Air quality

 

You can tell it's more hazy than usual. 

Thoreau was a great friend. My friend call me while going on a run. We used to run from Manhattan to Coney Island, take a dip,  smoke a bowl, get a hotdog and take the subway back, or around and around Central Park together when we were training for the 1994 marathon. We really got to know each other running together.

He went on his run in California and I walked down to Willow Lake. Pretty good conversation. I told him about Thoreau's narcolepsy and emulsifiers. He's reading Fancy Bear Goes Phishing. He's going to do a rundance soon. If you'd like to see a video about his DMT trip, here it is. 

Thoreau in Staten Island

Emerson's brother took in HDT as a tutor for his children. Emerson's brother William Emerson was a successful lawyer and judge in Manhattan.

Thoreau got sick and didn't have much energy for traipsing about New York with the long commute to Manhattan. He placed 2 pieces of journalism, and didn't like New York. He developed narcolepsy of all things. It might have been a symptom of the tuberculosis. He wrote a good piece that could have given him national attention but he sent it to The Dial. His essay "A Winter's Walk".

On of the pieces of journalism was a takedown on the fantasy of technology and government interventions helping progress humanity. Thoreau seemed to think the change came from within. I think you can do both. Thoreau probably skews conservative. With the family pencil factory, he's going to be against taxes and government interference. 

Reading online I see that many conservatives don't see themselves in the present day Republican party. Thoreau might be persuaded by the kindness of Democrats. He was anti-slavery. All the women in his family were anti-slavery but they didn't have a vote. They couldn't speak in public. 

There were interesting experiences for the naturalist: He encountered the 17 year locusts, whose appearance and sounds he vividly described in a letter home to his mother. Being by the ocean was an important experience for him.

He got to meet Henry James and William James as children, before they went off to Europe. 

Links:

Thoreau’s Staten Island Experience

The Marginalia's post on A Winter's Walk

Century Wood

William T Davis is seen as a Staten Island Thoreau naturalist, born the year Thoreau died. (NY Times review of a biography about him)

Thoreau's letter to Emerson 

Queens Botanical Garden

It’s the first day of summer for my daughter so her mother wanted to take her to the botanical gardens.

A worker was planting rue and that reminded me of Hamlet:

In act 4, scene 5 of Hamlet, Ophelia gives away a number of flowers with medicinal properties, keeping only rue for herself:

OPHELIA: There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.

LAERTES: A document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted.

OPHELIA: There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me; we may call it “herb of grace” o’ Sundays. You may wear your rue with a difference. (170-177)

Rue is a plant with yellow flowers that “emit a powerful, disagreeable odor and have an exceedingly bitter, acrid and nauseous taste” (“rue” Botanical.com). (Source)

The gardener said rue wards off evil.

I sat and looked here while my daughter and her mother walked around. I read a little of Thoreau’s journal:

“Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another. The oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mould, which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest. The pine leaves a sandy and sterile soil, the harder woods a strong and fruitful mould.”

Miscellaneous

Ephraim Bull is famous for making the Concord grape famous. He bred a grape to survive the harsh winters of Concord. He became a state representative. 

Thoreau's first public speech was on Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), who roughly lived when Shakespeare did. He was an English statesman, soldier, writer and explorer. One of the most notable figures of the Elizabethan era, he played a leading part in English colonisation of North America, suppressed rebellion in Ireland, helped defend England against the Spanish Armada and held political positions under Elizabeth I. I feel like I'm just starting to learn history. See the painting below for what Raleigh looked like.

Horace Greeley visited concord. He would later hire Margaret Fuller. 

I find it so weird that women were not allowed to speak in public. 

Wendell Phillips (1811-18884) was an abolitionist who came and spoke in Concord, despite John Keyes' objection.

Thoreau read the Lotus sutra. I’m not sure if he could know much about Buddhism to put it into context, but that’s an amazing text, and he read it around 1842.

I was reading about Thoreau in Staten Island, not liking the city, thinking the best thing to do was to change the individual. I read, play chess online with people from all over the world on my phone, and talk to other parents while my daughter plays in the park. 

They ask me what I'm reading. The woman from Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat India, used to hang out in mulberry tries and eat the berries like I did as a kid in Wisconsin. Her son is a grade younger, and most of the Gujarat women don't talk to me, but she will talk to me for a little bit. 

