Thoreau at 200

If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that I have been ecstatically excited for months now about a book I'm handling publicity for in my day job at the University of Chicago Press: Laura Dassow Walls's new definitive biography of Henry David Thoreau. I've been a Thoreau reader for years--since the publication of the one-volume edition of his journals by the NYRB Classics line a few years back, he's been an almost daily companion--but Laura's book showed me a depth and complexity, and an aliveness, that I didn't think possible. It's an incredible book. If you don't want to take my word for it, take a look at the roundup of praise I put together for the Press blog last week on Thoreau's bicentennial.("Superb," "compelling," "a great service to American letters," "remarkable," "engaging," "every page feels essential," and so on . . . )

This all sent me back to Walden for the first time since I was 19. I knew from having read Laura's insightful chapter on it that it was a more heterogeneous, more strange book than I recalled or than its general reputation might have it, but I still wasn't prepared: it's nothing like a straightforward account of time in the woods. If it were published today, it would be structured carefully, from his decision to set out on this experiment through the moment he returned home, and its observations would be carefully arranged, themes and larger points drawn through the book in a way to maximize their impact.

Instead, it's a grab-bag of Thoreau's thoughts. It's more like reading his journal than I expected. He opens with the idea of moving to the woods, then immediately veers off into extended thoughts on other related topics. It's about 40 pages before he gets back to the details of his experiment in living--and then almost immediately he veers off again. Like everything he wrote, it is driven by his broad and intense interests, by what's engaging him at a particular moment--and, ultimately and most importantly, by his keenly observing eye. He never merely looked at the world: he looked closely, and thought about the meaning and importance of what he saw.

A century and a half after publication, many of Walden's phrases are familiar, repeated so much that they've become barnacled unto cliche. But if you can even briefly see some of them fresh, their power--both of ideas and of phrasing, is undeniable. I'll leave you with one from late in the book. Try to see it as if you've not known these lines before; see if you feel the thrill I did.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less comples, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Happy summer, folks.

Twilight thoughts, twilight haints

On a recent visit to my parents in the twice-failed utopia of New Harmony, Indiana, I experienced something I'd not seen for a long time, yet not really realized I'd lost: true, nearly unadulterated shimmery blue-dark summer twilight. "As daylight recedes," A. Roger Ekirch writes in At Day's Close: Night in Times Past,

color drains from the landscape. Thickets grow larger and less distinct, blending into mongrel shades of gray. It is eventide when, say the Irish, a man and a bush look alike, or, more ominously, warns an Italian adage, hounds and wolves. The darkness of night appears palpable. Evening does not arrive, it "thickens."

Winter twilight, Thoreau observes, is white; summer's is a "fading world of slate-blue, smoke, and umber," as Peter Davidson calls it in The Last of the Light: About Twilight.

When in that advancing obscurity, it is best to be with those you know, your family and friends--who, visible and audible near you, help you orient yourself and your ancient fears in that neither dark nor light world. Even more so when that is walk through the streets of New Harmony--streets that have seen some of the most unusual history in all of America ("Almost every citizen is aware of New Harmony's strangeness," wrote Marguerite Young in 1945). It's not a place of violent death or dark secrets, but any community with a history of enforced celibacy and religious fervor can't help but generate some residual shivers when the darkness begins to rise and spread from the surrounding fields.

All of that perhaps primed me for my encounter with the following account of a creepy twilight experience related by Harold Owen, brother of the famous war poet Wilfred Owen, in his 1963 memoir, Journey from Obscurity, which Peter Davidson shares in The Last of the Light.

 


Doesn't that have everything one wants in a creepy twilight story? Inexplicable sights and movements, a feeling of another world encroaching inexorably on our own, the recourse to companionship as the only solace. Wonderful.

For all but the most recent era of human history, "daily experience," Davidson writes, "would have included the slow fall of the light, an awareness of the slow process of twilight." We've all but lost what Nabokov (via Davidson) called the "gradual and dual blue" which "At night unites the viewer with the view."

I am a morning person, at my best in the gentle yet vigorous light of the earliest summer hours. But I see the value of twilight, and I can't argue with Thoreau:

For what a man does abroad by night requires and implies more deliberate energy than what he is encouraged to do in the sunshine. He is more spiritual, less animal or vegetable, in the former case.

Hie thee to your campsites and fields and wildest parks sometime this summer, folks. Watch the buzzing dragonflies at dinner give way to the dramatic swirl of the swallows, then the awkward swoop-drop-recovery of the bats, and the sleek stealth of the nighthawk. Watch the light fade, and see what it reveals.

Summer fades

From Edmund Wilson's notebooks of the 1920s:

The first cold blue of autumn and the melancholy of the shore provoking thoughts not only of the end of summer, but of the pressure of time, the wavering of ambition, the disappointments of love--the period of life that approaches its close like the period of the year.

August is usually a betwixt-and-between month for me: summery, yes, but often too hot, tainted by long-distant yet still potent memories of the too-early return of school. It's the month when you start to lament what you've not done in the summer, while still not having any of the consolations of autumn.

This year, however, August was an unexpected glory. It was hot enough here and there to clearly be summer, yet pleasant enough overall to reward porch-sitting and park-walking. It had five full weekends, and we were actually home for all but one of them. Baseball, well played for the dog days, was a soothing backbeat. Hummingbirds visited, the first time.

September's arrival, therefore, is less bittersweet than usual. Summer in Chicago is a fleeting, untrustworthy, regretful thing; this year, somehow, it escaped its own nature. I look to autumn now not with the melancholy of Wilson, but the joy of Thoreau, writing in his journal on October 14, 1857:

Another, the tenth of these memorable days. We have had some fog the last two or three nights, and this forenoon it was slow to disperse, but this afternoon it is warmer even than yesterday. I should like it better if it were not so warm. I am glad to reach the shade of Hubbard's Grove; the coolness is refreshing. It is indeed a golden autumn. These ten days are enough to make the reputation of any climate. A tradition of these days might be handed down to posterity. They deserve a notice in history, in the history of Concord.

May your autumn this year bring similar shimmering pleasure.

Virginia Woolf, naturalist

Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf displays all her many strengths as a biographer: a seemingly insatiable appetite for research, an ability to synthesize huge numbers of disparate and complicated sources, an eye for a telling anecdote (and the ability to tell it, or get out of the way and let her sources tell it), and, most important, a powerful desire to understand. Again and again in this biography Lee offers us different possible Virginia Woolfs, different ways to read or understand particular actions, statements, or decisions. She has opinions, certainly, but while she clearly wants to end up with a coherent portrait, she's nearly as concerned with simply making sure that we understand the limitations of our definite knowledge. A biographer's art is necessarily speculative and interpretive; the better ones remind us of that regularly.

As Lee acknowledges on the first page, Woolf is a daunting figure for a biographer, if for no other reason that that there's been so much written about her, by her friends, family, and acquaintances, initially, and then by scholars in the decades since her death. In addition--and probably most important and most daunting--there are the thousands and thousands of pages of her own writing, particularly the essays, letters, and diaries, in which she presents, analyzes, and refracts her own personality and mind as they change over the years.

