/www.life123.com/arts-culture/american-authors/thoreau/blossoming-into-a-writer-like-thoreau.shtml

I am in a sort of rapture, half-way through a very deliberate re-reading of Moby-Dick. The range of these Concordians is staggering, and the depth, and the sentences!

You are always right, Phil Gura, to nudge me, even with a hammer, about the social commitment of these guys. And then Jim Carroll came along in Practicing Catholic and introduced me to another of the neglected Emersonians, Isaac Hecker, who transcended to the point of converting to Catholicism and founding the Paulist order of priests…

So thanks again for a lift. Onward, ever onward, as Waldo liked to say.

I am a little surprised that Chris’s comments, as well as those of several commentators, have focused on Thoreau when the book is so rich in other characters and situations, showing us the complexity of Concord in Thoreau’s time. Think, for example of the opening chapter of CAPE COD, when Thoreau describes the drowning of all the Irish immigrants, coming for the promise of the New World. Concord was filled with such people, as well as with, for example, African Americans, as Elise Lemire as recently shown in her fine BLACK WALDEN. Many of Thoreau’s neighbors were those who welcomed the railroad, cotton mill and American enterprise, not those who were flocking to Brook Farm or New Harmony. John’s book informs us so well of the demographic in which Thoreau lived and labored.

Also, I think that we must give more credence to the honesty of Emerson’s assessment at Thoreau’s death. He wanted his young friend to engineer for all America, as he put it, but Thoreau was content to lead a huckleberry party. The problems America faced then (and those we face now) demanded more than just idiosyncratic personal gesture; they required the commitment of a Brownson, Ripley, or Parker, moving toward social justice. That is why, for all Thoreau’s value in awakening us to the “right” issues, we should consider how precisely we can best act in the world. Slavery would not have ended without the great organization of the abolition movement. Often, we have to move from the individual act of conscience to a unity of purpose in numbers. Some of the Transcendentalists knew that.

Thanks, as always, for a wonderful forum.

http://www.radioopensource.org/pico-iyer-the-transcendentalist-dalai-lama/

Pico Iyer’s beautiful book on his friend the Dalai Lama is chock full of quotations from our guys, Whitman, Thoreau and Emerson. But you’d doubtless noticed, Potter, that Emerson and the Dalai Lama have never been seen together.

Thoreau the Buddhist

Thoreau the Buddhist”

Can four words together be more layered then this? If we reflect Thoreau thought on Emerson, it can refer to Emerson’s mind – and the self he was driven to attain – but also to the inevitability of his earthly demise.

And Emerson’s home did burn, “Since burn it must.” Emerson’s doctrine was metamorphosis.

“The Greek sculpture is all melted away as if had been statues of snow, here and there a solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snow left in the cold delles or mountain clefts in June or July. It is so with all things. Permanence is but a word of degrees, everything is medial.”
– Emerson

“When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before.”
-Thoreau

Jimmcdowell: Sorry for my sloppy reference. (I was also sloppy in referencing the biography.)

From “Mind on Fire.” On the night of July 23, 1872, a crackling sound inside the plastering waked Emerson in the upstairs bedroom of his Concord home. The house was on fire.”

Later: “The fire constituted one more ending. After the fire Emerson virtually gave up public lecturing…”

Later: “The fire affected Emerson PROFOUNDLY. He was exhausted; he became ill. His power of attention and his memory weakened visibly.”

But the fire-talk that instills chills is Emerson’s last action the night he went upstairs to die. He went to the fireplace (as was his custom, Richardson informs us) “and took his fire apart, setting the sticks, one by one, on end on each side, and separating all the glowing coals.”

hurley: Well, now that I’ve heard from you, my reading list just expanded by three. More and more, I can see why Thoreau took that sojourn into the woods, not just to observe nature and write, but find time to read as well!

My mantra on books is a quote from Thoreau, “Read only the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”

Richardson writes in “Mind on Fire” “Emerson was in perpetual quest of basic books, books that bore original witness, books that met Montaigne”s stern query ‘What do I know?’ – books that were not just distilled from other books and that, as Whitman said, would probably pass away.”

“But recollect, you only read to start your own team.” -Emerson

My team will be reading biographies of Helen Keller, Mark Twain, and Che Guevara. The Bhagavad-Gita, and Confucius. Emerson’s journal and some Montaigne. And my beach read will be “The Tender Bar.”

Thanks, this has been great…as Chris says in this program – any excuse to talk about these guys!

a friend has my copy of “Mind on Fire”. Would you mind explaining your second to last paragraph if its not to much trouble?

(Incidentally, it’s fascinating that it was the personal strain of a fire in Emerson’s home that did him in at the end.)

By the way, I recommend yet again William Bronks beautiful essays on Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, originally published in The Brother in Elysium; Ideas of Friendship and Society in the United States, later republished, along with other essays, in Vectors and Smoothable Curves.

Also, Nother: rude of me not to have answered you apropos what I plan to read this summer. I mean to read back, but I’m really looking forward to new books by Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice) and Robert Harbison (Travels in the History of Architecture). Harbison someone to discover (start with Eccentric Spaces if you’re interested). How about you?

Wonderful show, by the way.

Before i listen a second time to the interview and not having as of yet read the book, I can’t help but picture some sort of salvation experience or perhaps a baptism (of fire) separating two portions of Thoreau’s life. This revelation drives me to personal reflection on the “fires” of my past, painful but necessary crucibles driving me the this present version of Jim.

Thanks for an amazing morning devotion!

Jim

“If I should only give a few pulls of the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we be it known, did not set it on fire, — or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself.”

It reads to me like Thoreau is saying that we crave that fire in the way we our tempted to prick our finger for a drop of blood…the rush of adrenaline – of life – supersedes our slumber of domestication.

I have not read the book as yet, but I’m curious if Mr. Pipkin ever raises the slight possibility that Thoreau intended for a fire beyond their camp. I heard the surprise that such a naturalist could make this drastic mistake. But isn’t there another side of the argument – or maybe not a whole side, but a bit off the corner – where we could surmise that Thoreau was so good that could reason before hand the extent of the fire, and the odds of the people putting it out. The fact that the fire was put out means that he would have been right in this regard.

In my unlikely hypothetical, Thoreau would be committing an ultimate act of civil disobedience. It would be a hot needle in the finger of Concord society, a stark reminder that they have built their houses in the Concord woods, the Concord woods do not surround their houses.

In Emerson’s biography “Mind on Fire” Richardson writes of Waldo’s and Thoreau’s relationship: The two men shared a sympathy with a certain kind of intellectual anarchy that Santayana says ‘is full of lights. It’s blindness is made up of dazzling survivals, revivals, and fresh beginnings.’ Yet there was always this unapproachableness in Thoreau, and a number of people shared Emerson’s lurking sense that Thoreau’s anarchic vitality was poisoned because it was drawn from a well of isolation that was ultimately destructive.”

(Incidentally, it’s facinating that it was the personal strain of a fire in Emerson’s home that did him in at the end.)

“A spark of fire is infinitely deep, but a mass of fire reaching from earth upward into heaven, this is the sign of the robust, united, burning, radiant soul.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson