Yesterday, I likened Henry David Thoreau to John Ruskin, suggesting both were proto-bloggers. Later, I turned to the authoritative Thoreau biography, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, by Robert D. Richardson Jr., and found that the author of Walden was a passionate though not uncritical admirer of Ruskin’s work. He died too soon, however, to read Fors Clavigera, Ruskin’s most blog-like creation. This is Richardson:
“Thoreau’s Ruskin is not the social and economic reformer of the years following 1860; he is the early Ruskin who was inspired by Carlyle and fired by Turner, the Ruskin who combined a strong moral sense, a passion for nature, an eye trained for close observation, an equal capacity to put it into words, and a prophetic earnestness and prose style.”
Much of that description applies equally to Thoreau, of course. For an academic, Richardson’s understanding of Thoreau is remarkably acute. He also writes well, with vigor and precision, and appreciates Thoreau primarily as a writer, not a social misfit or nature mystic:
“He loved language, loved to play with words. He owned a whole shelf of dictionaries, etymological, historical, pronouncing, dictionaries of Americanisms, of provincialisms, and of obsolete words. This zest and his genius for wordplay have reminded readers of James Joyce. Like Joyce, Thoreau labored at the craft of making language by breaking it down and building it up again. His fondness for paradox was carried so far so often it exasperated Emerson, who grumbled about Thoreau’s trick of always using the opposite of the expected word.”
Richardson’s description makes Thoreau sound like a modernist precursor who treated language as building material, the palpable stuff of his creation. His taste for puns, like Joyce’s, is notorious, and a pun is nothing but compressed linguistic matter. His humor, appropriately, is deadpan. His prose, at its best, is among the most pleasurable I know, and Thoreau worked hard to achieve its dazzling effects: “Nothing goes by luck in composition,” he wrote, “it allows of no trick. The best you can write will be the best you are.”
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Patrick,
Any lover of both jazz and Thoreau, such as myself (I can hear Henry now blowing his axe after chopping wood with it, which explains why it was frequently out of tune, on a crisp Concord morning, with Ralphy by his side sawing on the fiddle) will recognize the kinship between, say, a Sonny Rollins comment like, “If it ain’t inside you, it won’t come out your horn,” and Thoreau’s, “The best you can write will be the best you are.”
Yet Thoreau’s mercifully short poem--
“My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it”--
and his comment that composition “allows of no trick” are, of course, but two examples of the trickery, pun, and paradox that Emerson found so exasperating.
“Richardson….makes Thoreau sound like a modernist precursor who treated language as building material, the palpable stuff of his creation,” puts me in mind of a small gem of a book about Thoreau by Stanley Cavell, entitled The Senses of Walden.
Here is Cavell in his chapter on Sentences:
“All and only true building is edifying. All and only edifying actions are fit for human habitation. Otherwise, they do not earn life. If your action, in its field, cannot stand such measurement, it is a sign that the field is not yours. This is the writer’s assurance that his writing is not a substitute for his life, but his way of prosecuting it.”
Sounds remotely like the intersection of books and life.
Cavell speculates that Thoreau intentionally left many unanswered questions and ambiguities about the meaning of much of his writing, as if playing hide-and-seek with the reader. Some examples he gives are:
"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection," compared to
"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection," (emphasis on ‘ode’), or
"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection,” (emphasis on ‘propose’).
"The form of servitude called Negro Slavery," or
"The form of servitude called Negro Slavery," (emphasis on ‘Negro’).
"I would fain say something to you who are said to live in New England," or
"I would fain say something to you who are said to live in New England," (emphasis on ‘live’).
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