At the same time, those thousands of pages are a biographer's dream: they contain so many wonderful nuggets of insight, humor, aphorism, analysis, and character that choosing what to leave out is surely nearly as hard as figuring out what to draw on. Lee makes excellent use of the material, and in doing so she's all but cemented a hitherto vague conviction on my part that I will eventually need to read all of Woolf's writing--not just the novels and the handful of essays I've read and gone back to over the years, but the letters and diaries, too.

What caught my eye today was a small group of diary entries that Lee highlights, from 1917 to 1919, when Woolf took up diary writing again in earnest after a break in the early years of the war. She and Leonard were living in their country house at Asheham, and, as Lee explains,

To start with, as if a great soloist were getting back into shape with simple exercises, she put down brief, exact nature notes, suppressing the "I" of self ("went mushrooming") and becoming merely a mirror, a recorder, of wartime rural life.

Lee draws out a batch of those entries:

Swallows flying in great numbers very low and swift in the field.

The field full of swallows, & leaves broken off in bunches, so that the trees already look thin.

Found the same caterpillar--dark brown with 3 purple spots on either side of the head--that we found last year. We took him home . . . The caterpillar has disappeared. There is a purple smudge on the window sill, which makes it likely that he was crushed.

I waited for him [Leonard] in a barn, where they had cut mangolds which smelt very strong. A hen ate them.

The days melted into each other like snowballs roasting in the sun.

Elsewhere, Woolf refers to the "tragedy" of the smushed caterpillar.

Woolf's notes don't have quite the assurance of a true naturalist like Thoreau--you get the sense that Woolf still feels outside of nature in a way that Thoreau, at his most engaged, seems not to have--but they do share a keenness of eye, and a simplicity of description that lets natural objects be what they are, only later to be turned into ideas or symbols or metaphors. If Woolf's diary of that period is full of jottings like those, I think that volume is where I'll have to start reading.

Thoreau, of course, was also more analytical. Woolf was observing in order to limber up to write; Thoreau wrote to record, analyze, and understand. In his journal for January 22, 1859, he records an encounter with some caterpillars that highlights the difference. He spots some thin lines in the ice on the pond, and initially he thinks they're cracks:

But observing that some of them were peculiarly meandering, returning on themselves loopwise, I looked at them more attentively, and at length I detected at the inner end of one such line a small black speck about a rod from me. Suspecting this to be a caterpillar, I took steps to ascertain if it were, at any rate, a living creature, by discovering if it were in motion. It appeared to me to move, but it was so slowly that I could not be certain until I set up a stick on the shore or referred it to a fixed point on the ice, when I was convinced that it was a caterpillar crawling slowly toward the shore, or rather toward the willows. Following its trail back with my eye, I found that it came pretty directly from the edge of the old or thick white ice (i. e. from where the surface of the flood touched its sloping surface) toward the willows, from northeast to southwest, and had come about three rods. Looking more sharply still, I detected seven or eight such caterpillars within a couple of square rods on this crystallization, each at the end of its trail and headed toward the willows in the exact same direction. And there were the distinct trails of a great many more which had reached the willows or disappeared elsewhere. These trails were particularly distinct when I squatted low and looked over the ice, reflecting more light then. They were generally pretty direct toward the shore, or toward any clump of willows if within four or five rods. I saw one which led to the willows from the old ice some six rods off. Slowly as they crawled, this journey must have been made within a few hours, for undoubtedly this ice was formed since midnight. Many of the lines were very meandering, like this: --



and apparently began and ended with the thin ice. There was not enough ice to support even a caterpillar within three or four feet of the shore, for the water was still rapidly rising and not now freezing, and I noticed no caterpillars on the ice within several feet, but with a long stick I obtained quite a number.

Thoreau--after drawing those very Tristram Shandy-like squiggles--goes on to delineate the three types of caterpillar he gathered, note that they "All curled up when I rescued them," and then to speculate on how they got trapped on the pond in the first place. The thoughts lead him to a mini-rhapsody:

Undespairing caterpillars, determined to reach the shore! What risks they run who go to sleep for the winter in our river meadows!

Virginia Woolf may demonstrate and unexpected openness to nature; Hermione Lee may be a wonderfully perceptive biographer of powerfully intelligent writers. But if a biographer of the caterpillar is ever needed, I think Thoreau's your guy.

Feeling the bite of winter's bone

{Photos by rocketlass.}

It is currently -2 degrees Fahrenheit in Chicago. Out in the 14 mph wind, it feels like -22.

At times like these, I always find myself thinking of Thoreau. Has anyone ever reveled in the cold like he does in his journals? His entry for January 7, 1856 is fairly matter-of-fact in its treatment of the cold:

At breakfast time the thermometer stood at -12 degrees. Earlier it was probably much lower. Smith's was at -24 early this morning. The latches are white with frost at noon. They say there was yet more snow at Boston, two feet even.

Straightforward, but that detail about the latches just chills you to the bone, doesn't it?

Things were milder by the 10th:

The weather has considerably moderated; -2 degrees at breakfast time, but this has been the coldest night probably. You lie with your feet or legs curled up, waiting for morning, the sheets shining with frost about your mouth. Water left by the stove is frozen thickly, and what you sprinkle in bathing falls on the floor ice. The house plants are all frozen and soon droop and turn black. I look out on the roof of a cottage covered a foot deep with snow, wondering how the poor children in its garret, with their few rags, contrive to keep their toes warm. I mark the white smoke from its chimney, whose contracted wreaths are soon dissipated in this stinging air, and think of the size of their wood-pile, and again I try to realize how they panted for a breath of cool air those sultry nights last summer. Realize it now if you can. Recall the hum of the mosquito.

What strikes you in that passage is its simple noticing: shivering, Thoreau nonetheless attends to detail.

I've never had to live with indoor cold quite like what he's describing, but his description of frost-rimed sheets does raise a chilly memory from late December 1996, as London endured what we were told at the time was its coldest stretch in history. (Let's be clear that it wasn't that cold, folks: Blitz aside, you Londoners are wimps.) The pipes supplying the semi-squalid travelers' house in Neasden where I was renting a room froze and broke, soaking the epidemiological minefield that was the living room carpet and knocking out the power--and heat. A flame-spitting hallway Salamander was better than what kings could have expected in medieval times, but the air upstairs was nonetheless bounteous in cold. It felt like nothing so much as walking through physical curtains of cold, or a host of ghostly presences, each caressing your face with a searingly lifeless finger. And when you got into bed, fully dressed, you could never quite shake the feeling that the sheets were icily damp.



Tomorrow, as I walk the mile to the L, I'll try to keep in mind Thoreau's enthusiasm, from later in that day's entry:

I love to wade and flounder through the swamp now, these bitter cold days when the snow lies deep on the ground, and I need travel but little way from the town to get to a Nova Zembla solitude.

