Josh's review of The Heart of Thoreau's Journals
The Heart of Thoreau's Journals by Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau is his usual ornery/visionary self in these journals: always complaining about something. Interesting to think of the different 19th century "journal styles": Thoreau seems closer to Emerson, for example, than the Englishman Francis Kilvert, though all three of their notebooks are similarly obsessed with nature.
Nature for Americans is something to hang your hat on, and that's what so hilarious to me about this book. Here's Thoreau, proto-hippie, inventor of American wilderness, and he treats Walden Pond like a gigantic I Ching. Further evidence that the Puritan spirit went underground but never disappeared.
Still, if every great diary is a personal, one-man (or woman) self-help book, then Thoreau's teaches: 1) How to be profitably alone, 2) How to feel that nature is a constellation in which you are the single, all-encompassing figure, and 3) How to look at natural objects with a clean eye. He is a GREAT looker. Up there with Tolstoy in this category, especia...more
Nature for Americans is something to hang your hat on, and that's what so hilarious to me about this book. Here's Thoreau, proto-hippie, inventor of American wilderness, and he treats Walden Pond like a gigantic I Ching. Further evidence that the Puritan spirit went underground but never disappeared.
Still, if every great diary is a personal, one-man (or woman) self-help book, then Thoreau's teaches: 1) How to be profitably alone, 2) How to feel that nature is a constellation in which you are the single, all-encompassing figure, and 3) How to look at natural objects with a clean eye. He is a GREAT looker. Up there with Tolstoy in this category, especia...more
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