of Thoreau’s entry that day amounts to gossip and Concord history. Thoreau visits George Minott, a subsistence farmer whom Thoreau elsewhere describes as “perhaps the most poetical farmer.” Minott lives in a house built and previously occupied by Captain Isaac Hoar – hence, the Hoar House. Thoreau says of Minott as a boy: “He was quite a lad and used to climb up on the frame and, with a teaspoon, take the eggs of the house wren out of the mortise holes.” Thoreau, never a model of conventionality, encourages us to conclude that Minott was a Dickensian eccentric, even by the standards of his place and time:

“Minott always sits in the corner behind the door, close to the stove, with commonly the cat by his side, often in his lap. Often he sits with his hat on. He says that Frank Buttrick (who for a great many years worked at carpentering for John Richardson, and was working for him when he died) told him that Richardson called him when he was at the point of death and told him that he need not stop working on account of his death, but he might come in to the prayer if he wished to. R. is spoken of as a strong and resolute man.”

It’s at this point that Thoreau writes the paragraph Gilleland sent me. By the way, it was a descendant of the above-mentioned Captain Isaac Hoar, Elizabeth Hoar (1814-1878), a schoolmate and friend of Thoreau, who said, “One would as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree as Henry’s.” She added, “I love Henry, but I can never like him.” (Thanks go to Walter Harding.)

Typically for Thoreau, the journal entry for Feb. 20, 1857, is a collection of paragraphs unified only by the fact that Thoreau wrote them on the same day. As in an Emerson paragraph, there’s no necessary continuity among the parts. He picks up the Minott family story for another paragraph, mentions Robert Beverley’s description of Virginia fauna in The History and Present State of Virginia (1705), speculates on the relation between the song of a bird and its human auditor, and concludes with this lovely coda, characteristically laced with botanical metaphors:

“What is hope, what is expectation, but a seed-time whose harvest cannot fail, an irresistible expedition of the mind, at length to be victorious?”

As I prepare for my own “expedition of the mind” and body, I assemble a small stack of books to carry in my bags. The rest will be hauled across the continent in a moving van and stowed in a storage unit until we buy a house. I pick carefully, though I’m told the corporate housing we’ll temporarily occupy in Bellevue, Wash., stands across the street from the main branch of the King County Public Library. When packing books for travel, one packs for sustenance. We need pemmican, not petit fours. My Library of America edition of Thoreau’s work is already pulled. So are Montaigne, Hopkins, Basil Bunting, Liebling and Flann O’Brien – a library of sustenance.