Calm

 

How a walk in nature restores attention (Medical X Press)

"New research from University of Utah psychology researchers is helping prove what American authors John Muir and Henry David Thoreau tried to teach more than 150 years ago: Time spent in nature is good for the heart and soul."

I don't need research to prove what I already know, but I imagine people need to find some way of developing their careers.

Talking to an arborist for the City, doing a sketch of a tree on my street, so that they have a record before they prune it. He said my street was good because there were no power lines to plan around. He says they're going to prune and uproot stumps in the next several months. He said they shouldn't take more than 1/3 of a plant in pruning, that's just a rule of thumb.

He reports the tree in the courtyard are London plane. It is a hybrid of Platanus orientalis (oriental plane) and Platanus occidentalis (American sycamore). According to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation the symbol of that organization is a cross between the leaf of the London plane and a maple leaf. It is prominently featured on signs and buildings in public parks across the city. The tree is on the NYC Parks Department's list of restricted use species for street tree planting, because it constitutes more than 10% of all street trees.

They grow so fast, they swallow up insects trying to invade them. I asked about Lantern flies. He says they attack fruit trees. He recommended buying up wine because the prices are going to go up. I told him I don't drink any more.

Who was Thoreau?

I've finished the magnificent Walls biography of Henry David thoreau.

Thoreau was a naturalist, surveyor, philosopher, poet, lecturer, graphite producer, pencil maker, writer, educator, friend and lifelong bachelor, transcendentalist, Harvard graduate, river sailor, and fire starter—literally and figuratively, politically and personally. 

He was daft and judgmental towards native Americans, and curious and perceptive about them, appreciating them, seemed to easily alternate between the two stances of judgement and curiosity. 

Some gays claim him, detect a sense of a secret self in his writings. He was wary of Whitman but was disappointed when the women put the kibosh on inviting him to stay in Concord. He asked a woman to marry him, but she declined. An older woman asked him to marry and he declined. We don’t know if his attention to young boys was purely motivated by his desire to share knowledge and educate. He seems to have been a real character of Concord. His proposal of marriage to a woman makes him nominally hetrosexual. Looking at no known sexual activity makes him asexual. Like many people in history, we just don't know, and have to tolerate not knowing. I'm not sure what the obsession is beyond Foucault's pointing out that at some point in history sexuality became a part of who and what you are. Not really anyone's business in a way.

He was a decided homebody who traveled down to Philadelphia and up to Quebec, and wrote books about Massachusetts, Maine and Cape Cod. He wrote about his trip to Canada. He worked hard to become a writer. He could also dance and sing. He loved walking, and could tell you what week it was based on the wildflowers. He lived in Staten Island for a year but could get his literary career off in New York. At the end of his life he went out west to Minnesota.  

His first book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers took him 3 years to pay off because it was essentially self published if it didn't sell enough copies, and it didn't sell enough copies. It was a book about a trip he took with his brother who died soon after the trip, and it never mentioned his brother. Many of his books were posthumously published. "The Succession of Forest Trees" is supposedly his most read essay and work in his life, reprinted in newspapers across the country.

He was disgusted by meat and killing but ate and enjoyed it anyway. He wrote about his disgust of the fur trade. 

He was disappointed in slavery and was a stop on the Underground Railroad. He wrote about it once in his journal, but it's suspected that he did more than what he wrote.

He organized to support Irish laborers families with knitting coats for children. He gave a worker $50 to get his wife and family to America. He bought wood from Irish laborers to build his hut on Walden Pond. His trip to Cape Cod took a somber note when an Irish hunger ship crashed and he was presented with the recent wreckage and pillagers. 

He utterly rejected Puritanism. He disliked government, the Mexican war, supporting slavery even in the north, but worked well with people, except stupid editors who altered the meaning of his texts. He inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King with his civil disobedience. He could also imagine city planners who made sure the environment wasn't destroyed by greedy single minded people who ignored other's concerns. Did he think up the idea of public parks in towns and cities as Walls suggests? I have a hard time believing it, European cities had parks already. Boston Commons was established in 1634. There's a park in Budapest called Varosliget that was established in the 13th century that lays claim to the oldest park in Europe. Walls was suggesting the seed of the idea in America may have been influenced by Thoreau, not that he thought up the idea of municipal parks. 

"In Queens, the oldest parks are Daniel Carter Beard Memorial Square (known as Flushing Park until 1942), which was acquired by the town of Flushing in 1875" (NYC). I go walking every week in Flushing Meadows Park, by Willow Lake. 

He was friends with all the fascinating transcendentalists, and other naturalists, businessmen and scholars. He cared for Emerson’s family when Emerson went to England, traveled and hiked with poet Ellery Channing. He went to Fire Island to see if he could recover Margaret Full’s body. Caroline Healey Dall stayed a few extra days with the Thoreau's after her lecture in Concord. He met Whitman once, and loved his Leaves of Grass. He wanted to invite Whitman to stay in Concord but the women dislike him and vetoed an invitation. He met John Brown and introduced him to Emerson. He met Frederick Douglass, and possibly Harriet Tubman. 

