… Keeping Henry Thoreau Around. ( Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I'm with Levi on this 100 percent. I found the New Yorker article underwhelming and annoying.I mention the canon because I truly sense an effort in this article called Pond Scum to remove Thoreau from our literary pantheon, and I detect a dull and careless complicity with this mission in the immediate reaction on Twitter and elsewhere to Kathryn Schulz's article. A blog post at Bibliomanic includes a screenshot of this tweet by Brent Staples of the New York Times: "Kathryn Schulz burns Henry David Thoreau to the ground. Nothing left but ashes." This tweet has been favorited more than 100 times.Nothing left of Thoreau but ashes? This is supposed to be a good thing? Over my dead body does Henry David Thoreau leave the pantheon — I'll go with him instead if I have to, and I won't be alone.
Ms. Schultz has the merit of having read Thoreau, and of regarding him as an author to be argued with, not a saint to be revered. She is entirely correct, in my view, in saying that there there is something deeply cold in Thoreau's writing. I don't think that Thoreau cheats in Walden, but I think that it is generally misread, that it is not a young man's book, and that young men who think it is have not been paying attention. She ignores some of his merits. But she pays him more respect than some hundreds or thousands of careless admirers do.
ReplyDeleteThoreau may not have tailored himself for the young, but the young see something in him, the way young fell in love with Steppenwolf, a novel about a man undergoing a midlife crisis. Thoreau was 37 when Walden was published, but only 28 when he settled in the cabin by the pond. At 28, one knows youth is well on the wane, birthday no 30 on the horizon. I think Thoreau was someone who did not want to grow up, and everybody has anxieties about it, not least those on the cusp of having to do it.
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