Like Thoreau, I love my solitude, but I'll confess to preferring the version I have right now: sitting in my warm, if drafty library, blankets and lap cats close to hand.



Bundle up, folks.

Best of . . . well, not of the year. Or even anything beyond a narrow slice of publishing. But oh, what a great slice!

I drew up a brief list of the books I most enjoyed reading this year for Proustitute's blog that will appear laster this week. I'll tweet and post a link to it when it shows up (though until then, you could do worse than trawling through the other lists he's gathered--I've already found some promising new books that way).

Rather than rehash that list, I'll do something different here. There's no secret that my favorite publisher--other, that is, than the one that pays my salary--is New York Review of Books Classics. They take up more than half a bookcase in my library. Those shelves contain nearly as many unread books--stored away against a rainy day--as favorites, and nothing that's not at least of interest.

But which are my favorites? Which do I return to again and again? Which recommend most often? It's not an easy choice--easier than picking my favorite of our three cats, but not wildly so. Still, five it is, so here they are (with apologies to Alvaro Mutis, Rebecca West, William Dean Howells, Thomas Browne, Richard Hughes, Elizabeth Taylor, Elaine Dundy, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Felix Feneon, Raymond Kennedy, John Williams, Edith Wharton, and so many others who could have made this list).

J. F. Powers/The Stories of J. F. Powers

Powers could easily be on this list for any of the three books NYRB Classics publishes. His novels Morte D'Urban and Wheat That Springeth Green, especially the former, are masterpieces of thoughtful comedy, their satire pointed and effective while not carrying anything like the scorched-earth quality so often found in that form. Powers shows us human frailty, but nonetheless leaves us with belief--belief, if not always or necessarily in the god the priests he writes about purportedly serve, then at least in the value of acts of human kindness and morality.

I selected the short stories rather than the novels for the simple reason that the collection includes my two favorite pieces of Powers's writing: "A Losing Game," which may be the funniest story I've ever read (I have tried many times to read the first pages aloud to friends, and I've never gotten through it without dissolving into laughter), and, even more remarkable, its sequel, "The Presence of Grace," which within a few short pages transforms a priest whom we've seen as a figure of fun into, for one shimmering moment, an agent of grace.

Daphne Du Maurier/Don't Look Now

I first encountered Du Maurier as a child, when Robert Arthur included "The Birds" in one of the many Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthologies of suspense stories for children that he edited. I read and re-read that story, year after year, to the point where even today I know many sentences by heart--which I realized a few years back as I listened to an old radio adaptation and found myself speaking along with it.

I wrote about "The Birds" a few years ago, and what I said about why the story affected me so deeply as a kid remains true:

Death in "The Birds," whether avian or human, is concrete and horrible. It takes something beautiful and right--a living, moving, even graceful creature--and it replaces it with a broken thing, a perversion, an object of horror. It is irreversible, and, as the tension mounts, page by page, it seems increasingly inevitable. To a child, that knowledge is as chilling as anything. I read the story again and again, knowing the bleak ending would never change.

And that's only one story! Du Maurier was a master of the tightly turning suspense story, and this collection is full of them. A few are relatively slight, but they're never less than surprising, and the best of them are genuinely creepy and strange. "The Birds" may be unshakable because of childhood, but the one that I think will stay with me as an adult is "Monte Verità," a novella-length tale of interwar rootlessness, hopeless love, and the slow erasure of the hidden places of the earth. It's a daring story with a mystical tinge, and you turn its last page feeling as if you've been returned from somewhere very far away--possibly against your will.

Robert Burton/The Anatomy of Melancholy

I came to this book through Anthony Powell, who makes his fictional stand-in in A Dance to the Music of Time, a fan (and eventual biographer) of Burton. Powell admires the sheer surfeit of the Anatomy's 1,200-plus pages, its cascade of endless sentences and quotations and interpolations, the sense it gives of an attempt--under the guise of delineating and explicating melancholy--to take in all of the drivers and hidden currents of human life.

I'll admit to not having read nearly all of the Anatomy, but that doesn't keep me from wholeheartedly endorsing it in this list: it's not a book to read all of, but one to keep at your side for occasional investigation, serious or otherwise. For example, after hearing Melvyn Bragg devote an episode of his BBC radio program In Our Time to the book, I looked (with the help of Google Books) for "news" and found a passage that, if we imagine it beaten into submission with the AP Stylebook, could describe our media environment today:

Be content; 'tis but a nine dayes wonder; and as one sorrow drives out another, one passion another, one cloud another, one rumour is expelled by another; every day almost, come new news unto our ears, as how the sun was eclipsed, meteors seen i'th' aire, monsters born, prodigies, how the Turks were overthrown in Persia, an earth-quake in Helvetia, Calabria, Japan, or China, an inundation in Holland, a great plague in Constantinople, a fire at Prage, a dearth in Germany, such a man is made a lord, a bishop, another hanged, deposed, prest to death, for some murder, treason, rape, theft, oppression; all which we do hear at first with a kind of admiration, detestation, consternation; but by and by they are buried in silence: thy father's dead, thy brother rob'd, wife runs mad, neighbour hath kild himselfe; 'tis heavy, gastly, fearful newes at first, in every mans mouth, table talk; but, after a while, who speaks or thinks of it? It will be so with thee and thine offence: it will be forgotten in an instant, be it theft, rape, sodomy, murder, incest, treason, &c. thou art not the first offender, nor shalt thou be the last; 'tis no wonder; every houre such malefactors are called in question: nothing so common,

Even better, however, is to use the book like the ancients used to use Virgil, as I did with my Thanksgiving post. The sortes Burtonae rarely will divulge anything like comprehensible prophecy, but it is almost guaranteed to offer some previously unnoted gem. Let's give it a try:

We watch a sorrowful person, lest he abuse his solitariness, and so should we do a melancholy man; set him about some business, exercise, or recreation, which may divert his thoughts, and still keep him otherwise intent; for his phantasy is so restless, operative and quick, that if it be not in perpetual action, ever employed, it will work upon itself, melancholize, and be carried away instantly, with some fear, jealousy, discontent, suspicion, some vain conceit or other.

May the melancholy man be always accompanied by Burton.

J. L. Carr/A Month in the Country

This slim novel is the most haunting, and maybe the most moving, of all the NYRB Classics I've read. A young man returns from World War I and takes a job restoring a medieval mural in a country church. He sleeps out in the bell tower, surrounded by quiet--Carr makes us feel the comforting warmth of the English summer--as each day he scrapes away just a bit more of the covering to reveal the anonymous painter's hellish vision of the apocalypse.

It's a novel about loss, and, obliquely, about war. About returning a different person to a place become different itself, and thus being rootless. About that feeling of being between--of watching days peel off the calendar pleasurably, but darkened by the endpoint you know is nearing. It's about craft, and work, and solitude, and the power of all three to transport and transform us, about what a job done well can do for the doer. And it's about the risks we court when we open our hearts, especially--as with Carr's protagonist--when we've just come from a situation that demanded we close them.

