File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1997/phillitcrit.9711, message 845


Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 11:55:47 -0500
From: George Trail <gtrail-AT-UH.EDU>
Subject: Re: PLC: Thoreau


Brackets, per usual [g]

>George,
>
>I like Thoreau, but two things stick in my mind as odd.
[Read him some more, if you only come up with two.]
In his essay on John
>Brown, which I think he declaimed on courthouse steps somewhere, he said he
>hoped not to hear that Brown's execution had been canceled.  Why? because
>causes need their martyrs, and the heck with people?
[I don't know the essay, but I would suspect that it would be because he
did not support Brown's methods.]
>
>Also, when he lists what it cost him to live at Walden, he has an item for
>taking his shirts to the laundry.  Like my economist friend who bought a cow,
>intended to subsist only on barter, but hit a snag when the gas station
>wasn't interested in bartering gallons of milk for gallons of gas for his
>truck.  So now he's growing Christmas trees.  He wasn't going to give up the
>truck.  Not exactly a way to cut loose 100% from the world of money and
>commerce.
[Precisely. Cost to "borrow" and axe. And he moved back to town, after all,
ad came in regularly when it got really cold. The piece is very funny, and
Thoreau knows it. Again, I classify it with the great leg pulls of
literature.]
>
>I used to think the Amish and Mennonites had the answer.
[What was the question?]
  Forget about the
>truck. But a recent issue of Time has an article about some serious--even
>tragic--medical problems these communities are  having from lots of
> inbreeding over many generations.
[Be careful how  you use the word "tragic" around us literary types.]
>
>It seems to me we've never really dealt with the industrial revolution--that
>the idea of going back to a more "natural" life keeps resurfacing, although
>of course you can't recover the past.
["Nature," as Thoreau well knows, is an elaborate trope. We can't go "back"
to it except as our construction.]
>
>Tell me what you think is uniquely American about Thoreau, because I assumed
>a lot of his ideas came from Rousseau (and got passed on to Ghandi). I think
>you're probably talking about his writing style.

[He starts from scratch. He is irreverant. He is funny. I would venture
that only the comic book Thoreau (the one that is cited in reference to
_Walden_ being a set of directions for getting 'back to nature.') got
anything from Rousseau. Like Whitman, he is an original.]
>
>pat sloane

[g] Out of the woods.




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