I talked a lot to the son of an Iranian ambassador for the Shah, who played in a punk band that opened for the Ramones and Iggy Pop. Such fascinating lives people lead. The Gujarati woman will have to study for her exam to become American and India has a strong democratic tradition, she will be interested in New York elections. I complained that nobody could name anyone running for mayor. My Ukrainian friend says that people from eastern Europe don't like politics and don't read English very well, so they're unlikely to be into politics. I was excited because they were going to ranked choice, you voted for 5 people, and so I read up on the 8 main candidates I could vote for. They man who won wasn't in my top 5, that's how closely I think people think about politics. Anyway, I got to give a bit of an outline as to who Thoreau was, and why he was important in America. I told them that Thoreau read as much as he could from the eastern traditions, casting a wide net. I'm not sure he distinguished between Hinduism and Buddhism, or between Mahayana and Hinayana. Never mind, he probably read deeper by translating the languages. 

Lit Hub has an article on Thoreau's humor. It's excerpted from Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living by John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle. There are so many books on Thoreau. He's really quite a magnet for thinkers. And that is wonderful. 

Amos Bronson Alcott

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) was the father of the author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott. He was an educator but lost students when it came out he was honest about sex. He went to England and was fairly popular there, two disciples came back from England to Concord. Around that time Alcott was refusing to pay taxes based on principles, and was waiting for the jailer to come back when someone paid his taxes. This was a principled stand at not paying taxes. I think it was about slavery. So I wonder if Thoreau leaned his civil disobedience a little from him.

I have a problem where I read about other people and I want to put down my biography of Thoreau and read one about Alcott. I don't know if it's attention deficit, feels sort of unique to the advent of the information age. I'm curious about so many things, but reading a big biography is quite time consuming and maybe I want more instant gratification to my questions. I'm really fascinated by his veganism.

William Ellery Channing

Emerson collected a bunch of oddballs around him, I think that's to his credit that he could appreciate a wide variety of people, he valued originality, people who listened closely to themselves and nature. In a way Transcendentalism is about friendships.

One of these people was William Ellery Channing (1817-1901). His father was a preacher, but he went towards poetry. He also wrote the first book on Thoreau. My library doesn't have a book of his poetry, but it does have his book about Thoreau. He married Margaret Fuller's sister Ellen Fuller, and they eventually lived in Concord.

After 5 years of trying to be a poet, Emerson and Fuller lost faith in Thoreau's ability to become a poet. Emerson would favor Ellery as the poet of Transcendentalism. 

I see Edgar Allen Poe (1806-1849) as the best critic of Transcendentalism, and therefore part of Transcendentalism. He was critical of Ellery Channing, the name he used to distinguish himself from his father who lived from 1870-1842 and had the same name, and wrote about theology and slavery. 

Links about William Ellery Channing:

All Poetry

Wikipedia

Issuu

A WALK TO WACHUSETT

A WALK TO WACHUSETT by Henry David Thoreau is hard for me to read, but it's his first piece. He doesn't get money for it, but it's a wider audience than The Dial which folded after 2 years of exhaustion by Margaret Fuller. It sputters on with Emerson for a little while. 

I just plough through it reading. Thoreau took the walk with Fuller's little brother Richard Fuller, who would go to Harvard when Margaret couldn't. I find it so amazing that that women weren't allowed at Harvard, but then again you see countries like Afghanistan trying to go back to that way of being.

It's a 36 mile drive these days from Concord to the Park to climb Mount Wachusett. 

First America has to get rid of slavery and then get women the vote. It's a march of progress that retrenches and takes steps back. We're witnessing a lot of regression in American society these days. The republicans figured out they couldn't impose their highly contradictory vision on America, so they break it down to smaller things like states. So you can find states that have rancid radical far right policies. And then they pretend that their republicanism got rid of slavery from the democrats. MTV still plays music and Christianity is about helping thy neighbor. The rise of white Christian nationalism in America is quite a shock, and has nothing to do with Christianity. 

Going back to nature was a move the early Americans used to fight against Puritanism, with it's confused vision. We're always fighting against confusion and bewilderment. Everyone is just trying to get a foothold going, some leverage to understand something in the chaos and confusion. If you go on social media, we're exposed to more different perspectives than people used to confront in a lifetime. There are some hiccups in human development as we try to figure this out. 

The funny thing in the essay is he's hiking away from home on an adventure, and when he's at the inn for the night, they give him a Concord newspaper.

A walk, a saunter, a hike is central to Thoreau's response to life. It's friendship. It's connecting to nature. It's healthy. It's out of the all the insanity. 