He read Indian ancient texts but probably didn’t know the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism.

He accidentally started a wildfire that destroyed hundreds of acres but tried to get the town to fight it, some were indifferent. When Wentworth started a fire he warned against it and a bit of a wildfire started on Mount Washington, Tuckerman’s Ravine, in New Hampshire killing ancient forest.

His mother was pregnant with him in 1816 when there was no summer, and many moved west. He was against the Mexican War, slavery and the fugitive slave laws. He lived through the 1857 panic, in part triggered by the Dred Scott decision. He saw the beginning of the Civil War but not the end of it.

He got to read Darwin's Origin of the Species, with his friends aloud. In the context of the times, the book supported the ideas of abolition of slavery. He saw the arguments verified in his experience as a hiking naturalist. It gave him new ideas about how to study nature, and he both stayed on a mountain for a long time, and culled his journals for patters across the seasons. He thought about seeds and tree succession. 

Thoreau defended John Brown and saw his actions as noble. His way of seeing perhaps influenced Boston and the north regarding his actions, created a noble narrative. He wrote 3 essays about John Brown. John Brown's daughter Annie through Thoreau was a little like John Brown. His two daughters were adopted by Concord Transcendentalists and they went to school in Concord. Thoreau helps smuggle a co-conspirator, a Mr. X, out of the USA to safety in Canada. People ignored the summons regarding John Brown's conspiracy. The schoolmaster Sanborn was seized by marshals, and the town rescued him before they could get out of town. He showed up on court the next day and the warrant was canceled. It was reissued, but he wasn't caught before the secession of South Carolina and the start of the Civil War.

He seems to have had tuberculosis since age 18, and yet lived to age 44, only living 3 years longer than his father who had a longer life. His one expressed regret that comes down to us is that he wished he wasn't so offish. “ When his orthodox Aunt Louisa asked, "Henry, have you made your peace with God?" he answered pleasantly, "I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt."”(p.495 Walls)

Thoreau and Muir, and his end

Thoreau was in Madison Wisconsin June 23rd 1861, traveling back from Minnesota to Concord Massachusetts. John Muir was 23 and just got out for the semester and was walking back to Portage. He had just finished his first semester of college. His parents had him working on the farm up till then. I read a biography of Muir and when I think about Thoreau, I think about Muir, who was a great naturalist too. The idea that while they didn't meet, they were close to each other perhaps, maybe in the same city, maybe not too far apart. 

The end of life is of course sad. I feel like Thoreau was coming into his own and dying at the age of 44 was too young. What could he have done with another 20 years, even at a diminished capacity. Unfortunately his traveling companion Horace Mann, the famous one's son, would die at age 26. Maybe I'm getting older, but when you read biographies, they seem to be quite punctuated by death. I know my grandparents deaths were quite shocking to me, uncles and friends now. I remember in my 20s reading the obituary pages of the Times and not knowing the people who died.

This year we lost a lot of celebrities. This year we lost Tommy Smothers, a Dixie Chick, the original drummer for AC/DC, Norman Lear, Shane MacGowan, the saxophonist for the Psychedelic Furs, Matthew Perry, Suzanne Somers, Louise Gluck, Jimmy Buffett, Bob Barker, the school teacher on Little House on the Prairie, the guy who wrote the ballad "Hey Paula", Robbie Robertson, The keyboardist for the Kinks, Paul Reubens, Sinéad O'Connor, Tony Bennett. the rhythm guitarist for Journey, Robert De Niro's grandson, Alan Arkin, the woman in Slackers who claimed to have a pubic hair from Madonna, Glenda Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, Pat Robertson, Tina Turner, Martin Amis, the bassist for the Smiths, Jim Brown, Jerry Springer, Harry Belafonte, Bob Newhart's wife, Tevye actor, Shirley from Laverne and Shirley, David Crosby, Gina Lollobrigida, Lisa Marie Presley, Raquel Welch, Astrud Gilberto, and last but not least Wayne Shorter, and many more faces and names I recognized (source). Tim Wakefield, a pitcher who helped break the Sox's curse, was my age. A lot of people were on TV shows I never watched, or otherwise never heard of them. I'm sure I missed someone too. NY Times collection.

Thoreau died on May 6, 1862. This photo was taken August 21 1861. It was his last trip "away from home" to take the photo, but he would ride in a carriage to Walden Pond in September. His last comment in his journal was that he could tell the direction of the storm by how it cleared the mud off pebbles. 

He was chipper on his deathbed, I think another sign of his greatness. He refused opiates, and Channing was with him a lot at the end. His last words might have been, "Now comes good sailing."

I had insomnia and finished the book at 4:55am on January 8th 2024. 

Emerson's eulogy of Thoreau.

Reading Thoreau and Thoreau biography thoughts today.