A Month in the Country is a book I return to reliably every few years. I'm rewarded each time, and I don't see that changing in the decades to come.

(Actually, this book would be worth buying solely for Michael Holroyd's introduction, which includes a bizarre, Carr-related story of a literary prize that bestows meat on its winners.)

Henry David Thoreau/The Journal, 1837-1861

This final book, like Burton's, is more one for dipping into than for reading straight through. It's not been far out of my reach at any time since it was published. Through these journals Thoreau emerges, to my mind, as more interesting, more companionable, less irritating (for, let's be honest, he can be irritating) than anywhere else. He goes about in nature, and we walk alongside, day by month by year.

Whereas Burton is best enjoyed through the index or randomness, Thoreau's journal is perhaps most fun as a regular companion, a way to peer through the years to see what this specific day, long past, was like. As I write this, Christmas approaches--and on that day in 1856 a thirty-nine-year-old Thoreau offers advice from experience

Take long walks in stormy weather, or through deeps snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

Though I will admit to having no intention of following Thoreau's advice--a seat by the Christmas tree with my family and cups of tea beckon instead--I find it bracing nonetheless. Day after day after day, he's there with you; you'll never regret it if you decide to join him on his daily wanderings.

Happy holidays, folks. Here's to another year of great reading (and perhaps even more reliable blogging? I can hope . . . )

One of the drawers in Donald Westlake's filing cabinet was labeled "Are you still here?" Which, I trust, is where, were he still with us, he would right now be filing 2013.

From Henry David Thoreau's journals, the entry for December 31, 1851:

Ah, beautiful is decay!

Or, as Timothy Hallinan in his crime novel Crashed put it,

Hope, the slut, always springs eternal.

Happy New Year, folks--and the gods bless Damion Searls for bringing us the NYRB Classics edition of Thoreau's journals, which are guaranteed to while away many a future day.

Thanksgiving with Twain and Thoreau

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In his autobiography, Mark Twain--in one of the rambling asides that, taken together are the autobiography--writes briefly of Thanksgiving:

The original reason for a Thanksgiving Day has long ago ceased to exist--the Indians have long ago been comprehensively and satisfactorily exterminated and the account closed with Heaven, with the thanks due. But from old habit, Thanksgiving day has remained with us, and every year the President of the United States and the governors of all the several states and the territories set themselves the task, every November, to advertise for something to be thankful for, and then they put those thanks into a few crisp and reverent phrases, in the form of a Proclamation, and this is read from all the pulpits in the land, the national conscience is wiped clean with one swipe, and sin is resumed at the old stand.

Twain can always be counted on to prick self-regard, be it national or personal. But even a pricked Thanksgiving can be a source of joy: even family sans illusions remains family, and seeing them a pleasure. The holiday falling late this year, you might, if you remember, follow your meal, and football, and shopping, with a toast on Saturday to Twain himself, who, had he the physical immortality to match his literary life, would be turning 178.

Thoreau is another to turn to as Thanksgiving approaches; for all his grumbling and unsociability, gratitude was an emotion he understood. On December 12, 1851, the thirty-four-year-old Thoreau wrote in his journal,

Ah, dear nature, the deep remembrance, after a short forgetfulness, of the pine woods! I come to it as a hungry man to a crust of bread.

I have been surveying for twenty or thirty days, living coarsely even as respects my diet,--for I find that will always alter to suit my employment,--indeed, leading a quite trivial life; and tonight, for the first time, had made a fire in my chamber and endeavored to return to myself. I wished for leisure and quiet to let my life flow in its proper channels, with its proper currents; when I might not waste the days, might establish daily prayer and thanksgiving in my family; might do my own work and not the work of Concorde and Carlisle, which would yield me better than money.

(How much forbearance, ay, sacrifice and loss, goes to every accomplishment! I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost a man learns to speak simply at last.)

For those on the East Coast, facing a storm that dealt Chicago but a glancing (if frigid) blow, a more prosaic entry may be in order, like this one from November 24, 1857:

Cold Thanksgiving weather again, the pools freezing.

Freezing it may be, overblown and self-regarding it may be, contemplative and restorative it may never wholly be--but ever since 1996, when I spent my one and only Thanksgiving out of the country, and thereby fully realized for the first time how much I appreciated the simple pleasures it offers of family and food, I've been a devotee, if not an evangelist. Have a good Thanksgiving, folks. May your family be well, and your life flow in its proper channels.

Christmas Eve

Reading Steerforth over at The Age of Uncertainty on the unpleasures of bookselling as the holiday sand drips through the hourglass of advent is sufficient to remind me to be grateful that I'm not working today, my days of shooing customers out the door just as the reindeer are touching down long over.

But before I turn out the lights on this little shop for the holidays, I've got a couple of modest gifts to distribute. First, this account of holiday skulduggery, from Anthony Powell's journal for Christmas Eve of 1987:

My tenant Adrian Andrews recently reported theft of a black ewe (only one in his flock), saying sheep-lifting by no means uncommon in this neighborhood. Today he arrived on doorstep (having grown beard so that I did not recognize him). . . . I remarked the black ewe had reappeared. He said police found her dumped in garden over Cranmore way. Like living in Wild West.

I don't think rocketlass and I are likely to get up to any sheep-lifting over Christmas, but if we do, we'll surely have the sense to stick to the white sheep, rendering our crime less likely to be detected. Good god, have these crooks never read any Holmes?

The party Dawn Powell (no relation to Anthony) attended on Christmas Day, 1932, and recorded in her journal may have been more civilized than sheep-lifting, but it was perhaps in some ways just as unbuttoned:

To a party at Cheryl's. Decided to do a rowdy modernist version of Aristophanes' "The Knights," which Cheryl was eager about--have hecklers, stooges, big placards through the house, "The Theater is Propaganda" across the curtain. Have the senate in back of house, sausages rushed through audience, passed-out Cleon and Sausage-Seller have fight of swear words across audience. Dress in stylized Greek costume, shirts, etc Have scenes described in play actually take place either by marionettes or by movies, have music, have people sell things between acts like a burlesque show.

As entertaining as that sounds, knowing my temperament I'd more often than not instead plump for a day like Thoreau's Christmas eve of 1856:

To Walden and Baker Farm with Ricketson, it still snowing a little.

It was very pleasant walking thus before the storm was over, in the soft, subdued light.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Enjoy the "soft, subdued light" of the ebbing of the year.

"Each season is but an infinitesimal point," or, Reading Thoreau for my birthday

The briefest of posts today, for it's my birthday and I mean to do little but play the piano and read while watching the sparrows squabble with the squirrels over windowsill seeds. As usual on my birthday since NYRB Classics published Damion Searls's magnificent edition of Thoreau's Journals, I've turned to that book to keep me company today--a day that resembles one in June of 1857 that Thoreau described as a "mizzling and rainy day . . . a drizzling rain, or 'drisk,' as one called it."

