Journal-ism

My favorite blog, strictly speaking, is not a blog at all but selections from the journal of a cranky New England bachelor who died more than 140 years ago. The Blog of Henry David Thoreau is the inspiration of Greg Perry, an indifferent poet but a blogger of genius who daily posts an excerpt from a corresponding date in Thoreau’s 14-volume Journal. Experienced readers know that Thoreau, though he lived most of his life in Concord, Mass., and died at the age of 45, enjoyed an expansive, multiform existence. He was a naturalist, classicist, surveyor, pencil manufacturer, handyman, Transcendentalist, abolitionist, proto-anarchist, poet and, most significantly, writer of great American prose. To his credit, Perry gets around to sampling all of these identities and more. In fact, Thoreau, in his Journal, with its strict attention to the ever-changing details of weather and wildlife, inner and outer life, is one of the two writers I think of proto-bloggers. The other is John Ruskin, especially in his unclassifiable Fors Clavigera.

For months in junior high school, I carried the Signet paperback edition of Walden and “On Civil Disobedience” every day, like a talisman against growing up too responsibly. I underlined and memorized sentences from both works and from his essay “Life Without Principle” – music to the ears of a disaffected 16-year-old usually more attuned to slogans and lyrics, circa 1968, than prose steeped in American orneriness, wordplay and love of paradox:

“The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.”

I listened to Thoreau and his example for a long time, well into my 20s. His picture hung beside Kafka’s in my freshman dorm room. Then, his Transcendentalism wearied me and he came to seem adolescent. Only in the last decade have I returned to Thoreau, reclaiming him on the grounds of his artistry, his unwillingness to compromise and his increasingly informed love of the natural world. Let the late Guy Davenport (a descendent of Thoreau, by way of Ezra Pound) in his essay “The Concord Sonata,” have the last word:

“This text has been written first with a lead pencil (graphite encased in an hexagonal cedar cylinder) invented by Henry David Thoreau. He also invented a way of sounding ponds, a philosophy for being oneself, and raisin bread.”