I listed the major works of Thoreau and I'm going to try and read through them. It's possible I'll quit, I have to admit that. But I already crossed on thing off the list, and I'm working on another. Looking for similar people who did the same thing, I came across a fellow who had to put post it notes over his eyes because his wife though they were creepy. I think it's weird that women find things creepy when they're not and you have to cater towards their feelings because we live in a age where women's feelings were over run for so long that it's verboten to continue to do it. It doesn't matter that she's wrong, she has the feeling. Therefore if you are her husband reading the book, you put post it notes over the eyes so she doesn't feel creepy.

Reading Aulus Persius Flaccus (1940) 

Aulus Persius Flaccus is a roman poet and satirist. (More on him)

I come across this: "Ipse semipaganus Ad sacra Vatum carmen affero nostrum,"

Which translates to: I half pagan bring my verses to the shrine of the poets.

Here's a fun quote: "Scarcely can you distinguish one harmonious sound, amid this unmusical bickering with the follies of men."

Thoreau is listing poets: "...Homer, and Shakspeare [sic], and Milton, and Marvel, and Wordsworth."

Who is Marvel? Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)? 

I love it how the importance of spelling wasn't that great in Shakespeare's time and even up to Thoreau's time spelling wasn't of the utmost importance. 

People were so judgemental in the past: "measured faultfinders at best"

Itarticeps crimints means "It's time for the criminals".

I like how Thoreau tries to undercut the sanctimonious voice. I think. "...while no evil is so huge, but you grudge to bestow on it a moment of hate." 

He prefers love over hate. I don't actually know who Perseus is, he's an early hero in mythology. He's got a lot of statues where he's holding a head he cut off. There's even a complicated genealogy. 

"Hand cuivis promptum est, murmurque humilesque. Tollere susurros de templis ; et aperto vivere voto."

Translation: A hand is ready for every one, and a murmur is humble

Remove the whispers from the temples; and with an open desire to live.

I feel exhausted, I'm nowhere close to finishing this.

"Est aliquid quo tendis, et in quod dirigis arcum An passim sequeris corvos, testave, lutove, Securus quo per ferat, atque ex tempore vivis?"

Translates: Is there something at which you aim, and at which you direct the bow? Do you follow the ravens here and there, or the shell or the clay, Easy to carry through, and you live from time?

And then I'm finally done after reading a section of something. It reads like a school assignment. I think it was his first published work in The Dial in 1840.

There are lots of things I don't write about in the biography. But I find it interesting he spent a month in New Jersey surveying, east of Perth Amboy on Raritan Bay for Marcus and Rebecca Spring. He was expected to attend a dance. He read the lecture Moosehunting and Walking. Thoreau chaffs at working. Alcott came down to see if he wanted to live at this commune, and then took Thoreau to Greeley's farm in Westchester. Greeley had invited Thoreau to live there for a year or two. They went to Brooklyn to attend a Henry Ward Beecher sermon. The crowd was "weeping, laughing and devout". Alcott was impressed, Thoreau thought it was pegan. They visited Walt Whitman. He wasn't there but his mother fed them some cakes. 

“The year before, when Whitman published Leaves of Grass, he had mailed a copy straight to Emerson, who, seeing yet again a brilliant new poet to mentor, had written him one of his thrilling trademark letters of support. The buoyed Whitman seized on the letter's most quotable line and, to Emerson's horror, blazoned it right across the spine of his next edition: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." In one stroke Whitman had given birth to the modern cover blurb, quite without Emerson's permission.” (p. 394 Walls)

They meet and Whitman says he's America, and Thoreau pours water on him and says he's not really into American politics. They bring up the quoting on his book by Emerson and Whitman brushes it off. They part without really a connection. A great naturalist and a great poet don't necessarily connect. But Whitman gave him a copy of Leaves of Grass second edition, and Thoreau went home and read it. He liked it, and carried it around Concord. It was a bit scandalous of a book and the ladies didn't want them to invite Whitman to Concord. They didn't want a fag who couldn't politely hide it better. 

There's a wonderful movie, Separate Tables (1958), where the prudery of old women doesn't win out. It's on one of the Cohen brothers favorite movies list.

Thoreau seems to have loosened up with reading Whitman, and enjoyed himself and passionately embraced his likes.

One was singing Tom Bowling, of which I found this version. A version and lyrics:

1

Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling, the darling of our crew;

No more he’ll hear the tempest howling for death has broached him to.

His form was of the manliest beauty, his heart was kind and soft,

Faithful below he did his duty, but now he’s gone aloft, but now he’s gone aloft.

2

Tom never from his word departed, his virtues were so rare,

His friends were many and true-hearted, his Poll was kind and fair,

Ah, then he’d sing so blithe and jolly, a-many’s the time and oft,

But mirth has changed to melancholy, now Tom has gone aloft, now Tom has gone aloft.

3

Yet shall poor Tom find pleasant weather when he who all commands,

Shall give to call life’s crew together, the word to pipe all hands;

Thus Death, who kings and tars dispatches, in vain Tom’s life has doffed,

For though his body’s under hatches his soul is gone aloft, his soul is gone aloft.

Another version on Spotify. I can't seem to find an unvarnished one.

