A Different Stripe

Checking in on Thoreau: arguing about John Brown and finding friends in windfall acorns

Today's excerpts from Henry David Thoreau's Journal are in posthumous dialogue with The New York Times. The first dates from exactly 149 years ago and itself was written around the one-year anniversary of John Brown's execution. As these editorials from earlier in the week show, we haven't finished arguing about the raid on Harper's Ferry. The second excerpt came to mind after reading the Urban Forager's recipe for acorn-flour bread. In these two passages, we see the diversity of subject in Thoreau's daily log, but also how, in each case, he draws from the particular moment (a debate, a discovery) a lesson for about life and its proper conduct.

Dec. 3 [1860]. Talking with Walcott and Staples to-day, they declared that John Brown did wrong. When I said that I thought he was right, they agreed in asserting that he did wrong because he threw his life away, and that no man had a right to undertake anything which he knew would cost him his life. I inquired if Christ did not foresee that he would be crucified if he preached such doctrines as he did, but they both, though as if it was their only escape, asserted that they did not believe that he did. Upon which a third party threw in, "You do not think that he had so much foresight as Brown." Of course, they as good as said that, if Christ had foreseen that he would be crucified, he would have "backed out." Such are the principles and the logic of the mass of men. It is to be remembered that by good deeds or words you encourage yourself, who always have need to witness or hear them.

Oct.8 [1851]. By the side of J.P. Brown’s grain-field I picked up some white oak acorns in the path by the wood-side, which I found to be unexpectedly sweet and palatable, the bitterness being scarcely perceptible. To my taste they are quite as good as chestnuts. No wonder the first men lived on acorns. Such as these are no mean food, such as they are represented to be. Their sweetness is like the sweetness of bread, and to have discovered this palatableness in this neglected nut, the whole world is to me the sweeter for it. To find that acorns are edible,—it is a greater addition to one’s stock of life than would be imagined. I should be at least equally pleased if I were to find that the grass tasted sweet and nutritious. It increases the number of my friends; it diminishes the number of my foes. How easily at this season I could feed myself in the woods!

More excerpts from the Journal:
June 10th, 1857
June 15th, 1852
August 11th, 1858
Oct. 22, 1837

Checking in on Thoreau: The first entry

Oct. 22 [1837].
“What are you doing now?” he* asked. “Do you keep a journal?” So I make my first entry to-day.

So begins Henry David Thoreau's Journal, one of the major projects of the naturalist's career, and one that would eventually comprise nearly one two million words.

The abridged Journal of Henry David Thoreau will be available through www.nyrb.com in early November.

More excerpts from the Journal:
June 10th, 1857
June 15th, 1852
August 11th, 1858

*In his introduction to The Journal, editor Damion Searls remarks, "The 'he' in this first entry is undoubtedly Emerson."

Commonplace: Nicolas Bouvier on insects

 

The Marshal Insect Album via Bibliodyssey

"For a long time I lived without hating anything much. Today, I positively hate flies. Even thinking about them brings tears to my eyes. A life entirely devoted to wiping them out seems to me a great destiny. I mean the flies of Asia; those who have never been out of Europe are no judges of the matter. In Europe flies keep to windows, to sticky liquids, to the shade of corridors. Sometimes they even wander on to a flower. They are no more than shadows of themselves, exorcised – that is to say, innocent. In Asia they are spoilt by the abundance of the dead and the abandon of the living, and they have a sinister insouciance. Tough and relentless, smuts from some horrible material, they are up with the sun and the world is theirs. Once it is daylight, sleep is impossible. At the slightest hint of repose, they take you for a dead horse and attack their favourite morsels: the corners of the lips, around the eyes, the eardrums. You find yourself asleep? They venture forth, get in a panic, and in their inimitable manner buzz up channels of the most sensitive mucus membranes in the nose, at which point you leap to your feet, retching. But if there is a cut, an ulcer or a spot that hasn’t yet healed over, you could perhaps doze off for a bit because they will make a beeline for that, and their tipsy immobility then – replacing their odious agitation – has to be seen to be believed. You can then observe one at leisure: it has no obvious appeal, is not exactly streamlined, and its broken, erratic, absurd flight, designed to get on one’s nerves, is beneath contempt. The mosquito, which one would happily do without, is an artist by comparison."

From The Way of the World
by Nicolas Bouvier

Commonplace: How am I to lose myself once again among the stones of Aran?