Grief and Loss

His brother gets sick and he closes school early because he can't do it all by himself. Thoreau lives with Emerson and writes poems and then goes off to Boston to read more poems to learn the craft of poetry, but he doesn't really like the poems and comes back to Concord. Margaret Fuller gives him some editorial feedback that he's not there yet. The time between the boat trip and his brother's death is a time of floundering and trying things for Thoreau. 

In the end it would Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman who were the great poets of the time. William Ellery Channing and Jones Very would be the lesser poets. Emerson and Thoreau would use poetry, but they were not great poets, you read their poems as a kind of way to triangulate their thinking.

I collect the names of my high school classmates who have passed away since we graduated in 1985. I have a folder of bookmarks for the obituaries of their parents. My best friend from that time, and others I knew less in class of 500 have passed. 

Perhaps a biggest loss of Thoreau was the death of his brother from cutting his finger shaving in 1842. 

The loss of my grandfather was a big loss to me, a dark cloud hung over me for a year. I feel like the mortality rate was younger, and people didn't live as long, they could be taken quite easily in Thoreau's time. Today John Thoreau's lockjaw would be cured by antibiotics. Those tetanus shots we get prevent lockjaw now. 

My other grandfather got dementia and was gone but present for a while, so I had a kind of rolling mourning, he was gone but still there. The very serious minister became playful and light. He quit playing scrabble with his wife whom he was married to for over 75 years. When the dementia was diagnosed, Grandma lost the will to live. The technical cause of her death was a easily curable bladder infection, but I tend to think she wasn't too into living after she'd lost her lifelong partner. They have gotten married when my grandfather was 19 and she was 16, those kinds of things happened in those days. They were sweet simple people. I remember the food was good, but there was a kind of strained asceticism. Grandma was perceived as a worrier. Grandpa would go to his study and work on his ministry work. They were not wealthy but they were kind to take me for a month in the summer. Grandpa would take me to Six Flags one year, and they traveled to Washington DC and took me to the museums. They were happy to entertain their grandson and while it was weird sometimes to be in a church going family when my parents were atheists, there was a kindness in the community. I tagged along with my grandfather and was often bored, but I feel so lucky to have gotten to know them. 

My father is getting towards the end of his life, and soon I will too. The cycle of life is a funny old thing, you can't really think your way out of it. You can try and age well by eating well and exercise, socializing and doing meaningful things. But time marches on, and if you're lucky to live a long time, you collect loss of family and friends until it's your turn.  

I feel like Henry holding John towards the end was more intimate than my family dying while I was far away.

I still remember the death of Oscar, a cat. I've lost a lot of dogs and cats throughout my life. I think sometimes of getting a dog even though I don't think the city is a place for dogs, they're too wild to be cooped up all day.

Sometimes you drift away from people and you've lost them before they die. Divorce is a death of a relationship but the other person is still alive. Having children is pretty difficult with someone you're not longer in a relationship with. Thoreau proposed to Ellen, but nobody after that. His romantic and sexual life are pretty unknown. He had many great friendships and was close with his family. 

I've studied death and grieving, reading many books on the subject after being assigned The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker in college. There are many good memoirs, and technical books like How We Die. There are many good movies that explore grief. The conclusion is to live your life as best you can, and that was what Thoreau was all about, living life deliberately. 

Grief is a sun you can't look into for too long, humans reset mostly, and the grief flavors life moving forward. This father's day I think about my cousins, who have newborns and and one's wife is pregnant, and they have lost their father. The cycle of life. When my sons were born I thought about who was there to notice and who wasn't. 

Thoreau got psychosomatic symptoms and thought he had lockjaw and was dying but didn’t. 

He writes the poem:

Brother where dost thou dwell?

What sun shines for thee now?

Dost thou indeed farewell?

As we wished here below.…

Dory Trip

John and Henry took a week to build a sailboat. I wonder how many people could do that type of thing today. On August 1839, after a melon party, John and Henry left Concord Massachusetts for Hooksett, New Hampshire. While on Walden Pond Thoreau would write a book about the experience, in part as a tribute to his brother, even though he doesn't say so in the book. McPhee complains about some of the style of the book, which seems appropriate. There's something off about the writing to my mind too, because it's not easy or pleasant to read at times. But he likes this bit of writing:

