[July 12th
marks Henry
David Thoreau’s 200th birthday! So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
five texts and contexts for Thoreau, leading up to a weekend post on three ways
we can remember and celebrate this unique and influential American on his 200th.]
On what three of
Thoreau’s social relationships can tell us about the man and his influences.
1)
Edward Hoar: Hoar, who was six years younger
than Thoreau and grew up across the street from him in Concord, is best
remembered as the friend with whom Thoreau
accidentally started a forest fire in April 1844, leading to the
destruction of more than 100 acres of Concord woods (and, some
have argued, leading Thoreau to his Walden project as a kind of penance to
those woods). While that was the pair’s most famous experience with nature, it
was far from their only excursion; Thoreau and Hoar spent a good deal of time
in and around the Concord woods, and upon Thoreau’s untimely death in 1862 he
left Hoar a large number of pressed plants from the area (to add to Hoar’s own
growing collection). Hoar’s daughter would donate that collection to the New
England Botanical Club’s Herbarium in 1912, providing a clear and shared
legacy of Thoreau and Hoar’s friendship and shared love of nature.
2)
(William) Ellery Channing: If the forest fire
offers one possible origin point for the Walden project, another is a statement
attributed (in Thoreau’s journals) to Thoreau’s friend Channing, who in March
1845 is
said to have told Thoreau, “Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and
there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other
alternative, no other hope for you.” Channing,
Thoreau’s age and the nephew of the famous Unitarian minister of the same name
(which led the younger Channing to be known as Ellery), was a budding poet and
member of the Transcendentalists, and many of his poems were published in the group’s journal
The Dial. But he is perhaps best
known as Thoreau’s first biographer, as he published Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist, with Memorial
Verses in 1873, just eleven years after Thoreau’s death. Thoreau and
Channing were among the younger Transcendentalists, but Channing’s biography
reflects the influence that Thoreau had on everyone in the group during his
brief but important life and career.
3)
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Few American
friendships have been studied and analyzed more fully than that between Thoreau
and his Concord friend and Transcendentalist mentor Emerson. Whether or not
Thoreau actually had the
legendary jail cell exchange with Emerson, it certainly embodies a key
distinction between the two men, emphasizing Thoreau’s activism against
Emerson’s philosophical orientation. Emerson also dedicated one of his more
unique pieces of writing to his late friend: the 1862
eulogy essay “Thoreau.” Yet I think Thoreau can also be put in direct
conversation with Emerson’s first published
essay, “Nature,” and particularly with that essay’s opening, title section
(source of the famous “transparent
eyeball” metaphor among other oft-quoted moments). On the one hand, Thoreau’s
Walden project can be seen as a direct enactment of that section’s ideas, such
as: “To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as
from society”; and “In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than
in streets or villages.” But at the same time, I would argue that Emerson’s vision
of Nature remains entirely subjugated to human interests and perspectives (“Nature
always wears the colors of the spirit”), while Thoreau was more able to depart
from himself and see and experience nature on its own terms.
Last Thoreau
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Thoreau responses you’d share?
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