I particularly like the entry for June 6 of that year, when Thoreau was just a couple of years older than I am. In it he expresses what I've always loved most about June, and about having a birthday that opens the month: it's a time of beginnings, the time when, most years, summer finally starts to feel truly imminent.

This is June, the month of grass and leaves. The deciduous trees are investing the evergreens and revealing how dark they are. Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late. Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature.

And with that, back to books and birds. Enjoy the weekend, folks.

"It takes an effort of the imagination to conjure up a rose," or, In the bleak midwinter

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Pleasantly housebound by the third-largest snowfall in Chicago history, I turn for today's post to some old favorites, all reliably sound on the subject of snow.

First, there's E. B. White, whose thoughts on snow have already graced my Tumblr and Twitter feeds today. A pleasantly rambling New Yorker essay from 1971, "The Winter of the Great Snows," offers plenty of thoughts on the stuff, so much a part of White's Maine winters. "When snow accumulates," writes White,

week after week, month after month, it works curious miracles. Familiar objects simply disappear, like my pig house and the welltop near the barn door, and one tends to forget that they are there. Our cedar hedge (about five feet high) disappeared months ago, along with the pink snow fences that are set to hold the drifts. My two small guard dogs, Jones and Susy, enjoy the change in elevation and the excitement of patrol duty along the crusted top of the hedge, where they had never been before. They have lookout posts made of snow that the plow has thrown high in the air, giving them a chance to take the long view of things.

A chance, at least when considered metaphorically, that I doubt they took--unless perhaps the secret of dogs' good natured satisfaction is a quiet far-sightedness? No, scratch that thought: the dog I saw romping in front of our building moments ago was unquestionably living only in, for, and of the present moment.



White comments on a phenomenon that rocketlass and I got to see firsthand this afternoon when we finally ventured out: the plight of those in the path of the plow. Writes White:

Every new swipe of the plow hurls a gift of snow into the mouth of a driveway, so that, in effect, the plowmen, often working while we sleep snug in our beds, create a magnificent, smooth, broad highway to which no one can gain access with his automobile until he has passed a private miracle of snow removal. It is tantalizing to see a fine stretch of well-plowed public road just the other side of a six-foot barricade of private snow. My scheme for town plowing would be to have each big plow attended by a small plow, as a big fish is sometimes attended by a small fish. There would be a pause at each driveway while the little plow removes the snow that the big plow has deposited. But I am just a dreamer.

The grade-school philosopher in me sees a risk of infinite regression, of ever-smaller plows followed by ever-smaller plows ad infinitum, but I suppose that, come February, a driveway owner in rural Maine would likely be willing to take that chance.

White's essay reminds me of a some moments from Nicholson Baker's wonderfully contemplative little book A Box of Matches (2003), such as this passage, in which his similarities to White are fully on display:

[L]ast month we had that very unusual snowfall that ticked against the window all night. It was an unusual snow, almost like Styrofoam in its consistency in some of the deep places, and when you dug in it, the light that it let through was an interesting sapphire blue--perhaps different prevailing temperatures during snowflake-growth result in a different shape of crystal, which absorbs and allows passage to different wavelengths of light. That Saturday Henry and I dug a tunnel through the snowplow pile. The duck became interested in our project--companionably she climbed to the top, beaking around in it for bits of frozen mud. When both of her feet got cold at the same time she sat down in the snow for a while to warm them. Once or twice she levitated, flapping hard. She didn't much want to walk through the tunnel, and we didn't make her.

Baker also reminds me of Thoreau in that passage, his ever-attentive eye trained on minute details of the snow, as his mind ticks away in the background trying to understand their whys and wherefores.



Thoreau himself, not unexpectedly, is good on snow: his Journals offer entry after wintry entry filled with descriptions of and inquiries about snowfall. In honor of today's Chicago, where last night's thundersnow has drifted in places higher than a man's head, I'll choose the entry of January 13, 1852:

Would not snow-drifts be a good study,--their philosophy and poetry? Are they not worthy of a chapter? Are they always built up, or not rather carved out of the heaps of snow by the wind passing through the chinks in the walls? I do not see yet but that they are builded. They are a sort of ripple-marks which the atmospheric sea makes on the snow-covered bottom.

Snow has fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, but from our cozy home here beneath the atmospheric sea the midwinter is far from bleak. Books and cats and tea, and snow as far as the eye can see--how can we complain?

Thoreau's late November

As Thanksgiving approached last week, I spent a bit of time thumbing throughthe NYRB Classics edition of Thoreau's Journal, which Damion Searls edited last year. I was looking, lazily, for a mention of Thanksgiving, but--as is so often the case with this endlessly rewarding book--I got distracted.

First, I got caught up in a trip to New York, on November 22, 1854:

Left at 7:30 A.M. for New York. Went to Crystal Palace, admired the houses on Fifth Avenue. . . . Greeley carried me to the new opera-house, where I heard Grisi and her troupe. First, at Barnum's Museum, I saw the camelopards, said to be one eighteen the other sixteen feet high. I should say the highest stood about fifteen feet at most (twelve or thirteen ordinarily). The body was only about five feet long. Why has it horns, but for ornament? Looked through his diorama, and found the houses all over the world much alike.

I love the range of that entry: has anyone--even those of us who know Thoreau to be more complicated than the caricature of the woodsy hermit--ever imagined him actively admiring the houses of Fifth Avenue? Yet how quickly, at Barnum's Museum, he's the familiar Thoreau again, instinctively analyzing and questioning the fauna on display, while seeing to little differentiate the human habitations on offer.

Then I got pulled in by the entry for November 19, 1853, which brought to mind recent, weather-prompted thoughts of my own:

What is the peculiarity of the Indian summer? From the 14th to the 21st October inclusive, this year, was perfect Indian summer; and this day the next? Methinks that any particularly pleasant and warmer weather after the middle of October is thus called. Has it not fine, calm, spring days answering to it?

Then, traveling backwards in Thoreau's time and forwards, weather-wise, in my own, I ended up at this entry, from November 25, 1851:

That kind of sunset which I witnessed on Saturday and Sunday is perhaps peculiar to the late autumn. The sun is unseen behind a hill. Only this bright white light like a fire falls on the trembling needles of the pine.

One of the side benefits of my regular running routine is that, as the days draw in with the autumn, it makes me attend to the daily changes in the early evening light. Two weeks ago, the light along the lakefront after work was breathtakingly golden, playing along the lingering leaves with all the warmth of a Maxfield Parrish painting; now the leaves are gone, and the best we can hope for, on a clear day, is the sunset Thoreau describes, attenuated and sickly, but enough--just enough, because it has to be--to hold on to until the thaw.