"Finding the entrance to the labyrinth is not the simplest of steps, for I find myself separated from it by another labyrinth. I no longer live in Aran; I cannot jump on my bicycle and go and have another look at that harsh grey hillside. My sight-lines and thought-lines to it are interrupted by the thick boggy hills and dazzling waters of Connemara. I am too far for touch, too near for Proustian telescopy. There is also a dense forest of signposts in the way, the huge amount of material I have assembled to help me. Here to my hand are a shelf of books, thirteen piled volumes of diary, boxes bursting with record cards, a filing-cabinet of notes, letters, off prints from specialist journals, maps and newspaper cuttings. Also, three ring-binders of writing accumulated over a dozen years towards this work, some of it outdated, misinformed, unintelligibly sketchy, some so highly polished it will have to be cracked open again in order to fuse with what is still to be written. What tense must I use to comprehend memories, memories of memories of what is forgotten, words that once held memories but are now just words? What period am I to set myself in, acknowledging the changes in the island noted in my brief revisitings over the years, the births and deaths I hear of in telephone calls? In what voice am I to embody the person who wrote that first volume with little thought of publisher or readership during a cryptic, enisled time, I who live nearer the main and have had public definitions attached to me, including some I would like to shake off—environmentalist, cartographer—and whose readers will open this volume looking for more of the same and will be disappointed if they get it? How am I to lose myself once again among the stones of Aran"

from The Stones of Aran: Labyrinth by Tim Robinson

Checking in on Thoreau (ii)

Photograph by Paul-W via Flickr

June 15 1852. Very warm. Now for a thin coat. This melting weather makes a stage in the year. The drouth begins. The dry z-ing of the locust is heard. Bathing cannot be omitted. The conversation of all boys in the streets is whether they will or not or who will go in a-swimming, and how they will not tell their parents. You lie with open windows and hear the sounds in the streets.

How rapidly new flowers unfold! as if Nature would get through her work too soon. One has as much as he can do to observe how flowers successively unfold. It is a flowery revolution, to which but few attend. Hardly too much attention can be bestowed on flowers. We follow, we march after, the highest color; that is our flag, our standard, our “color.” Flowers were made to be seen, not overlooked. Their bright colors imply eyes, spectators.

Checking in on Thoreau

[the first of what may become an ongoing series in which a publishing drudge, working on a new abridgment of the Journals of H.D. Thoreau daydreams about life far away from florescent light glare and ever-whirring air-conditioning fans]

In 2005, the Thoreau Institute kept a chronologic photographic record of some areas of the grounds around their offices. This is the dogwood tree as it appeared on June 10 of that year.

June 10, 1857

In Julius Smith's yard, a striped snake (so called) was running about this forenoon, and in the afternoon it was found to have shed its slough, leaving it halfway out a hole, which probably it used to confine it in. It was about in its new skin. Many creatures—devil's-needles, etc., etc.—cast their sloughs now. Can't I?

Commonplace: From the bathroom wall

 "The Professor was silly enough to think that if doctors had to pass examinations before they could cut out his appendix, then members of parliament ought to pass examinations before they could rule his life."

—T.H. White, Mistress Masham's Repose, p. 155

Photographed in the bathroom of Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where L.J. Davis read to a standing-room-only crowd last night. If you missed it, swing by Book Court on April 14th. Davis will read from A Meaningful Life and then discuss the book with Jonathan Lethem.

L.J. Davis and Jonathan Lethem at Bookcourt in Brooklyn 4/14

Commonplace: The strangest writer, according to Borges

"I have visited some literatures of the East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic anthology of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."

—Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-fictions
via A Journey Round My Skull

Insults from all over

Bakri, who previously had been laughing without saying anything, said, "Tell us, Bint Majzoub, which of your husbands was the best?"
    "Wad Basheer,” said Bint Majzoub promptly.
    “Wad Basheer the dozy dope," said Bakri. "He was so slow a goat could make off with his supper."

—from Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
with an introduction by Laila Lalami
forthcoming April 2009

Commonplace: Henry de Montherlant as maverick

"As Robert B. Johnson puts it in Henry de Montherlant (1968), 'Montherlant is French literature's twentieth century maverick,' and mavericks do not, on the whole, endear themselves to political bigots."

—John Fletcher, "Henry de Montherlant," French Novelists, 1930-1960

Chaos and Night by Henry de Montherlant (with an introduction by Gary Indiana) is forthcoming from NYRB in March 2009.