There's a 25 page document on Joe Polis, Thoreau's guide on a trip in Maine.

First Native American book by a Native American which Thoreau read. 

Reading Thoreau project

Aulus Persius Flaccus (1840) (Online) (another version) X

The Service (1840) (I find this one in the book of essays.) Librivox x Another difficult essay.

A Walk to Wachusett (1842) x YouTube

Paradise (to be) Regained (1843)

The Landlord (1843)

Sir Walter Raleigh (1844)

Herald of Freedom (1844)

Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum (1845)

Reform and the Reformers (1846–48)

Thomas Carlyle and His Works (1847)

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience, or On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849)

An Excursion to Canada (1853)

Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)

Walden (1854)

A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859) (Online) (Wikipedia)

Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown (1859)

The Last Days of John Brown (1860)

The Succession of Forest Trees (1860) (Online)

Walking (1862)

Autumnal Tints (1862) (Last published work while alive) (online Atlantic doesn't hold the copyright so I don't think it should be behind a paywall)

Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree (1862)

Died May 6th 1862

The Fall of the Leaf (1863)

Excursions (1863)

Life Without Principle (1863)

Night and Moonlight (1863)

The Highland Light (1864)

The Maine Woods (1864) (T couldn't figure out an ending, but edited to the end)

Cape Cod (1865)

Letters to Various Persons (1865)

A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866)

Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881)

Summer (1884)

Winter (1888)

Autumn (1892)

Miscellanies (1894)

Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau (1894)

Poems of Nature (1895)

Some Unpublished Letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau (1898)

The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau (1905)

Journal of Henry David Thoreau (1906)

The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1958)

I Was Made Erect and Lone (Online, two) X (Analyzed by Steven Ward)

The Bluebird Carries the Sky on His Back (Stanyan, 1970)

The Dispersion of Seeds published as Faith in a Seed (Island Press, 1993)

The Indian Notebooks (1847–1861) selections by Richard F. Fleck

Wild Fruits

X=Read or listened to read. 

This was from Wikipedia. I'm going to finish the Walls biography and read more books about Thoreau, but I'm going to also try and read his original works to the best of my ability.

I thought about trying to determine how many pages each thing was, and then spreading it over a year, but I know I'm not good at sticking to schedules, I'm better at going at my own pace.

Some of these things will be harder to find than others. For instance the first one isn't in my essays electronic book. So I included the link where I found it.

Other things to consume, to be considered:

Walden: The Ballad of Thoreau--Michael Johnathon's theatrical play. YouTube

Today's notes from reading Thoreau biography

The Farmers Club in 1850's Concord, thought retention of people through education was the way to keep people from leaving for the city or out west. Thoreau wasn't part of the club, but they asked him where to get wildflowers when they wanted to decorate the town and how to rehabilitate forests who were damaged. I was reading in the Times that American cities are losing people these days and I think the city needs to do some to keep people in the city. They have planted a lot of trees, which delights me. 

They noticed that pine forest changed to Oak, squirrels burying acorns had an oak tree just waiting for a pine tree to fall down. The subject now is called plant succession, another subject Thoreau was a pioneer of. 

Speaking of environmentalism, I think there is a lifestyle paradox. If you really like nature, you spread out into the sprawling suburbs instead of living in the city, which might be the most environmental thing you could do, using public transport, and living in buildings instead of heating a house that just bleeds heat. So if you love nature, come live in NYC!

It does bring up the point that some subjects aren't in books, and you have to go it alone. People without education will always point this out, but people who read books know it too. 

The amazing knowledge that Thoreau had was that he could even say what day of the month it was by which flowers were blooming.

In 1954 he had this photo taken for 16 cents, according to Walls. I think now I might have gotten that wrong, I was misreading Walls. The national portrait gallery puts it at 1956 and for 50 cents, perhaps the case that came with it:

Maybe it was 1856 because what comes next is the capturing of the pigs, which is August 8th 185.

More Thoreau trivia

Reading Laura Dassow Walls biography:

Emerson advanced him $75 to search for Margaret Fuller on Fire Island after her boat crashed into a sand bar. 

I went to Fire Island today.

The one foreign country Thoreau visited was Canada in 1850. He never traveled really far, though read quite widely and traveled important steps for himself. In a way it's really cool that he traveled locally.

Thoreau was furious when an editor changed his essay. He wouldn't have much Reddit karma because he'd say what he wanted and dam everyone else if they didn't like it. He would not change it. 

I take something down quickly if there are even 3 downvotes more than upvotes. I still think I can think those thoughts and that I'm right given the context of my life, but I'm not into getting downvoted, I simply remove the offending comment or post. I have not sufficiently wrought out a message that is empathetically received on Reddit. There is a time and place and style for every thought to be expressed, but I don't imagine I'm always right and the public is wrong. 

The public and the private are different. I want to learn what the public doesn't like, so I can tailor my presentation to the world. I don't imagine there will be a equal line up with private and public. And I value my private experience beyond compare, I just don't assume everyone else has to. There are things I snap judge quickly as harmful to society and I downvote. That is my vision. 