Celebrating birthdays with Thoreau

Having recently celebrated my thirty-sixth birthday, I turned--as I have so often done in the months since I bought the book--to Thoreau's Journal to see what he was up to on his thirty-sixth birthday, July 12, 1853. He takes no notice of his birthday in the pages of the journal, and it seems he spent the day, in typically quiet fashion, paying attention to the woodland plants:

White vervain. Checkerberry, maybe some days. Spikenard, not quite yet. The green-flowered lanceolate-leafed orchis at Azalea Brook will soon flower. Wood horse-tail very large and handsome there.

Birthdays have been spent in far worse ways, and I find Thoreau's approach to birthdays congenial. A birthday seems best spent doing what one always chooses to do when free of obligation; in my case, that involves a stack of books and a pitcher of iced tea on the back porch, with perhaps a martini to welcome the dusk. My version of paying attention to the woodland plants.

Thoreau's forty-third birthday offers a bit more idiosyncrasy, in the form of some advice for hikers:

The best way to drink, especially in a shallow stream, or one so sunken below the surface as to be difficult to reach, is through a tube. You can commonly find growing near a spring a hollow reed or weed of some kind suitable for this purpose, such as rue or touch-me-not, or water saxifrage, or you can carry one in your pocket.

In Chicagoland, that advice takes on added poignancy this week, which has seen the local water authorities balk at the EPA's efforts to make it work to return the Chicago River to something more closely resembling water.

Speaking of rivers: in a wonderful interview with Christopher Lydon on Radio Open Source, Damion Searls, the editor of the new edition of Thoreau's Journal that has so entranced me these past months, offered a memorable passage from the entry for May 17, 1854 whose closing could serve, in a pinch, as a distillation of Thoreau's approach to the world:

Observed a rill emptying in above the stone-heaps, and afterward saw where it ran out of the June-berry Meadow, and I considered how surely it would have conducted me to the meadow, if I had traced it up. I was impressed as it were by the intelligence of the brook, which for ages in the wildest regions, before science is born, knows so well the level of the ground and through whatever woods or other obstacles finds its way. Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship around the globe? The globe is the richer for the variety of its inhabitants.

Even better, in typical fashion, Thoreau immediately shifts from that well-turned phrase and flight of fancy to the particular, taking note of a humble squirrel:

Saw a large gray squirrel near the split rock in the Assabet. He went skipping up the limb of one tree and down the limb of another, his great gray rudder undulating through the air, and occasionally hid himself behind the main stem.

Oh, living things, hide not from Thoreau! It is pointless, for he will seek you out; it is pointless, for he is your dearest friend.

Lovecraft and loving New England

{Photo of the Giambi Zombie by rocketlass.}

One of the reasons I started this blog was so that I would be less inclined to read aloud, an activity which is only barely acceptable even in the presence of the most carefully chosen audience. Fortunately, that need not stop rocketlass, who launched me on tonight's post by reading aloud to me the following passage, which opens H. P. Lovecraft's "The Picture in the House" (1920):

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

A sentiment with which Hawthorne, our great chronicler of New England's secret desires and corruptions, would surely agree.

The Lovecraft passage also reminds me of a page from Thoreau's journals (the new edition of which, edited by Damion Searls, should be on every bedside table as we ease into summer). On October 29, 1857, Thoreau, then forty years old, wrote:

There are some things of which I cannot at once tell whether I have dreamed them or they are real; as if.they were just, perchance, establishing, or else losing, a real basis in my world. This is especially the case in the early morning hours, when there is a gradual transition from dreams to waking thoughts, from illusions to actualities, as from darkness, or perchance moon and star light, to sunlight. Dreams are real, as is the light of the stars and moon, and theirs is said to be a dreamy light. Such early morning thoughts as I speak of occupy a debatable ground between dreams and waking thoughts. They are a sort of permanent dream in my mind. At least, until we have for some time changed our position from prostrate to erect, and commenced or faced some of the duties of the day, we cannot tell what we have dreamed from what we have actually experienced.

This morning, for instance, for the twentieth time at least, I thought of that mountain in the easterly part of our town (where no high hill actually is) which once or twice I had ascended, and often allowed my thoughts alone to climb. I now contemplate it in my mind as a familiar thought which I have surely had for many years from time to time, but whether anything could have reminded me of it in the middle of yesterday, whether I ever before remembered it in broad daylight, I doubt. I can now eke out the vision I had of it this morning with my old and yesterday forgotten dreams.

My way up used to lie through a dark and unfrequented wood at its base,—I cannot now tell exactly, it was so long ago, under what circumstances I first ascended, only that I shuddered as I went along (I have an indistinct remembrance of having been out overnight alone),—and then I steadily ascended along a rocky ridge half clad with stinted trees, where wild beasts haunted, till I lost myself quite in the upper air and clouds, seeming to pass an imaginary line which separates a hill, mere earth heaped up, from a mountain, into a superterranean grandeur and sublimity. What distinguishes that summit above the earthy line, is that it is unhandselled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know no path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. That rocky, misty summit, secreted in the clouds, was far more thrillingly awful and sublime than the crater of a volcano spouting fire.

I'm surely not alone in having fallen for the New England of Hawthorne, Lovecraft, Thoreau, and Emerson, feeling it as home--ancient and corrupt as it might be--despite never having lived there?

"All that is required in studying them is patience," or, On youthful enthusiasm

We had an old college friend in town this weekend, which made me take particular note of two descriptions of college life that I encountered in my reading the past few days. First, there's the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Peter De Vries' Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (1983), who, fearing that his bad study habits are about to prevent him from reaching high school, offers a prematurely wistful riff on what he'll therefore ultimately miss by not going to college:

Lights blooming at dusk along the Quad. Girls with convertibles. The glee club singing "Brown October Ale." Swallowed oysters retracted on the end of a string by potential fraternity brothers. Limburger set by wits on dormitory radiators.

Then I came across a reminder--not dissimilar to what one gets from accounts of Lord Rochester's "growing debauched" as a twelve-year-old at Oxford in the seventeenth century--that even De Vries' midcentury vision of gentle college prankery is a step up from earlier days, as displayed in this description by Robert D. Richardson of early nineteenth-century Harvard:

The three Rs at Harvard during Thoreau's time were rote learning, regimentation, and rowdyism. Boys commonly entered college at fifteen, sometimes younger. Dress, hours, and attendance were all prescribed. Meals were in commons, and the food was said--as all college food is always said--to have been dreadful. Breakfast consisted of hot coffee, hot rolls, and butter. Supper was tea, cold rolls "of the consistency of wool," and no butter. The midday meal was the only one that was plentiful, and students sometimes affixed a piece of the noon meat to the underside of the table, with a fork, in order to have meat for supper. . . The habits of the students were rough; throwing food at meals was nothing compared to the habitual destruction of property, which was not confined to breaking up furniture. Public rooms in inhabited buildings were blown up with gunpowder "every year," according to some accounts. . . . Many [dorm] rooms had a cannonball, useful when hot as a foot warmer, when cold to roll down the stairs in the middle of the night.

