Category Archives: Henry David Thoreau

Ferns and More

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

By Corinne H. Smith

“In the Lee farm swamp by the old Sam Barrett mill site, I see two kinds of ferns still green and much in fruit. … To my eyes they are tall and noble as palm groves, and always some forest nobleness seems to have its haunt under their umbrage. Each such green tuft of ferns is a grove where some nobility dwells and walks. All that was immortal in the swamp’s herbage seems here crowded into smaller compass, — the concentrated greenness of the swamp. How dear they must be to the chickadee and the rabbit!” ~ Thoreau’s Journal, October 31, 1857

I like ferns. I think they invite good vibes and happiness. You can’t stay in a bad mood when you look at a fern. So when a pair of beautiful specimens started growing in the shade of the north side of the house last year, I was pleased. They stayed green and leafy for the entire summer. And they grew. And they grew some more. By the time fall arrived, the ferns reached the windows. I could look out and admire them from my very own bathroom. I marveled at how tall they’d gotten. Sometimes I got the urge to cut one of them down, grab it by its thick woody stem, hold it high, and wave it back and forth as I paraded around the neighborhood. But that would have meant the sad end of it afterward, too. So I let the ferns alone. And what about their woody stems? I should have considered them an important clue.

How the ferns began

My ferns lost their fronds in winter. They looked like twin palms standing naked in the snow. I noticed that a third and smaller one stood nearby, too. I worried about their survival. I shouldn’t have. Spring brought them all back again. This time, they had fewer fronds along the bottoms of their trunks and more at the tops. And they began to grow even taller.

When several people came by to help me with lawn clean-up, my first piece of advice was to let the big ferns alone. Don’t cut them down, I said. The workers looked puzzled. I knew they would understand as soon as they walked behind the house and saw the fronds. And they did. No ferns were harmed in the taming of the yard. And still they grew.

Beautiful fronds

Scientists tell us that ferns were once the main and largest plants on the planet. Their growth, death, and decay contributed to the formation of coal deposits during the Carboniferous era. One source I found said that their fronds were “clustered at the top of a treelike trunk, sometimes 30 or 40 feet in height, rather than growing directly from the rootstalk.” Well, this described my backyard ferns exactly. And now I was finding smaller versions of them on other parts of the property. Was I growing Ur-Ferns here? Were these individuals part of a species left over from ancient times? If so, how and why had they parked themselves behind my house? Were they going to take over the place?

I found an answer of sorts one day during my early evening neighborhood walk. As I sauntered along the sidewalks, I kept my usual eye out for squirrels, rabbits, and birds. But I noticed some of the greenery, too. Four blocks away from my house, I saw something so powerful that I had to stop. A large tree I had walked past for months suddenly demanded my attention. I could barely believe my eyes. The “leaves” of this tree looked exactly like my beautiful ferns. I stared at them as my brain processed this new information. Evidently my big ferns weren’t ferns at all. They were young trees. They could even be related to this one. What a revelation! My saunter slowed to a thoughtful trudge as I turned around and made my way home.

The Fern-tree down the street

“It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. … If you would make acquaintance with the ferns you must forget your botany. You must get rid of what is commonly called knowledge of them.” ~ Thoreau’s Journal, October 4, 1859

I guess I forgot my botany, Henry. Ferns wouldn’t have woody stems. They wouldn’t grow as high as the house. I got out my guidebooks to identify them. It turns out my ferns may instead be mimosa trees. They’re all going to keep growing taller. Soon, I’ll have to pull out the smaller ones popping up behind the shed and along the fence. But the twins behind the bathroom window? I’m going to leave them there. I’m going to assign their fate to a future caretaker of this property. And I’m going to keep enjoying them while I’m here.

The twins today

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Posted in Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Living Deliberately, Nature, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

Train of Thought

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Sandy Stott | 1 comment

I Know, I Know…

I should be moving on, out into the glad day, on to what is immediate and away from the parsings of a small mind. It is, after all, October and the tints in all slants of sun are especially vivid after the season of many greens. Still, the recent piece in the New Yorker rankles, perhaps particularly because I so often respect its writers and their analyses of what’s afoot (or wheeling along) in the world.

So, just one more close look at one more of staff writer Kathryn Schulz’s weak readings, and then, I’ll move on. So.

In mid-essay, Schulz tries to work with her central accusation of hypocrisy by assailing Thoreau’s assessment of the railroad – newly put through in 1844 – that passes not far to the west of his Walden house. She finds Thoreau inconsistent, writing:

Nor was he interested in subjecting his claims to logical scrutiny. And that is the second problem with basing one’s beliefs on personal intuition and direct revelation: it justifies the substitution of anecdote and and authority for evidence and reason. The result, in Walden, is an unnavigable thicket of contradiction and caprice. At one moment, Thoreau fulminates against the railroad, ‘that devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town’; in the next he claims that he is ‘refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me.’