On November 8th 1850 Thoreau quit cutting out paper from his journal and began to write an entry every day.

The fugitive slave act of 1850 offended Thoreau's sense of morality and beauty, which he combined. The land grabe of the Mexican-American War was offensive to him as well. The compromises of the new states not having slavery meant that the fugitives had to be seen as property and the whole nation had to return slaves. It was a national law. But the whole nation didn't agree and protected escaped slaves.

Henry David Thoreau

I got the biography by Laura Dassow Walls back from the library. It's a long book and I have a big pile of books I mostly ignore, but I hope to finish it.

He's just published his first book, and he assumed the risk of publishing and his first book ended up costin him $290 in a time when the square hut he built on Walden Pond cost him $28.12 and 1/2. It took him 4 years to pay it off. Meanwhile his sister Helen dies in 1849, the 4 siblings are down to 2 now. Helen had refused to go to church because slaveholders were allowed in, but the minister performed her funeral at her home. He got some bad reviews, but couldn't get anything but faint praise from Emerson. 

That reminds me of my stalling to read a friend's book, and in a way that kind of hindered our friendship. I wasn't into it. He eventually got it published and friends bought it, but I'm pretty poor and didn't buy it. My friend hasn't answered emails as he moved away, and perhaps it's his wrong email address, but it's quite possible we don't know what to say to each other any more. Publishing is a strain on friendships. It was a real source of pain for Thoreau. All great writers have to write a few bad works before they can hit on their masterpiece. Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman all published substandard books before they hit on their masterpieces. To me it would have been a mistake to write about his brother and not confess his grief that he lost his brother. This is my problem with Transcendentalism, the writing is just really hard to read. I like the ideas, but the execution is difficult. A difficult birth to the first literary movement in America.

Thoreau’s Journal December 8th

 "When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves. I am not surprised that certain of my neighbors speak of John Brown as an ordinary felon. Who are they? They have much flesh, or at least much coarseness of some kind. They are not ethereal natures, or the dark qualities predominate in them, or they have much office. Several of them are decidedly pachydermatous. How can a man behold the light who has no answering inward light? They are true to their sight, but when they look this way they see nothing, they are blind. For the children of the light to contend with them is as if there should be a contest between eagles and owls. Show me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and then let me hear what noble verse he can repeat."

-From Thoreau's Journal; December 8, 1859.

After Walden

Henry David Thoreau left Walden, but in a way you carry that experience around with you. He stayed with the Emerson family while Waldo traveled to Europe to do lectures. Such an odd thing to step in and be the male role model and leader in another family temporarily, but it makes sense in a way.

We know what happened to Thoreau during this period because he wrote letters to Emerson.

Sophia Foord (1802-1885) proposed marriage to Henry. A 45 year old women who taught Emerson's children for a year, when Henry was 30. She had lived with the Alcott's. Henry declined the offer. She sent him semi-incoherent letters and saw herself as his soulmate, they would be united in heaven.

Amos Bronson Alcott was hired to build a structure, maybe thought to be a writers place, but it was too ramshackled. It's speculated that it was a way to give Alcott and Thoreau money for Emerson. A quixotic project they seemed to work on for a while that never quite came off. 

The Walden home was moved, and it was almost a new home until the gardener fought with his wife and left, and the rebuild languished. Then it was moved again and then later scrapped for parts, and you could say some boards still exist in a barn in the area.

The railroad sparks kept setting fire to Emerson's land, at Walden and by his home. They fire burned woods would eventually be clear cut, and Thoreau's Walden would be gone.

Emerson's (second) wife Lidian got sick. Emerson was worried but took a side trip to Paris in time for the 1848 revolution. Meanwhile Margaret Fuller was writing about the revolutions in Rome. Emerson wanted to rescue her, but she was married and with child. Lidian recovered, and resumed writing letters abroad to Emerson. With such an intimate relationship, one wonders what it was like for Lidian and Henry. 

We have no information about Thoreau's sexual life, was he gay or bi or asexual? Was sexuality so cut off in these times? As a naturalist, he saw it all as natural, he wrote some things Walt Whitman would approve of in his journal. But the trail goes dead and we just don't know.

What Thoreau Heard in the Song of the Crickets

Lewis Hyde wrote an article for New York Times. It starts out:

"Beginning in August and well into the fall here in New England, the crickets take over the night, their song a chiming of little bells or a rhythmic ripple of falling water. There has always been folklore to tell us what that song means. In ancient Greece, Aesop took it to be a sign of careless joy. In China it still portends wisdom and good fortune. In Germany it may warn of danger."

I liked this line: "Thoreau may have become a master of fruitful leisure but that doesn’t mean he was a stranger to the urge to improve himself and his world."

I like the dialectical thinking: "One mark of a durable fable is its ability to contain a contradiction without resolving it. In this case we have conflicting ways to hear the creaking of the crickets and both are true: time is limited and time is endless; you must get to work and you may relax. Thoreau was clearly familiar with both states of mind."