Our college lives were . . . um, a bit different from both those accounts, not even really partaking in the contemporary versions of those ignoble pastimes. Nary a keg stand have I done.

Instead, my college days were marked, at their best, by a realization that sprung pleasantly upon me in my first days as a student, as I was starting to discern potential friends in the mass of my contemporaries: here, and here, and here again, were people who were openly enthusiastic! These people, the ones to whom I found myself drawn (and with many of whom I am still close eighteen years later), were excited about things--art, books, movies, sports, ideas--and weren't the slightest bit ashamed to reveal that excitement. Coming hard on the heels of high school, with itsde riguer poses of disenchantment and disdain, that fervor was tonic. Its unabashedly nerdy charms carried me through my English degree, and they continue to underlie nearly everything I do today, from my writing here and other places to my baseball fandom to my fumblings at the piano.

In his biography of Thoreau*, Richardson uses a line from Madame de Stael to describe Thoreau's intellectual eagerness as a young man:

Thought is nothing without enthusiasm.

It's appropriate that Thoreau was one of the people who set me off on this train of thought, for enthusiasm--as seen in his unquenchable thirst for knowledge of the natural world--is one of his most endearing qualities. I'll close this post with a demonstration, from his journal entry for this day, April 18th, 1857:

Frogs are strange creatures. One would describe them as peculiarly wary and timid, another as equally bold and imperturbable. All that is required in studying them is patience. You will sometimes walk a long way along a ditch and hear twenty or more leap in one after another before you, and see where they rippled the water, without getting sight of one of them. You sit down on the brink and wait patiently for his reappearance. After a quarter of an hour or more he is sure to rise to the surface and put out his nose quietly without making a ripple, eying you steadily. At length he becomes as curious about you as you can be about him. He suddenly hops straight toward you, pausing within a foot, and takes a near and leisurely view of you. Perchance you may now scratch its nose with your finger and examine it to your heart's content, for it is become as imperturbable as it was shy before. You conquer them by superior patience and immovableness; not by quickness, but by slowness; not by heat, but by coldness.

To which the wonderful new edition of Thoreau's journals from NYRB Classics appends this note:

A Concord farmer's perspective: "Why one morning I went out in my field across there to the river, and there, beside that little old mud pond, was standing Da-a-vid Henry, and he wasn't doin' nothin' but just standin' there--lookin' at that pond, and when I came back at noon, there he was standin' with his hands behind him just lookin' down into that pond, and after dinner when I come back again if there wasn't Da-a-vid standin' there just like as if he had been there all day, gazin' down into that pond, and I stopped and looked at him and I says, 'Da-a-vid Henry, what air you a'doin'?' And he didn't turn his head and he didn't look at me. He kept on lookin' down at that pond, and he said, as if he was thinkin' about the stars in the heavens, 'Mr. Murray, I'm a-studyin'--the habits--of the bullfrog!' And there that darned fool had been standin'--the livelong day--a-studyin'--the habits--of the bull-frog!" (Quoted in Mrs. Daniel Chester French, Memories of a Sculptor's Wife, 1928)

The outside world may frequently be bemused by such unfettered enthusiasm, but we of the not-so-secret society of nerds and scholars, oh, we understand!

"Whan that Aprille with hise shoures soote . . .", or, Spring is here!

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Last night's spectacular thunderstorm--which offered among its many boisterous attractions a surprise drum-roll of hail--combined with the pleasant chittering of birds outside my window that woke me before dawn this morning has finally convinced me that spring is truly upon us.

It's also put me in the mind of Chaucer, and specifically the prologue to his Canterbury Tales, which offers my favorite evocation of the spring. I quote it here in the Middle English because it's far more fun to read that way--and as a reminder that one of the pleasures of Middle English is that you don't really have to know it to read it. If you barrel through with confidence, you'll be mostly right in your interpretation:

Whan that Aprille with hise shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour,
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye
That slepen al the nyght with open eye,--
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages,--
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

The "smale foweles maken melodye / That slepen al the nyght with open eye" cheer me greatly every time I think of them; as a notoriously light sleeper, I never feel quite so close to the birds I love to watch as when Chaucer describes their restless rest, and the way that the spring reminds them to leaven it with melody.



As for goon on pilgrimages, the best I'll do on that front will be to joyfully bicycle the mile and a half to Wrigley Field on Monday. Until then, I'll make my devotions to the spring by continuing to revel in the journals of Thoreau, who on April 6th of 1856 encountered some not-so-smale foweles:

As I am going along the Corner road by the meadow mouse brook, hear and see, a quarter of a mile northwest, on those conspicuous white oaks near the river in Hubbard's second grove, the crows buffeting some intruder. The crows had betrayed to me some large bird of the hawk kind which they were buffeting. I suspected it before I looked carefully. I saw several crows on the oaks, and also what looked to my naked eye like a cluster of the palest and most withered oak leaves with a black base about as big as a crow. Looking with my glass, I saw that it was a great bird. The crows sat about a rod off, higher up, while another crow was occasionally diving at him, and all were cawing. I am not sure whether it was a white-headed eagle or a fish hawk. It rose and wheeled, flapping several times, till it got under way; then, with its rear to me presenting the least surface, it moved off steadily in its orbit over the woods northwest, with the slightest possible undulation of its wings,--a noble planetary motion, like Saturn with its ring seen edgewise. It is so rare that we see a large body self-sustained in the air. While crows sat still and silent and confessed their lord.

For a week or two now, I expect I'll think of crows, when I see them, as Thoreau's crows, confessing their lord. There are worse ways to enter the spring.

"We have had a good solid winter."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

The lovely 70-plus-degreeness of the day, as unseasonal in its own way as the snow that fell two weeks ago, has reduced my brain to a froth, incapable of putting together a proper post. Instead, I offer some unconnected quotes from recent reading, in hopes of distracting you until such time as my brains have become accustomed to the absence of cold.

1 First, from Jill Lepore's look at the strange history of marriage advice, "Fixed," in the March 29th issue of the New Yorker:

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

That's as succinct and convincing an argument for history as I've ever encountered. It could serve as a epigraph, for example, to the series of podcasts on the American Civil War by David Blight that I just finished listening to (and, as I've said before, highly recommend). It's particularly well suited to that war because the lessons we've drawn from it and the disavowals we've made have been very different in the North and the South since almost the moment the fighting stopped. And thus the path forward has never been quite so clear as we might wish it to be.

2 In the wonderful piece on Jonathan Swift's poetry that he wrote for me at the Quarterly Conversation, Patrick Kurp quoted from the introduction to Victoria Glendinning's 1998 biography of Swift:

He is extremely “nice” in the eighteenth-century sense. He is not always “nice” in our sense of lovable and pleasant. He is a disturbing person. He provokes admiration and fear and pity. All I can assure you is that in keeping company with Jonathan Swift you are not wasting your time.

Could there be a better way to introduce a subject--and a biographer--than such a clear-eyed appraisal? It offers instant assurance that your companion on this trip will be perceptive and truthful, and that, in addition, she can write. As someone whose natural tendency is to string clause upon clause, giving a sentence its leash until it pulls up, panting and confused, of its own worn-out accord, I admire the blunt punch of Glendinning's style, both in that passage and throughout the biography.

And if you've not read Patrick's article, you definitely should do so: it's smart and funny and, because it's about Swift, beastly and foul as well.

3 Finally, in honor of the weather that's so addled me, I return to the new New York Review of Books edition of Thoreau's journals, a book that belongs on every bedside. March 31, 1852 found Thoreau less lucky than we Chicagoans: it was "a cold, raw day with alternating hail-like snow and rain." But his mind roved on to spring nonetheless:

Perchance as we grow old we cease to spring with the spring, and we are indifferent to the succession of years, and they go by without epoch as months. Woe be to us when we cease to form new resolutions on the opening of a new year!

Thoreau had sins, no doubt, and awkwardnesses and failings, as we all do, but indifference, like inattention, was never of their number.

The next day he wrote,

We have had a good solid winter, which has put the previous summer far behind us; intense cold, deep and lasting snow, tense winter sky. It is a good experience to have gone through with.

Indeed. And now it's time for baseball.

In the wake of the storm

For all the folks on the east coast who are digging out from yesterday's snowstorm, two entries from the wonderful new edition of Thoreau's journals that the New York Review of Books Classics line has just published:

December 24, 1856

More snow in the night and to-day. making nine or ten inches.

P.M.--To Walden and Baker Farm with Ricketson, it still snowing a little.
        It was very pleasant walking thus before the the storm was over, in the soft, subdued light.

December 25, 1856

Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

Now, as you settle into your third hour of shoveling, you can console yourself with the fact that you're just taking your place in a long American tradition of snow appreciation!

More holiday cheer from Thoreau

While I was typing the entry from Thoreau's journals that closed my most recent post, I noticed two others on the facing page that I can't resist sharing. In their juxtaposition of the serious and the silly, they give a nice sense of the many pleasures to be found in the book.

First, as our Puritan upbringing teaches us, we will be serious:

December 26, 1858

Call at a farmer's this Sunday afternoon, where I surprise the well-to-do masters of the house lounging in very ragged clothes (for which they think it necessary to apologize), and one of them is busy laying the supper-table (at which he invites me to sit down at last), bringing up cold meat from the cellar and a lump of butter on the end of his knife, and making the tea by the time his mother gets home from church. Thus sincere and homely, as I am glad to know, is the actual life of these New England men, wearing rags indoors there which would disgrace a beggar (and are not beggars and paupers they would could be disgraced so?) and doing the indispensable work, however humble. I am glad to find that our New England life has a genuine human core to it; that inside, after all, there is so little pretense and brag.

I'm impressed (and entertained) by the way that Thoreau recasts a moment of embarrassment as an indication of the essential goodness and simplicity of New Englanders--and at the same time I love the little glimpse this entry gives of the social awkwardness we sense underlying much of Thoreau's work. It can't always have been easy to know him, can it? "He will pop up, won't he?" I can imagine the lady of the house above muttering to her husband as he swings wide the front door.

And now for the silly, from two days later:

December 28

Aunt Jane says that she was born on Christmas Day, and they called her a Christmas gift, and she remembers hearing that her Aunt Hannah Orrock was so disconcerted by the event that she threw all the spoons outdoors, when she had washed them, or with the dishwater. . . .

Better the spoons with the dishwater than the baby with the bathwater, I suppose.

"The days are short enough now," or, Winter walks with Thoreau

{Photo of Walden Pond in winter by Flickr user Kingdafy. Reproduced under a Creative Commons license; some rights reserved.}

After being tantalized by excerpts all autumn long on A Different Stripe, the blog of the New York Review of Books Classics, I finally got myself a copy of their new edition of selections from Thoreau's journals this week. It couldn't be more suited to dipping into here and there: the entries are rarely more than a couple of pages long, and a few minutes spent with their meditative tone and wide-ranging thoughts are a perfect way to start or end one's day.

Today, as snow and cold put paid to any lingering fantasies of a mild winter, I looked through to see what Thoreau was doing on some long-gone Decembers. And, much as I love snow, I can't say that the first one I found didn't leave me feeling a tad jealous:

Dec. 10, 1853

Another still more glorious day, if possible; Indian-summery even. These are among the finest days in the year, on account of the wholesome bracing coolness and clearness.

Ahem.

Thoreau's invocation of Indian Summer does seem a bit optimistic, however, as he goes on to give more--and specifically more wintry--detail:

Paddled Cheney's boat up Assabet.

Passed in some places between shooting ice-crystals, extending from both sides of the stream. Upon the thinnest black ice-crystals, just cemented, was the appearance of broad fern leaves, or ostrich-plumes, or flat fir trees with branches bent down. The surface was far from even, rather in sharp-edged plaits or folds. The form of the crystals was oftenest that of low, flattish, three-sided pyramids; when the base was very broad the apex was imperfect, with many irregular rosettes of small and perfect pyramids, the largest with bases equal to two or three inches. All this appeared to advantage only while the ice (one twelfth of an inch thick, perhaps) rested on the black water.

What I write about at home I understand so well, comparatively! and I write with such repose and freedom from exaggeration!

Lest you become too jealous of Thoreau's lovely day--or too troubled by your own blustery, frigid one--you should know that a mere two weeks earlier he had been convinced that winter's grip was as solid as it gets:

Nov. 27

Now a man will eat his heart, if ever, now while the earth is bare, barren and cheerless, and we have the coldness of winter without the variety of ice and snow; but methinks the variety and compensation are in the stars now. How bright they are now by contrast with the dark earth! The days are short enough now. The sun is already setting before I have reached the ordinary limit of my walk, but the 21st of next month the day will be shorter still by about twenty-five minutes.

It is too cold to-day to use a paddle; the water freezes on the hand and numbs my fingers.

Before I turn to my fireplace and mulled wine, I'll give you an entry for tomorrow, too, because I can't resist the way this entry combines wildly disparate modes of thought:

Dec. 11, 1858

To Walden. An overcast afternoon and rather warm. The snow on the ground in pastures brings out the warm red in leafy oak woodlands by contrast. These are what Thomson calls "the tawny copse." So that they suggest both shelter and warmth. All browns, indeed, are warmer now than a week ago. How much warmer our woodlands look and are for these withered leaves that still hang on! Without them the woods would be dreary, bleak, and wintry indeed!

A "swirl" applied to leaves suddenly caught up by a sort of whirlwind, is a good word enough, methinks.

Some, being offended, think sharp and satirical things, which yet they are not prepared consciously to utter. But in some unguarded moment these things escape from them, when they are as it were unconscious. They betray their thoughts, as it were by talking in their sleep, for the truth will out, under whatever veil of civility.

That closing meditation makes me wonder what sort of arguments Thoreau had been getting himself into that day!