"The bass, Tilia Americana, also called the lime or linden, which was a new tree to us, overhung the water with its broad and rounded leaf, interspersed with clusters of small hard berries now nearly ripe, and made an agreeable shade for us sailors. The inner bark of this genus is the bast, the material of the fisherman’s matting, and the ropes and peasant’s shoes of which the Russians make so much use, and also of nets and a coarse cloth in some places. According to poets, this was once Philyra, one of the Oceanides. The ancients are said to have used its bark for the roofs of cottages, for baskets, and for a kind of paper called Philyra. They also made bucklers of its wood, “on account of its flexibility, lightness, and resiliency.” It was once much used for carving, and is still in demand for sounding-boards of piano-fortes and panels of carriages, and for various uses for which toughness and flexibility are required. Baskets and cradles are made of the twigs. Its sap affords sugar, and the honey made from its flowers is said to be preferred to any other. Its leaves are in some countries given to cattle, a kind of chocolate has been made of its fruit, a medicine has been prepared from an infusion of its flowers, and finally, the charcoal made of its wood is greatly valued for gunpowder."

I’ve been thinking about common birds. Found this list on Google.

Links:

John McPhee "Paddling After Henry David Thoreau" New Yorker, December 7th, 2003.

A Week On The Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Wikipedia)

Standard EBooks 

Online version (Guttenberg)

Failed romance

In 1839, Thoreau's first love interest (maybe) was Ellen Devereux Sewell. Unfortunately I know the relationship was ultimately doomed, but the forever narrative takes away from the time spent together. Ellen and Henry went to see a Giraffe together, of all things. The spent 2 weeks hanging out. They would spend some time together later too.

John, Henry's older brother, ask her to marry him, in person on the beach. She even said yes. A young lady, when she told her mother and father, they were not pleased and they backed out. She also thought maybe she liked Henry more. 

Henry would ask her to marry him by letter, not knowing about his brother's proposal. Her father would not consent, her father was a Unitarian minister, and they were Transcendentals. Imagine that being a thing that disqualified a man of being marriageable. She wrote back immediately to say no. 

It was when she was 20 years old when she said yes to marriage and meant it. She married John Osgood, a unitarian minister from the town over. 

Henry would never propose marriage again in his life. He would be friends to the married couple, and Ellen would treasure the poems he wrote for her brother, her and his books.

I find myself washed up as an unwanted single at my advanced age, and I'm OK with that if my friend Henry suffered through the same things. I know down the line he would also have intense friendships with Emerson's wife, being a sort of stand in husband when Emerson went on his lecture tours. In the absence of a great romantic love, Thoreau was a great brother, son, neighbor, teacher, writer and friend.

Thoreau's poem Sympathy is considered to be the lasting impression we have of this early attempt at a relationship, but it's about Ellen's younger brother Edmund. To me the poem speaks to meeting other people and appreciating them, perhaps seeing a nobility in youth. Positive regard, see the noble in people. I can't help but think of Anne of Green Gables (1908), who was all about meeting kindred spirits. This poem was the first submission to the new journal of Transcendentalism, called The Dial, with Margaret Fuller as the editor.

Sympathy

Lately alas I knew a gentle boy,

Whose features all were cast in Virtue's mould,

As one she had designed for Beauty's toy,

But after manned him for her own strong-hold.

On every side he open was as day,

That you might see no lack of strength within,

For walls and ports do only serve alway

For a pretence to feebleness and sin.

Say not that Cćsar was victorious,

With toil and strife who stormed the House of Fame;

In other sense this youth was glorious,

Himself a kingdom wheresoe'er he came.

No strength went out to get him victory,

When all was income of its own accord;

For where he went none other was to see,

But all were parcel of their noble lord.

He forayed like the subtle breeze of summer,

That stilly shows fresh landscapes to the eyes,

And revolutions worked without a murmur,

Or rustling of a leaf beneath the skies.

So was I taken unawares by this,

I quite forgot my homage to confess;

Yet now am forced to know, though hard it is,

I might have loved him, had I loved him less.

Each moment, as we nearer drew to each,

A stern respect withheld us farther yet,

So that we seemed beyond each other's reach,

And less acquainted than when first we met.

We two were one while we did sympathize,

So could we not the simplest bargain drive;

And what avails it now that we are wise,

If absence doth this doubleness contrive?

Eternity may not the chance repeat,

But I must tread my single way alone,

In sad remembrance that we once did meet,

And know that bliss irrevocably gone.

The spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing,

For elegy has other subject none;

Each strain of music in my ears shall ring

Knell of departure from that other one.

Make haste and celebrate my tragedy;

With fitting strain resound ye woods and fields;

Sorrow is dearer in such case to me

Than all the joys other occasion yields.

Is't then too late the damage to repair?

Distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp hath reft

The empty husk, and clutched the useless tare,

But in my hands the wheat and kernel left.