He reports there were 7 drafts of Walden over 9 years. How do I keep track of my disparate interests. Soccer, and opera, Buddhism, literature and Shakespeare, hiking and Thoreau, jazz and new music, chess and politics. 

Interesting distinction between robust and antifragile. 

Leaving Walden

After two years and some odd months, Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6th, 1847. Emerson was going to England for his lecture presentations, and Lillian Emerson asked Thoreau to live with them to support the family. Thoreau accepted the request. 

Supposedly after his going to the top of Mount Katahdin, Thoreau was writing a lot more. He also read the Bhagavad Gita.

Civil Disobedience

I'm to the part in the bio of Thoreau by Walls where he spends some time in the clink. Jailer offered to pay his back taxes, but he refused. Scholars speculate that it was his aunt Marie. He didn't spend much time there, and came out to attend a huckleberry party. I have to reread and reacquaint myself with the essay, but I've been asking myself what is worth withholding money from the government in form of protest. Thoreau was protesting the Mexican-American War I think, but honestly it's not fully clear. He could also protest slavery. 

For me, the loss of reproductive right in women is something. The tardy prosecution of Trump is another. He should never have gotten as far as he got, and he should already be off ballots, and unable to run for president. The idea that his prosecution for crimes is political is hooey. The lack of effort to curb global warming and the illegitimate and corrupt supreme court is another. The loss of middle class, and the control of the rich in politics is another. I think a lot about Wynn Alan Bruce.

Now I don't think you should just go and not pay taxes willy nilly, just because you're a little disgruntled. I had a logic professor who withheld a percentage of his taxes spent on military budget. I thought that was cool and principled. Never knew what happened to him about that. I google him and no info. Anyway, I think it has to be a highly considered principle stand. 

I think more often than I would like to admit about the show The Good Place. That you can't be ethical in this day and age, you participate unwillingly in too much bad stuff. Thoreau wanted to live a deliberate life, and standing up for his distaste for the Mexican-American War and Slavery was a deliberate stand against them. It may have been puny, but it inspired Gandhi and MLK, so maybe it wasn't that small.

I don’t really agree that the government should always do less. To me roads, garbage removal, the 1,700 parks in New York City, and many efforts are in our own best interest. Still, a fascinating essay.

Links:

Sonlit: Her point is that Thoreau is often view from a narrow viewpoint regarding his night in jail. "This compartmentalizing of Thoreau is a microcosm of a larger partition in American thought, a fence built in the belief that places in the imagination can be contained. Those who deny that nature and culture, landscape and politics, the city and the country are inextricably interfused have undermined the connections for all of us (so few have been able to find Thoreau’s short, direct route between them since). This makes politics dreary and landscape trivial, a vacation site. It banishes certain thoughts, including the thought that much of what the environmental movement dubbed wilderness was or is indigenous homeland — a very social and political space indeed, then and now — and especially the thought that Thoreau in jail must have contemplated the following day’s huckleberry party, and Thoreau among the huckleberries must have ruminated on his stay in jail."

I like this bit: "Conventional environmental writing has often maintained a strict silence on or even an animosity toward the city, despite its importance as a lower-impact place for the majority to live, its intricate relations to the rural, and the direct routes between the two." 

Moving to the country and cutting down trees to live in a new house, has more impact than staying in the city and reducing human impact on nature. 

Trivia: Robert E. Lee wrote a play about Thoreau's night in jail. Wonder if he understood that he was doing it because of slavery, in part. I'll have to read it. Turns out it's not that Robert E. Lee who wrote it.

Thoreau and larger events: Mexican American War and James Polk

"The Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848 marked the first U.S. armed conflict chiefly fought on foreign soil. It pitted a politically divided and militarily unprepared Mexico against the expansionist-minded administration of U.S. President James K. Polk, who believed the United States had a “Manifest Destiny” to spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. A border skirmish along the Rio Grande that started off the fighting was followed by a series of U.S. victories. When the dust cleared, Mexico had lost about one-third of its territory, including nearly all of present-day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico." (History Channel)

Polk (1795-1849) was the 11th president of the United States of America. He was born in North Carolina. Wikipedia: "A property owner who used slave labor, he kept a plantation in Mississippi and increased his slave ownership during his presidency. Polk's policy of territorial expansion saw the nation reach the Pacific coast and almost all its contiguous borders. He made the U.S. a nation poised to become a world power, but with divisions between free and slave states gravely exacerbated, setting the stage for the Civil War." 

He had urinary stones as a child, and the operation to remove them might have left him sterile. He was a Tar Heel and went to UNC. He became a lawyer in Nashville Tennessee. He moved back home to Columbia Tennessee, and prospered in part because of the Panic of 1819. Global markets adjusted to the Napoleonic Wars and excessive speculation. He joined the state legislature, and he married Sarah Childress. "Following her husband's death in 1849, Sarah had a 42-year widowhood, the longest of any First Lady." And, "Rawley noted that Sarah Polk's grace, intelligence and charming conversation helped compensate for her husband's often austere manner."

