Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
contains a lot that I didn’t know about Americans. Thoreau turns out to have been a great illustration of David McCullough’s point about dealing with failure (previous posting):
For all his enjoyment of solitude, Thoreau did not live like a hermit in his cabin [at Walden Pond]. He often went to the village to have meals with his family at his parents’ house or with the Emersons.
During his two years at Walden Pond, Thoreau filled two thick notebooks, one with his experiences in the woods (the notes that would become the first version of Walden) and another containing a draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a book about a boat trip he had taken with his much missed brother some years earlier. When he moved out of his cabin and returned to Concord, he tried and repeatedly failed to find a publisher for A Week. No one was interested in a manuscript that was part nature description, and part memoir. In the end, one publisher agreed to print and distribute it at Thoreau’s own expense. It was a resounding commercial failure. No one wanted to buy the book and many of the reviews were scathing, with one, for example, accusing Thoreau of copying Emerson badly
The enterprise left Thoreau several hundred dollars in debt and with many unsold copies of A Week. He now owned a library of 900 books, he quipped, ‘over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.’
Today Thoreau is one of the most widely read and beloved American writers – during his lifetime, though, his friends and family worried about his lack of ambition. Emerson called him the ‘only man of leisure’ in Concord and one who was ‘insignificant here in town’, while Thoreau’s aunt believed that her nephew should be doing something better ‘than walking off every now and then.
John Muir would have been imprisoned for draft dodging in our time, not wandering around the Sierra Nevada:
As Muir was falling in love with botany in Madison[, Wisconsin], the Civil War ripped the country apart, and in March 1863, almost exactly two years after the first shots had been fired at Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln signed the nation’s first conscription law. Wisconsin alone had to raise 40,000 men, and most students in Madison were talking guns, war and cannons. Shocked by his fellow students’ willingness to ‘murder’, Muir had no intention of participating.
A year later, in March 1864, Muir left Madison and avoided conscription by crossing the border into Canada – his new ‘University of the Wilderness.’
Then, in spring 1866, when a fire destroyed the mill where Muir was working in Meaford on the shore of Lake Huron in Canada, his thoughts turned home. The Civil War had ended the previous summer after five long years of fighting, and Muir was ready to return.
Muir anticipated modern tree-huggers:
Muir lived and breathed nature. One early letter – a love letter to sequoias – was written in ink that Muir had made from their sap, and his scrawl still shines in the red of the sequoia’s sap today. The letterhead stated ‘Squirrelville, Sequoia Co, Nut time’ – and on he goes: ‘The King tree & me have sworn eternal love.
There were no strip malls in Florida back then, but Muir caught malaria on his way to Cuba (travel to which country was not restricted, of course). Regarding the unsuccessful attempt to block the Hetch Hetchy dam from being built within a national park, Muir noted that “Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded.”
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