Category Archives: Living Deliberately

Lost and Found

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

…and not till we are completely lost, or turned around…do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves and, realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. Thoreau, Walden

January holds for me days of writing about being lost. First I’ve been immersed in a second essay about a mountain search for a woman lost in a tempest, and now I’m at work on a series of analyses as I write my Accidents column for a mountain journal. Often, happily, the lost are found. Though, on occasion, one, a few, are not.

Whenever I approach this writing, it puts me in mind of Henry Thoreau’s Walden chapter, The Village, with its wonderful passage on being lost in the woods. There is, of course, a wink of irony there, I think, because whenever Henry Thoreau felt lost, he went to the woods – see this most famous written instance: “I went to the woods…” (You can fill in the ellipsis)…where he did not feel lost at all.

The way out

Often, as I parse these incidents where people have encountered mountain-trouble, I find head-scratching moments, where anyone sitting in the chair of rational thought would say, Whoa, how could they…or, if feeling a little needy, I would never…

A man decides on double his usual mileage; a woman goes up when the cold suggests staying down; two teenage girls say, “Let’s go up and watch the sun set,” and forget to bring lights against the dark that follows. Trouble ensues. But the real story’s a little deeper behind the moment, I think.

What Thoreau and Muir and Oliver… and you, I suspect…and countless others understand is the imperative to go out on foot, to visit the elemental world, where, yes, there is the risk of getting lost. But where there is also the greater promise that “we begin to find ourselves…”

A sort of selfie…a shadie? Apt, perhaps, for the woods.

I try to keep this daily necessity in mind whenever I write about foot-trouble in the wild.

Comments Off on Lost and Found

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

Thoreau in the Bookstore, Again

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Sandy Stott | 1 comment

By Corinne H. Smith

Here’s another Thoreau-related story from my day job at the bookstore. This time I got my hands dirty.

The boss gave me a stack of boxes to go through. My job was to figure out what was in them and to catalogue the volumes into our database. “There might even be some Thoreau in there,” he said. He knew what to say to get my attention.

I lifted the lids and saw that each box contained bound volumes of old magazines. VERY old magazines. Most were from the 1800s, and I had never heard of them. He was right. There could be some Thoreau in here. We were certainly dealing with the right time period.

What fun it was, to handle and read some of these 19th-century issues! They were intended to bring enlightenment and entertainment to people living away from the east coast cities. Here was “The Cultivator: A Monthly Publication to improve the soil and the mind,” with its great mission and tagline. Next was “The Rover: A Weekly Magazine of Tales, Poetry, Legends, Wit, Romance & Art.” I guess it wanted to cover every base. “The Rural Repository” had an even higher goal. It was “Devoted to Polite Literature, such as moral and sentimental tales, biography, traveling sketches, notices of new publications, poetry, amusing miscellany, humorous and historical anecdotes, &c. &c.” Some of these periodicals included engravings of real or fictional scenes. I love this stuff.

I was especially eager to pick up and look through the three volumes of “The Daguerreotype.” Henry Thoreau famously sat for a daguerreotype session with Benjamin Maxham in Worcester in June 1856. I knew it had been merely a short-term career for Maxham, and that he left Worcester a few years later. Maybe I could learn more about him here. But no. The magazine only spanned the years 1847-1849, and it only copied articles from France, England, and Germany. And it had no illustrations at all. None! What a letdown.

I put aside the heaviest and the messiest but matching books for last. Almost all of these volumes had crumbling outer spines. A reddish-brown dust poofed away from the books and onto my hands. In many instances, both the front and back covers had separated from the spines. Some were tied with a black ribbon to stay together. Each book was about two inches thick. They were old, they were in bad shape, and they were substantial. But amazingly enough, the bindings were the only awful part. The pages they were protecting were quite clean and readable. They were almost as pristine as the days they were printed.

This set turned out to be the first 23 volumes of a periodical called “Southern Literary Messenger.” It was published in Richmond, Virginia, from August 1834 until June 1864, when the war intruded enough to stop it. Our run went from 1834-1856. This was a major publication, and it contained literature and reviews of work from both Northern and Southern authors.

Edgar Allan Poe contributed a number of essays, poems, and reviews to the “Messenger” in its opening years, and he even served as editor for a bit. I found “The Raven” in volume eleven, 1845. It wasn’t the poem’s first publication, but it was still an early one. I also read his review of James Russell Lowell’s “A Fable for Critics.” Poe didn’t mention how Lowell chastised Thoreau for resembling Emerson; but he did manage to diss both Lowell and Margaret Fuller simultaneously. (You can read a transcription of his critique at http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/slm49l01.htm.)

What could I find related to Thoreau here? Well, “Walden” came out in August 1854. Maybe there was a review …. And yes, wouldn’t you know it? In the September 1854 issue, I found a combination announcement and review of Thoreau’s second book.

I wonder how many Richmond residents ran down to the store of bookseller and publisher Adolphus Morris after reading this paragraph? How well did Henry’s words sell in the South, back then?

Alas, while this was a new-to-me find, it was not a new one to the realm of Thoreauviana. The text of this review appeared in The Thoreau Society Bulletin in 1954. And yet, it’s still fun to launch such treasure hunts when wading through drifts of 19th-century pages.

1 Comment

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

Second Snow

Posted on January 10, 2016 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

Of Fire, Water, Air, Earth in the Winter Mountains

For, as after a rain there is a second rain in the woods, so after a light snow there is a second snow in the woods, as the wind rises. Thoreau, Journal, 12/17/51

So too in the mountains…when the wind rises.

It is almost as if some fire were burning north of Franconia Notch. The north wind into which I point smokes over the ridges and courses down like its cousin water; it is a Niagara of variable white pouring toward me, flying by above. I edge into a pullout, grab my camera, step out and climb some feet up the bank; now I can feel the snow’s tiny grains ticking on my face, hear them on my quickly-inadequate nylon shell. I click off a few hurried shots and retreat to the car, where soon the fire of the engine is shunted back to me by the heater. Too elemental out there to tarry, I think.

Still, I look up into the coursing air, and in the thicknesses and thinnesses of the snows, in their flap and veer, I see the turbulent, liquid quality of air.

The snowfall now on the move again was, like all thus far this winter, a minor one, an inch or two overnight, and I brushed it easily from surfaces; the early morning world was a still-life. This second snow, however, this reshuffling, has a cold edge to it.

I have come north for contact with what Henry Thoreau called the “unhandselled globe,” (Ktaadn, The Maine Woods) and, in a minor way, I get it more than once while watching the wind stir this “second snow” and fling it like veils of dust across the mountains that rise above. Especially when I step out into it.

Within this snow and behind it the mountains are both substantial and in motion, and I am little, but in no little awe.

Much of the cloudcap blowing from the summits is “second snow.”

Comments Off on Second Snow

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