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ended the war, and increased the land of America substantially. USA marched into Mexico City and defeated them there. It's hard to believe that actually happened.

The victory in the Mexican-American War led to the Gold Rush in California in 1849. 300k people rushed to California when gold was discovered in Coloma California, between Lake Tahoe and Sacramento. 

I have to say, it's weird to think of Thoreau leaving Walden and then there being a Gold Rush, those things seem to be from different eras. And yet the Civil War hasn't even happened. I find it so weird that I'm interested in history later in life, I found it quite tedious when I was younger. 

"...plant life is the foundation of all human intellection." p.203 of Laura Dassow Walls' biography of Thoreau.

He planted 7 miles of beans and groundhogs ate an eighth of a mile. So he ate one. He struggled at eating animals and his friendship with Bronson Alcott could have influenced that.

"always I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished." Walden. He defends vegetarianism as a higher law.

I find trying to not hurt others the most beautiful aspect of the spiritual life, living deliberately. 

Thoreau could imagine some of the lives of escaped slaves who lived in the area, he could imagine the Native Americans who lived nearby and were no longer there. There was evidence of dwellings and arrowheads when he ploughed the fields. 

Cast of neighbors

The three most frequent visitors to Thoreau on Walden pond were Edmund Hosmer, a farmer, Poet Ellery Channing and Bronson Alcott, early vegan, educator and prophet. Emerson would visit, as would French-Canadian woodchopper Alek Therien. Nearby was an Irish sharecropper named John Field, his son and infant and wife Mary. Irish Ditcher Hugh Coyle lived on the other side of the pond. He was an alcoholic and died while Thoreau was living on Walden Pond. Thoreau studied the inside of his house before the town burned it down. Cato Ingraham, a slave of Duncan Ingraham lived nearby even though the house built for slaves was in ruins. John Wyman was a potter who squatted in Hugh Coyle's house before he was there, Wyman's field was sold to Emerson to expand his land. Zilpah White, former slave until the Revolution, had a one bedroom hermitage nearby. She spun flax for brooms and made linen. In 1813 arsonists burned down her house. She rebuilt and lived to 1820 and the age of 82. In 1845, when Thoreau was there, the structure perhaps existed in ruins. Thoreau borrowed a few bricks from the ruins. Brister Freeman, who declared his freedom with his name, bought an acre on what's called Brister's hill. He fought in the Revolutionary War. He planted apple trees, which Thoreau would get apples from. John Breed was the town barber and lived near Brister Freeman. A local boy burned Breed's house down in 1841. The area might have been a small grouping of freed slaves, Thoreau explored ruins and found evidence of larger past population. Since it was marginal land, too rocky to farm, they didn't bother to evict the settlers. Peter Hutchinson the butcher and Jack Garrison and his wife Susan Robbins might have lived there. There might have still be some African American squatters around the time Thoreau was there. The Emerson family later deeded the land to the town as a park. Walden Pond ended up preserved instead of settled. 

Got bio back

 Phlox

I borrowed Ellery Channings bio, and got Walls. I do want to read Channing but after I finish Walls. 

Thoreau has just moved into to his Walden home. He craves solitude and is a little irritable when his sisters visit him. It seems like he didn't want to be taken care of, which must have been so confusing to them, they loved taking care of him. 

He bought the wood from the Irish laborers who built the railroad. 

I read a really fun book Hermits. Solitude is wonderful, I quite love it. 

I really need to read Walden again. That might be better than just reading about what he did when he wasn't writing it. This is a problem I have, I can always imagine a better book to read than the one I'm reading. What is the ultimate best book, the most optimal book to be reading in each moment?! Leading a purposeful life, I guess you just follow your interests, but also you have to batten the hatches to get through some longer things. 

I have been reading about Memoirs in Mary Karr's book The Art of Memoir. In a way memoirs are about examining life.

Thoreau was 28. He's still close to home, he still works, he still has visitors, and many people would visit the pond at the edge of town. Nobody is under the illusion that he's not in an edge of town situation, he's not out in the wilderness isolated. 

But he's self sufficient in a new way for him. He's mother and sisters aren't taking care of him. Well, they will perhaps do his laundry occasionally. He is living more rough with self determination. Some people find it helpful to spend a fair amount of time alone to discover themselves in important ways. 

Was his ostentatious simplicity performance art as Wall's wonders? He was hospitable to everyone who visited and explained his mission of living deliberately. 

P.195 Walls: “Meeting Thoreau became an Event, the kind of thing one retailed to posterity. As a consequence, all those harmless and loving dinners at home, where he dropped off his laundry, caught up on the news, packed in a good meal, and maybe carried away a pie for breakfast laid him open to endless charges of hypocrisy. No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry. But from the very beginning, such charges have been used to silence Thoreau.”

What does is develop his voice as a writer, writing he eulogy to his trip with his brother without even naming his brother in the book, and then the confrontational prophecy of Walden.

Railroads

In June 1944 the railroad functioned in Concord with 4 trains a day to and from Boston, 8 in total. As he sat in his white pine home, he could hear the train go past 8 times every day.