Here, Schulz chooses a contradiction and then scurries on to another, ignoring the context of the railroad passage in the chapter “Sounds.” That fine passage, pp. 114 – 122 in the Princeton Edition, turns on, resolves its apparent contradiction, by using the conditional mood, a mood that seems to escape the little eyes of Schulz’s notice. On pages 115 and 116, in rapid succession, Thoreau offers 5 “ifs,” conditions under which the project that is the railroad, and, by extension, inventive enterprise, might be “heroic”: “If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends!”; “If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds…then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their escort.”

Yes, Thoreau points out, it is possible to live an inventive life, to conjure trains (or, if we were to consider a modern analog, the Internet), in concert with Nature, IF one aligns one’s purpose and thinking with Nature. No stranger to mechanical aptitude and inventive capability, Thoreau knew that our inventions can be marvels. And, he knew also, we tend to make our inventions joust with Nature rather than fit with it. And we tend to apply them to their lowest purpose, accumulating riches, thereby squandering their potential. Thoreau is “refreshed and expanded” by that inventive potential, by the knowledge that we can win with our capabilities, not by the potential for accumulating capital. But he sees the devil in the uses to which we commonly put our inventions. Positive possibility twinned with clear-eyed criticism, with a good dollop of poetry added – that’s Thoreau’s take on the railroad. Schulz, however, misses that train of thought.

I know; I know…time to go outside, time to see the colors fly in the prismatic forest. Time to listen to the pileated woodpecker laugh; he has the right response.

What waits outside.

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

A Reply to Pond Scum – a critique of Thoreau in the New Yorker

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Sandy Stott | 13 comments

First a link to this long essay by New Yorker staff writer, Kathryn Schulz: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum?intcid=mod-most-popular

Second a short response: That’s an amazing, it seems willful, misreading of Thoreau’s work. Where to begin? For starters, Schulz ignores Thoreau’s repeated purpose, awakening his neighbors, as opposed to trumpeting his own life. She also opens with a 21st-century awareness of the wreck of a famine ship as a way to cast Thoreau as coldhearted, a cheap writerly trick, I think, in that her opening anecdote is hardly from the core of Thoreau’s life and work. Then there is the tired charge of hypocrisy, even as Schulz tries to breathe new life into it. Here is a paragraph from late in the piece:

“But Thoreau did not live as he described, and no ethical principle is emptier than one that does not apply to its author. The hypocrisy is not that Thoreau aspired to solitude and self-sufficiency but kept going home for cookies and company. That’s just the gap between aspiration and execution, plus the variability in our needs and moods from one moment to the next—eminently human experiences, which, had Thoreau engaged with them, would have made for a far more interesting and useful book. The hypocrisy is that Thoreau lived a complicated life but pretended to live a simple one. Worse, he preached at others to live as he did not, while berating them for their own compromises and complexities.”

But really, did Thoreau claim to live a simple life? He aspired to simplify, to make good choices, but he never claimed that he led a simple life overall. His point that he had “other lives to live” after his Walden “experiment” aims in that direction. Thoreau was endlessly complex, and he knew it. He had a global awareness before it was fashionable to admit such. But he also knew that complexity must be balanced by the drive to simplify, to get at what’s meaningful in a world where we can be buried in drifts of information and yearning.

Just as Schulz accuses those who find wisdom or solace or guidance in Thoreau as cherry-pickers of the phrase, she too quotes liberally out of context. And she would have Walden be straight nonfiction, which it never claims to be, and surely isn’t.

I am in more sympathy with Schulz when it comes to T’s critique of government. We seem to be in the process and in the business of proving that narrow-minded principle and individualism lead to chaos; we’ll see. I’ve been long surprised that our radical right wing has made less use of Thoreau than they might have. Still, even in this area, Thoreau’s primary beef was with slavery, which, as Schulz acknowledges, was and remains our central national stain and shame.

Is the rescue of the world to be found in the individual? Thoreau would have it so; I’m not so sure. Especially when the number of individuals exceeds 7,000,000,000.

I am surprised that a magazine that says it features “the best writing anywhere” would go long with this piece. But provocation seems the name of the game in writing, and so there it is.

So much with which to take issue. So directly counter to what I’ve found as a teacher over long years of rereadings. And so missing in the spirit of joy that overflows from Walden and other writings, even in their sharp criticisms.

By chance I had just picked up Autumnal Tints for an annual rereading, and in his forward, Robert Richardson points to Thoreau’s early and sustained conviction voiced first in the Natural History of Massachusetts: “Surely joy is the condition of life. Think of the young fry that leap in the ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla with the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose scales worn bright by attrition is reflected upon the bank.” That seems more in keeping with the writer I’ve read these many years.

Surely, however, Schulz has achieved what Thoreau sought in writing – even on a rainy and sleepy afternoon, she has provoked and awakened.

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Posted in Arts, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote