John Summers: Henry David Thoreau Stands the Test of Time

[John Summers is the author of Every Fury on Earth. His TNR essay, “Gettysburg Regress,” will be republished later this year in Best American Essays: 2010.]

New York Review Classics, 704 pp., $22.95

Henry David Thoreau has never been more admired, but in his own time he was widely known as a minor writer, a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a bit of a crank. His moralism (which never lacked for judicious detractors) drew posthumous suspicions that he had been a critic of the worst kind—one motivated by enmity. “His mind strikes us as cold and wintry in its purity,” James Russell Lowell wrote in the North American Review in 1865. Lowell, confident that history would remember his own legacy, was not alone in accusing Thoreau of misanthropy, nor in predicting that posterity would put him in his place, as history had put his spiritual ancestors, the Puritans, in theirs.

But it is Lowell, the once-influential Harvard professor, whom history has forgotten, and Thoreau has been promoted to the equal of Emerson, and the tutor of Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the perennial ally of the unemployed. The turning point in this latter respect came in the 1930s. Then, the portrait of democratic individualism drawn in Walden brought the imperative of re-valuing their impoverishment to all those alienated from market values. “Life Without Principle,” a companion essay on materialism, had flattered the jobless with the thought that they had gained, not lost, a shot at spiritual regeneration. “Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages,” Thoreau wrote of the cultural pauperization entailed by industrial discipline. “But many are no more worthily employed now.”

This new edition of Thoreau’s journal should remove any lingering doubt that he spent his own free time richly. Over twenty-five years, he filled notebooks with observations drawn from his weekly excursions to Pine Hill, Fair Haven Pond, Baker Farm, Martial Miles Meadow, Nut Meadow Brook, and other locations surrounding Concord. Thereabouts, alone or with companions whom he sometimes neglected, he recorded the crickets chirruping, the sparrows sleeping, the shrub oaks shedding, the snow crusting over meadows, the ice cracking along the edge of rivers, the flies buzzing in the sun, and much more....

In Walden, “Life Without Principle,” “Resistance to Civil Government,” and other writings, Thoreau presents himself as the one supremely sane man. By the shadowy lights of his journal, though, his life seemed to him “more allegorical than actual.” When he was thirty-nine, he began to doubt his capacity for telling fantasy from reality. Describing himself as bipolar (as Emerson had described dreams), he said he was bothered by a recurring dream from his youth. Naming it “Rough and Smooth,” he concluded “my waking experience always has been and is such an alternate Rough and Smooth. In other words it is Insanity and Sanity.”

But anyone reading these lines should check the impulse to feel superior. If Thoreau paid for his industrial exemption with disorientation, then the regularity and benignity of nature, the turn of the seasons, saved his equilibrum in the end, and warded off the self-estrangement so prominent in modern confessional writing. Today, indeed, the writer’s environment is marked by a private life abolished (the “inner voice” gone online), and the margins of day and night, rather than pitching illuminating shadows, irrelevant. Writing has always seemed to authors like dreaming. But we are not likely to see anything like Thoreau’s journal again