Henry Thoreau As Remembered By A Young Friend by Edward Waldo Emerson

 

This slim 1917 volume was written by a son of Ralph Waldo Emerson, friend and proponent of Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau was a close family friend of the Emerson’s and spent much time with the family and aided in keeping up the household as Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, aka “Mr. Self-Reliance” himself, well, he was not very self-reliant at all. As a matter of fact, he wielded a fine pen but his skills around house and farm were considered laughable.

It is thought, he had Thoreau in mind when he penned the magnificent essay, Self Reliance.

Thoreau was noted by all who knew him as a fine “mechanic,” a fine workman, a handy gardener, caretaker, repairer of all things, a jack-of-all trades and not a mere “Scholar with nose in books, and head in the clouds” pronouncer of ideals never lived.

Thoreau lived his life with skin in the game, soul in the game.

I state matter-of-factly that Thoreau’s Walden and his essay Civil Disobedience are easily in the Top Ten Most Influential Volumes I have ever read.

I consider his massive unfinished project on Native Americans one of the Greatest Books Never Written, based on his notes alone.

The problem is, upon Thoreau’s death, many pronounced upon his work, his intentions, and called him misguided, an imitator, and other less than kind valuations.

These criticisms always struck me as odd as I always detected a consistency in thought and action and word from Thoreau. He lived what he said. He did what he wrote. He was no mere pronouncer of ideals ala his friend and mentor Emerson [whom I also adore.]

No, Thoreau always struck me as the real deal.

Well, young Edward Emerson, who knew the man well, felt the same way. He bristled at what he considered unjust and misguided opinions regarding Thoreau and set to correct the record with this volume.

In it, he offers his own experiences with Thoreau and samples from copious interviews that he conducted with real flesh and blood people, people who knew the man, to see what they had to say.

Young Emerson’s take on Thoreau is far different than his critics.

It is even different than his father’s.

The Elder Emerson calls Thoreau a bit humorless.

But we find that “lack of humor” judgment a bit odd, as all else seemed to find him frolicsome and a fine companion. [BTW-No one thought of Emerson as a jovial sort himself.]

Upon Henry’s death, Thoreau’s mother left his journals to the Elder Emerson to edit for publication.

Edward recalls his father stating these copious tomes contained some of the finest prose and observations he had ever come across.

What is also curious is that Emerson edited out all instances of jokes or whimsy.

Turns out part of the “lack of humor” problem was Elder Emerson himself.

Why he excised these bits, no one can say.

I’ll stop here and leave you with extracts from Edward Emerson’s defense of his friend.

He wrote [Thoreau]: “I would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering: such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer and let me feel for the furring. Drive a nail home, and clinch it so faithfully, that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.” Small things for him symbolized great.

·        Treat all things, ALL as worthy of time, worthy of effort, worthy of YOU.

 

As a man who once had some knowledge of the habits of our people, such as a country doctor acquires, I may say that I found that the root of much disease, disappointment, and blight was, that few persons stand off and look at the way their days pass, but live minute by minute, and as is customary, and therefore never find that the day, the year, and the lifetime pass in preparation to live, but the time to live never comes—here, at least. Thoreau couldn't do this, for he was a surveyor—one who oversees the ground, and takes account of direction and distance. Be sure his life at Walden was an experiment in keeping means and ends in their proper relative positions. He was not one who lived to eat.

Mr. Emerson noted in his journal, a few years before this Walden venture: “Henry made last night the fine remark that 'as long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way, — governments, society, and even the sun and moon and stars, as astrology may testify.”' Now he put aside doubt and custom, and all went well.

·        Never an excuse.

·        Always an act.

·        Never a complaint that was not stepped into with a remedy in the personal sphere.

·        No quiet desperation or justification to allow one “off the hook” to act.

 

They err entirely who suppose that he counselled every one to build hermitages in the woods, break with society and live on meal. This he distinctly disavows, but makes a plea for simple and brave living, not drowned in the details, not merely of cooking, sweeping, and dusting, but of politics, whether parish, town, state, or federal, and even of societies, religious, professional, charitable, or social, for, after all, these are but preparatory, — police regulations on a larger or smaller scale, — designed as means to make life possible, and not to be pursued as ends.

·        No need to go into the woods and “get away from it all.”

·        He didn’t.

·        No need to become mired in politics save where the effect is direct upon you.

·        Such enterprises drain time and soul.

 

He could afford to be a philosopher, for he was first a good common man. It takes good iron to receive a fine polish. His simple, direct speech and look and bearing were such that no plain, common man would put him down in his books as a fool, or visionary, or helpless, as the scholar, writer, or reformer would often be regarded by him. Much of Alcibiades’s description of Socrates in Plato’s “Symposium” would apply to Thoreau. He loved to talk with all kinds and conditions of men if they had no hypocrisy or pretence about them, and though high in his standard of virtue, and most severe with himself, could be charitable to the failings of humble fellow- men. His interest in the Indian was partly one of natural history, and the human interest was because of the genuineness of the Indian’s knowledge and his freedom from cant.

·        Might explain his higher regard among the Indians, woodsmen, “common worker” and children who knew him.

·        He was not here to impress scholars; he was here to press into real society.

·        No abstractions.

 

Some naturalists of the Dry-as-dust School are critical of him because he was not, like them, a cataloguer, and mere student of dead plants and animals. I remember once hearing Virchow, the great authority on physiology and pathology in Berlin, laugh to scorn the study of dry bones, for he said they are artificial, have no existence in Nature. The student of bones must study fresh bones with the marrow in them, the ligaments and periosteum still attached, the blood in their vessels and canals, if he would know anything of nature. Thoreau considered that one living bird for study, in its proper haunts, was worth more than a sackful of bird-skins and skeletons. A brown, brittle plant in a portfolio gave him little comfort, but he knew the day in March when it would show signs of life, the days in August when it would be in flower, and what birds would come in January from far Labrador to winter on those particular seeds that its capsule held stored for them above the snow.

·        No trivia.

·        No mere guidebook [or YouTube video.]

·        Honest to God, fingers in the dirt knowledge.

 

“Even the facts of science,’ said he, “may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced by the dews of fresh and living truth.’”

·        Life is where IT is found.

·        Not representations of life.

 

Thoreau and Alcott always had friendly relations, though they were not drawn one to the other. Thoreau, with his hardy independence, was impatient of Alcott's philosophic calm while failing to comfortably maintain his family. This invalidated his philosophy, of which Thoreau said he “hated a sum that did not prove."

·        Telling. Criticisms come from those who wrote of uplifted can-do souls, who’s only can-do was the words on pages and lectures in the auditorium.

·        Thoreau DID what the others did not, no matter how much they preached it.

·        Yet, he still got along with them.

·        I pronounce the critics jealous and a bit shamed.

 

[The next bit is from a copious section where people went to see him on his death bed—he died at 44. All tell a single tale; you can’t be unhappy around this guy even when he’s dying. BTW-He refused all pain medication, he wanted to live life straight and raw to the end.]

[PS-Staples in the below, was the jailer who held Henry when he was incarcerated for refusing to pay a poll church tax. He didn’t join the church and saw no reason to pay for what he did not indulge in. Seems even his jailer was charmed by him.]

His old acquaintance Staples, once his jailor, coming out, meeting Mr. Emerson coming in, reported that he “never saw a man dying with so much pleasure and peace." To his Calvinistic Aunt who felt obliged to ask, “Henry, have you made your peace with God?" — “I did not know we had ever quarrelled, Aunt,” was the pleasant answer.

The critics seem churlish to quarrel with a dead man who did not even quarrel with God.

I hold the man in high esteem.

If one is an admirer of Thoreau, this slim volume is an afternoon’s treat.