If I but love that virtue which he is,

Though it be scented in the morning air,

Still shall we be truest acquaintances,

Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare.

This perhaps is the poem about his first (maybe) love:

My Love Must Be As Free by Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)

My love must be as free 

    As is the eagle's wing, 

Hovering o'er land and sea 

    And everything 

I must not dim my eye 

    In thy saloon, 

I must not leave my sky 

    And nightly moon 

Be not the fowler's net 

    Which stays my flight, 

And craftily is set 

    T' allure the sight

But be the favoring gale 

    That bears me on, 

And still doth fill my sail 

    When thou art gone 

I cannot leave my sky 

    For thy caprice, 

True love would soar as high 

    As heaven is 

The eagle would not brook 

    Her mate thus won, 

Who trained his eye to look 

    Beneath the sun

The final poem of this early phase:

Friendship

I think awhile of Love, and while I think,

Love is to me a world,

Sole meat and sweetest drink,

And close connecting link

Tween heaven and earth.

I only know it is, not how or why,

My greatest happiness;

However hard I try,

Not if I were to die,

Can I explain.

I fain would ask my friend how it can be,

But when the time arrives,

Then Love is more lovely

Than anything to me,

And so I'm dumb.

For if the truth were known, Love cannot speak,

But only thinks and does;

Though surely out 'twill leak

Without the help of Greek,

Or any tongue.

A man may love the truth and practise it,

Beauty he may admire,

And goodness not omit,

As much as may befit

To reverence.

But only when these three together meet,

As they always incline,

And make one soul the seat,

And favorite retreat,

Of loveliness;

When under kindred shape, like loves and hates

And a kindred nature,

Proclaim us to be mates,

Exposed to equal fates

Eternally;

And each may other help, and service do,

Drawing Love's bands more tight,

Service he ne'er shall rue

While one and one make two,

And two are one;

In such case only doth man fully prove

Fully as man can do,

What power there is in Love

His inmost soul to move

Resistlessly.

June 14th 2023--Education Reform

Thoreau set his mind to improving pencils. Part of the issue was you couldn't really read about how to make better pencils. Somehow Thoreau figured it out. Better clay, more finely ground graphite, hotter stove to mix the ingredients. For a while Thoreau and Sons made the best pencils in America. They also kept it a secret, and didn't write anything down. 

This is an aspect of knowledge, that the hoarding of it makes you money. There was a fantasy that the internet would liberate us with open source information. 

The fantasy was in Buddhism that you could just learn all the deepest teachings and than that would liberate you. But you have to grind at meditating at least 2 hours a day, and that's not easy. Plus you need a teacher or a friend to discuss your meditation with. So what happened in America is you get a bunch of people who know a lot of exotic teachings but have a kind of intellectual digestion because the lack of community. Rugged individualism doesn't work at a certain point in spirituality. So the fantasy of open source helping us all get enlightened doesn't work. The teachings that come down to us are vague, and you really need community. People go to r/Buddhism and imagine they can find the secret and get enlightened, when it's an arduous path of intense meditation within a community that is the path.

That's one thing Thoreau was good at, being a friendly open person. 

At the school in Concord after he graduated, he'd quit after 10 days because he didn't want to whip the students. He still wanted to be a teacher, but he didn't want to whip children, as required in the day. He had trouble finding a job near his home. He could go out to Kentucky and find a job, but he didn't want to have to go so far away from home. He went to Maine. He overcame his shyness and worked to enjoy meeting new people and traveling. He didn't find a job and instead opened a school in his home. He didn't get enough students to make it lucrative at first, but soon required a second teacher.  With his brother, they reached 25 students, teaching from 8-12, and 2-4. His brother John was the head teacher, and Henry the assistant.

Amos Bronson Alcott was a teacher in Boston, and Elizabeth Peabody wrote a book about his school, but when it came out he gave sex education, parents withdrew their children, and when he admitted a black kid, the rest withdrew their kids. There was educational reform in the air, and Thoreau had his ideas about not forcing rote memorization reinforced by the whip. 

I want to learn more about Alcott's veganism, and his life, and why his daughter wrote a novel without the father being present. 

Thoreau had a lot of field trips in nature, and to learn about the world, to see how a newspaper was made, and how guns were made. They built a boat and spent time on the river.  He taught a little archaeology, how to find the burnt stones of Native American encampments. 

