… you’ll like “Pond Scum,” a New Yorker piece that heaps abuse on Henry David Thoreau, our neighbor here at Hanscom Field.
(Personally I have always liked Thoreau’s travel writing the best, e.g., Cape Cod
5 thoughts on “If you hated having to read Walden in high school…”
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Consider the source. Schulz is a leftist lesbian (I don’t mean this as an insult, just as a factual description). Is there ANY dead (or living) white male that she likes?
One of her chief indictments – that Thoreau viewed the wreck of the St. John with a cold eye, is found in your favorite work, Cape Cod. Cape Cod (and the rest) can be read for free on the web here: http://thoreau.eserver.org/capecd01.html
We’ll see if 150 years from now there’s anyone who even remembers Schulz enough to even bother stomping on her grave.
Thoreau’s supposed callous view of the wreck can be understood in the context of his Transcendentalism. He states that the bodies that he saw lying on the beach were but empty hulks and that their former occupants had ” emigrated to a newer world than ever Columbus dreamed of, yet one of whose existence we believe that there is far more universal and convincing evidence…..toward which we are all tending, and which we shall reach at last…”
The New Republic had what looks like a very good response to Schulz and other Thoreau-haters: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123162/everybody-hates-henry-david-thoreau .
“A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”
The book describes the Thoreau brothers’ river journey on the Concord River from Concord west to Lowell, Massachusetts where it connects with the Merrimack River from Lowell north to Concord, New Hampshire.
I’ve navigated the Merrimack River in the other direction several times – east through Newburyport and out to the Atlantic Ocean.
What Izzie said. Schultz simply doesn’t get it. As a fellow introvert, “Walden” for me is a sanctuary for the mind, a time and place to visit. An experience of ideas that quiets the buzz and dims the glitz of life. I have all his work in hardcover. Thoreau and Robert Frost take me through the long winter nights with lemon tea and honey. “Walden” is not a recipe for life. It’s a muse and rumination on life in 19th century New England. My favorite place and period.
“The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking,”
It would have helped Thoreau if he had understood that his was an understandable
response unnecessarily elevated into a kind of thumbs down on the human condition.
Rotting proteins become slimy and disgusting when carboxyl groups are removed from the amino acids released by protein decay. The resulting amines have names like cadaverine and putrescine. It was a smart development over millions of years to get us to associate these chemicals with disgust if not danger. Dung beetles on the other hand . . .