My sons loved Thomas The Tank Engine and watched hours and hours of it growing up in the 00's, the noughties. 

"What demon possessed me that I behaved so well."

 

"Thoreau found alienation oddly liberating" is a proposition of the biography by Walls.

I am fairly alienated. I've washed up in middle to late middle life with a daughter to take care, difficulty finding work, and my partner left me, and it's not easy dating really poor. I've also been fairly attractive, I realize that now, and a tubby middle aged man, isn't quite as lucky. I feel pretty authentic and true to my ideals, I express my truth, but it got me fired after 3 days in one job I had, and quickly a new girlfriend dumped me.

My friend copies my blog posts into ChatGPT and then regurgitates it back to me in poetry, playing with the various options. It's kind of funny but weird, and he didn't tell me, I had to guess, which was difficult because I didn't want to offend him if he really wrote them. He says that's the modern issue, you don't want to accuse people. He's retired and does edibles, and plays with ChatGPT. Sends me videos of him dancing on the beach. He's the one I've done so much backpacking, canoeing and camping. 

I've been thinking a lot about how with no clear thing, pleasure becomes the guiding principle. The problem is aiming for pleasure, is that often unpleasurable sections create pleasure. Pleasure is the result of something but when you target it, it evaporates quite a lot. Pleasure is derived also from pain in a yin and yang of life. I took a class on Taoism and really enjoy it, but think it's shamanism, there is no creed really, though there is some metaphysical palaver. Shamanism is great because you can develop your own truths, and you can reject all the other truths society tries to put onto you. I think Hinduism is so large there is room for shamanism, so you can get J. Krishnamurti quotes like this: "It is a waste of energy when we try to conform to a pattern. To conserve energy, we must be aware of how we dissipate energy." There's a Hindu ashram in Encinitas where my friend lives. He uses the bathroom on long runs.

Part of the eruption of joy watching soccer is built on boring hours of passing the ball around, the fight for possession. Part of the joy of opera is long endless arias that don't strike you. Part of the joy of jazz is after hours of garbled near chaos, there's some clarity, a riff that does make sense. He does take breaks from edibles and runs, which is something we also used to do together. We would run to Coney Island, jump in the ocean, and eat a hotdog and take the subway back. Talking running is great, and we would have great conversations. He calls me when he's on a run and sometimes I go for a walk to talk to him. He helps me relate to my ex who is angry and difficult in my experience of her, and has legitimate grievances. I'm sure it's all my fault, is a kind of mantra that doesn't help.

"What demon possessed me that I behaved so well." When you reject behaving well, it's hard to fold back into society. I do quite enjoy solitude, so I'm OK with being alone a lot in a crowded city. I'm friendly and would talk to anyone. Spending hours in the park watching my daughter, I get bored and just talk to everyone. I live in an immigrant neighborhood, and I really love learning about all over the world. I read about China, Ukraine and Latin America. I recently met a fellow who was the son of a Iranian diplomat, and stayed. He opened for Ramones and Iggy Pop, but his band broke up on the brink of a record contract. He sells rugs now. He went to Billy Joel's house, to install some rugs.

I really enjoy being thrifty. Being poor is a good way to reduce your carbon footprint. I see myself as a bachelor for the rest of my life. I love nature, and thinking and writing. Thoreau had the women in his life to take care of him, and he would go wandering and exploring and rough it.

Thoreau didn't have high quality spiritual practitioners to distinguish between the various traditions of the east, and might have seen them all of one. I'm not sure if he had the keys to unlock Buddhism the way I did. 

I don't like the Beat writers now, they're almost as bad writers as Transcendentalists, but they too hard a kind of spirit to them that I appreciate, and I enjoy the drama of the literary scene. 

Willow lake is my Walden pond. I meditate, but it's overgrown now, and the bugs get to me. They're building a drainage down there, and there are surveyors there every day, with ribbons on trees, I hope they don't cut them down. Cutting down trees really hurts me, I love trees so much.

Yesterday when I took these photos, I was thinking about mental formations. One of the instructions in anapanasati is to calm mental formations. I really like to excite my mental formations. Sitting so many years in meditation digs out these insights, there's always a counter force to every aspect of the path. 

I've been to Walden pond. Next time I go, if I go again, I'll do some hikes now that I know more about them.

I'm in the Walden section of the biography of Thoreau. 

Thoreau day

July 12 is the day Thoreau was born in 1817. He would be 206 today.

Reading the biography today:

Thoreau took a hike around and met Channing in Pittsfield. He slept rough and had adventures he didn’t write about. 

Back in Concord Emerson came out against slavery after meeting Frederick Douglas (1817-1895). Douglas's birth year is uncertain, so he may be the same age as Thoreau or a year younger. 

Isaac Hecker befriended Thoreau and invited him to travel with him in Europe. Thoreau declined. The first thought that comes to my mind was his mother's thriftiness. He probably couldn't imagine spending that much money on himself. In his travels with Channing he looked pretty wild on the boat mixing among the ladies and gentlemen.