Henry didn't play with the students are recess, but John did. I've played basketball at lunchtime with students, but outside that, I was never really into overly mixing with students. I had to go to the prom and facilitate dancing, and other social integration activities that maybe I even needed help with, but I'm more like Henry than John Thoreau. 

Thoreau

In a way I don't like the name of this blog, because, I'm not sure, but walking in nature is really appropriate actually. 

I'm going to wake up and start writing about Thoreau every morning. I'm working on a book about thoreau, and this public journal will be part of my writing process.

I was thinking about how strict and backward the education at Harvard. Thoreau got lucky to spend some time working with Orestes Brownson. He's a minor figure in the movement, but he was in the movement, and wrote a theological book that I'm not going to read. Theology is perhaps the least interesting aspect of the whole movement. I found it fascinating that the Wikipedia article didn't mention Thoreau's time with the family for a few months. That kind of thing signals perhaps an obsession with certain people. 

I fell asleep listening to Nature by Emerson. Uninterested in it, but maybe I'll catch some interest somehow letting the words wash over me.

Saw a strong recommendation for reading the Journals, and I'm looking forward to reading that. There are journals at the Morgan in New York. Found this video of Walls talking about the book she wrote. They have his desk at the library. I'd like to go to the Concord Museum sometime. In her talk she conveys how much his mother and sister loved him. She talks about being social and friendly. She's good as seeing how silly it is to belittle Thoreau for having his family do his laundry. He ate a chipmunk, but evolved towards vegetarianism. Alcott recommended living on vegetables, nuts and berries. He didn't quit eating fish, but he worried about it, and moved towards it. He was curious about Native Americans. She ends, "A man both in and out of time." (Found another talk, this time from Harvard Divinity School)

Supposedly when Walt Whitman's parents got married the sun was orange in 1816, like it was briefly, last week. A little smoke from forest fires is not the same as volcanic ash in the atmosphere, one is short term and the other one last a little longer. But it gives a taste and flavor.

The other character that came forth from Thoreau's life is Thaddeus William Harris, an entomologist who they didn't have a professor spot open for, so they made him librarian. No mention of Thoreau in his Wikipedia article.  

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was an abolitionist from the times. He wrote Part of a Man's Life. He was an abolitionist. There are so many thorns in the sides of America. 

I read today that Trump asked the Saudi to cut production to raise gas prices during the pandemic. It was a big thing for everyone to say Biden rose gas prices, but there's no outrage at this revelation? The political bias is about pointing out the other sides mistakes, not about integrity and accountability, which makes me sick. 

I work hard to understand my political bias, and understand there's democracy with both sides, and the two side idea isn't really accurate, there as many variations of political bias interpretations. The bias is because we have to theorize because it's too complicated. I still respect the wisdom of my bias and try to curb when it's not appropriate. 

Treat Williams died at age 71, and I'm watching his singing "I got life" in Hair, and I can't help but think that song was influenced by Thoreau. 

Proust liked Emerson and Thoreau.

Links:

Why Henry David Thoreau Would Have Hated Social Media

Quote from Journal Introduction by Damion Searls:

In the course of his life Thoreau may have discovered a species of bream, perfected the technology of manufacturing pencils, and anticipated modern techniques of cranberry farming, but his most lasting discoveries were about the interactions of different systems: how the seasons affect water levels, how animals propagate seeds, how one growth of forest trees succeeds the previous one, how the lake affects the shore or the river the riverbanks, and, most centrally, how the life he led shaped Henry David Thoreau and vice versa.

Ticks

There was a College student dragging some cloth across the ground. I asked her what she was doing and she said she was seeing if there were any ticks. She hadn’t found any. I asked her what she studied. She said she said environmental science. I said it be cool if I could go back in time and pick that. She said it’s not too late. I said sometimes it’s harder to change vectors later in life. I used to be a therapist who would tell people that in their 40's and 50's and 60's. They never believed me.

I meditated in the rain for 10 minutes. The one tortoise meditation.

Walking out I found two more students. I asked them if they found some texts and they said two

The survey guys were out again and I asked him about the drainage pipe they were making. The guy was kind of annoyed, I'd asked him before, but I wasn't clear on it. Yeah so you’re doing a drainage pipe right but I was trying to get some more information like what’s that gonna look like, a drainage pipe anyway? He says it’s going to go from E. Park Dr. to the Grand Central. I have asked where is the water going to dump out into? He didn’t seem to know.

I ran into the young lady again and asked her if she found any more ticks. She said no. I asked her if she understood what the pipe would be doing, where it what would that be, what it what would the impact be on the park? She didn’t seem to know.

Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture

“I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by attending to trivial things,” is a quote from Thoreau's that is discussed in Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture by Caleb Smith.

"Hannah Arendt, argue that Thoreau’s obsession with clearing his own conscience made him unfit for the collective, compromising work that real political change demands. Some claim that Thoreau promoted an ideal of self-reliance while refusing to acknowledge his dependence on other people’s labor, or that he misrepresented the Walden Woods as pristine nature while ignoring the indigenous, enslaved, and marginalized people who inhabited the land before and after he did. Thoreau can be caricatured as a narcissist, obsessed with his own reflection in the pond." (p.4)

"Thoreau did not ignore slavery or the violence of empire; he went to jail protesting his government’s participation in them."

"Thoreau could not entirely break his culture’s habit of recasting large-scale social and political problems as personal failings, best corrected by stringent moral rehabilitation."

“In our age of machines and money,” the creole mystic Adrien Rouquette wrote in French from his hermitage in the Louisiana woods in 1852, two years before the appearance of Walden, “people know nothing, anymore, of godly things.”12 Rouquette adapted Roman Catholic devotional practices to an ascetic, missionary life among the Choctaw people near Lake Pontchartrain, outside NewOrleans. Like Thoreau, whose book Rouquette came to admire, this self-styled primitive conducted an experiment on himself, trying to revive his depleted powers of attention. He saw himself as a voluntary exile, like one of the ancient desert fathers. The truth was that his diagnosis of modernity, along with his call for an attention revival, was becoming commonplace."

"Disciplines of attention were their therapies and rehabilitation programs. In the nineteenth century’s attention revival, there were heavy-handed moralists who preached attention in the service of social control." (p.7)

Some responses in Yale Review

Laura Dassow Walls has one:

Amid this intensifying feedback loop of external and self-imposed discipline, Thoreau’s perverse gift was to “saunter.” Neither an exercise of will over oneself nor a moral remedy for the world’s hurt, sauntering is something else altogether: a response to a call from someone beloved, issued from beyond the horizon of the self. To saunter is not to engage the push-and-pull of a coercive economy versus compensatory spiritual practices but to step outside this dialectic altogether, to release its hold on us and entertain other possibilities. Those in the grip of the attention complex might dismiss Thoreau’s open-ended, nothing-in-particular truancy as self-centered “navel-gazing.” I have noticed that when Thoreau and his ilk use language to attend to a world outside of the consumer economy, their work is usually labeled, often unkindly, “nature writing.”

Smoke

Photos don’t really do it justice. Reminds me of the atmosphere in Blade Runners 2.

My daughter didn't go outside in school today and came out wearing a mask. I was going to get her, and my neighbor gave me a mask.  That brings back memories of the pandemic. Everyone went home, we didn't go to the park, as usual.

The orange flowers are kind of more orange with the orange sky.

Forest fires are natural. When you curb them, they just collect more fuel to burn later, make it harder to control. Eventually you can't control it, and you get what they seem to get almost every year out west. It's an unstoppable force of nature. Nature is beautiful and wonderful, but it's also deadly and you can't control it.

You can't start any fires in NYC parks, but the was a fire that burned a swath of reeds in Flushing Meadows, about the size of a basketball court, but it didn't spread any further. A year later it was like it didn't happen.

Sometimes when I was out west, on some trip with my parents, driving endlessly. We would come across a recent area that had caught fire. Almost everything was dead, it was just burnt wood.

A male to female drag queen sang the national anthem at the soccer game. When someone new says how disgusted they are and how wrong those people are, I block them like a forest fire, they are spreading their terrible hate and lack of empathy. I don't really have time to argue or counter their comments, I just block them, hoping to staunch the wildfires of hate out of control in America. Unlike fires in nature, these fires don't seem natural, they are based on the withdrawal of care for other human beings, like you can stop a drag queen from existing by hating them. What do they threaten to the unintrospective? They stir up something very threatening to them. Ideas of gender are violated. The underneath biological sex is overlayed with the wrong pattern of gender for them, and that makes them rage.

When I was a teenager, it was cool to go to the Saturday midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I love that movie, and thought it was edgy. I didn't realize 4 decades later there would be a culture war to distract us from the once again rich getting the upper hand to buy off politicians to cut their taxes. The rich like culture war as cover for their class war. They themselves don't really care about the culture wars. They have enough money to buy justice for themselves, and impose their justice on others. The America I thought I was growing up in as a kid doesn't exist, or was taken from me. Forensic scientist can say which. We have eliminated the unprecedented boom of the 80's and 90's and stopped spreading the wealth. We've entered a robber baron era again, we've studied this in school, how is it happening again. The rise of anti-semitism, it's more and more common and acceptable. Now right wing minorities join in with punching down at others, they don't understand how fragile it is.

There was an African woman who loved Trump. We got along until she started insisting on her politics and then I couldn't abide her. January 6th was a legitimate protest to her. She moved to Hungary, where they have Christian Nationalism, where they don't like non-whites in their far right wing ideology. Part of the right wing agenda is to give space to white supremacists. I wonder how her mixed children and how she is doing from Hungary. She liked the right wing. Will they allow her even to exist because she shares so much of the ideology, or is she oppressed because of her skin color in the right wing country? I don't know, it's unlikely she'll come back exactly to this neighborhood if she comes back to America. She could go anywhere, why come back exactly here and let everyone know how wrong she was to back far right wing ideology. We join causes that could consume us, if they got out of control. The right thinks they're attacking unlimited empathy, but it's only idiot empathy that would allow those wildfires to spread.

Ivanka Trump has changed her name to Ivanka Kushner, identifying with antisemitic tropes her father says, because her brand was not doing well. She was willing to join in and connect with the power her father had, but now that everything is going sour, he's being held accountable--he thought he could escape accountability. The Supreme Court which he stacked with right wing radical judges, adding to the bought and sold ones already on the court, will protect him, but there are too many judges, and not everything goes to the Supreme Court. Appealing costs money. He tries to attack the judges families, get the names of the jurors. He does exactly everything you're not supposed to do. But the courts are a place where people like me, who grew up like me, remember the picture of America that was presented to us when we were young, and are fighting for it. 

When will this fog lift? 

Thoreau was vehemently against slavery, and did what he could to support the fight against it. He would die before the Civil War was over.

Canadian wildfires smoke

It's the weirdest sunset with the Canadian wildfire smoke in NYC right now. It's got me thinking about the volcano eruption in Indonesia in 1815, the caused the summerless 1816 when Thoreau's mother was pregnant with him. It was estimated that over 200k people had failing farms and moved west from Massachusetts. You could see sun spots when you looked at the sun through the high ash in the atmosphere. 

Mets game smoke (2)

My cousin sent me a podcast about 536 AD, which is referenced when you look at 1816. There are maybe more than 3 eruptions, and then in 539 and 540 were more eruptions, and Haley's Comet sent a bunch of particulates into the atmosphere. And by 541 there were Justinian plagues, which it's estimated killed 40% of the population in eastern mediterranean. The coldest decade, crop failures, mass famine. "A failure of bread". Cannibalism happened. With a massive dust vail, people didn't get vitamin D which boosts immunity. There were no shadows. Birds died, people fought, did "evil things". The Mayans paused in making historical markers. They probably didn't have the awareness we have now. What is the impact of our current world imagining? What would it have meant to only know local information. They were more likely to use mythology to grasp. When I read about the plague during the pandemic there were two kinds of reactions, one hedonistic, and another sort of moral retrenching and trying hard to be about good.

Things could be worse is a coping statement when things are hard. What was the hardness of the past few years. The plague of Trump and the pandemic where very straining times. We have bread and shadows.

So yin and yang, what was the greatest year? When you google best year ever, you get a self help book about planning for goals (snooze). Supposedly 1990-2000 were intense years of prosperity in general. Other people have defined the long boom from 1982-1997.

What is my best year? Hopefully the one coming up.

Images

 

Survey folk

Today there are new flowers out and there are some petals on the path. every days you could say like Heraclitus you can step in the same river twice, you can’t walk down the same path twice.

I don’t think I’m being paranoid by thinking the birds make special chirps when I first arrive, but when I sit down next to the lake, they go back to their regular noise style.

One tortoise stuck his head up during my 10 minute meditation.

Survey folk we’re going in when I left. A guy says they’re putting a drain in.

Today I start my year of Thoreau.

Holes for eggs

I think this mother is looking to dig a hole for her eggs.

Tortoise are water turtles. I haven’t seen one this big. There were a few holes around the place, like she dug but gave up because she couldn't get deep enough. 

Lush vegetation, the hair on my body was triggered by plants, insects, and spider webs. Calm waters, no wind, hot and humid. 

Reading today about Thoreau I read about the summer of 1816: "a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in April in the Dutch East Indies (known today as Indonesia). This eruption was the largest in at least 1,300 years (after the hypothesized eruption causing the volcanic winter of 536)"