176: Walden, or Life in the Woods

Hello, sophomores. Before we begin, I'd like to make two points. First, in the last episode about Elizabeth Bishop, I made a grave error. Radcliffe College. is the all-women's college that was subsumed into Harvard. Elizabeth Bishop attended Vassar College, which is a lovely college in New York State. I apologize to Vassar.

i apologize to radcliffe alumni and i apologize to harvard which has enough nonsense to put up with these days secondly i've started a blog well actually i've continued a blog that i used to have But it's at a new place. It's at johnmccoy.org. If you visit it, I will try to have something up about this very episode. And in addition to writing about the podcast, I write about literature, pop culture.

Art, opinions, you name it, everything. And if you like, you can subscribe to the blog as a newsletter and receive new posts through email. Okay, on with the show.

Are your school days out of sight when you took English, art, and math? What's your favorite Fahrenheit? How sour are the grapes of wrath? Do you need a challenger or disgusting Salinger? Do you love the written word? What happened to the Mockingbird? Our show is just beginning So find a place to sit These questions will be on the test It's time for Sophomore League

Welcome back to Sophomore Lit, where we reread your 10th grade reading list. I'm John McCoy, and with me is returning co-host Daniel Dottie. Hey, John. Very nice to be back. Hi, Daniel. Why don't you introduce yourself again? Sure. My name is Daniel Doughty. I have appeared on Sophomore Lit for such hits as Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.

And What Scarlet Letter, that was probably my favorite one we did. And one, well, we discovered that I have a fondness for 19th century New Englanders. But yeah, I also am a podcaster, formerly of The Cannonball, a literature podcast. Currently, I have downgraded my intellectual capacity in my current podcast project. is one where we cover 90s Star Wars tie-in novels. The show is called Thronderdome. So if you, like me, were someone who has...

quasi fond memories of reading Star Wars books as a middle schooler and is curious to revisit those sophomore lit style, you can check out Thranderdome. And how many of those are by Alan Dean Foster? If I recall correctly, I believe it is just the one. He is the author of the very first tie-in novel, which is an odd bird called Splinter in the Mind's Eye, which was written...

After Star Wars was a hit, but before Empire Strikes Back had been greenlighted or anyone knew what they were going to do for a sequel. Right. I remember seeing that in bookstores at the time, and I glanced through it being a... Being like a bad reader as a kid, I glanced to the end to see what the ending was. And as I recall, Darth Vader gets his arm cut off or something at the end of that, which is an odd thing.

Considering what would eventually happen in Empire Strikes Back, I guess. That's true. I think perhaps Georgian company were looking over Mr. Foster's shoulder. Okay, well, this is not a Star Wars podcast here. This is a literature podcast.

And this time, as you may have been hinting towards in your talk of your admiration for 19th century New Englanders, we are doing... We are doing Henry David Thoreau's Walden, published in 1854. Originally published under the title Walden or Life in the Woods, but nowadays mostly called Walden. What's your history with this book? I was struggling to recall. Because it's one that I've never sat down with. I am certain.

I had been assigned Thoreau in my time. I know I've read at least portions of civil disobedience. And I am sure that I must have at some point during the transcendentalism unit. And, you know, high school English had read some excerpts of or perhaps one of the full essays from Walden. I say that I must have. I do not have any specific recollection to me, like.

In my literary education, I very unfairly, as I've come to discover, thanks to shows like yours, the transcendentalists all kind of blurred together so that I would have a hard time, you know. talking about Thoreau versus Walt Whitman or something like that. They all smeared together as these kinds of guys that talk about the woods. I don't know. So I was really...

Yeah, I didn't really have any preconceptions jumping in other than that I knew I had been bored at one point by Thoreau. But yeah, so this was a really, this was a fresh read for me. And we were talking a little bit before you started recording that I had a blast with it. It was it was really now I can I can understand why.

16 year old me would have been bored. I can understand why anybody will be bored by it. But as I guess we'll, we'll dig into more on the show. There's also so much to recommend it. And it's so it's well.

We'll talk about it as we talk about it. I read Walden all the way through in graduate school. I had a class and I had actually a couple of classes in 19th century literature. That and early modernism were my fields. So anything from about 1840 to about... 1940, I guess, that century was what I read in grad school. And Thoreau is a transcendentalist, as a lot of people will point out about the book Walden, the woods.

that Thoreau went off to live in over the course of two years were owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He doesn't mention Emerson in the book by name. But one of the things I find very interesting about it is I find Emerson just tedious to read. I mean, Emerson... Emerson, if you read him, is just like aphorism after aphorism after aphorism after aphorism. And he had some very important ideas that are central not only to transcendentalism.

but to American art history, to a lot of thinking of this country. But, oh, my God, I cannot. I cannot read him to save my life. I know he spoke a lot. So maybe he was a better speaker. You know, maybe he would get up there and talk. And that was strangled too. But what I'll say about Thoreau is Thoreau is one of those people that like you go along, you're like reading 19th century American stuff. You read like Hawthorne or something like that, or you read Irving and you're like.

These guys are fine. They're good. I like them, but they are very attached to European forms. They desperately would rather be writing about Italian subject matter. or whatever, or even Poe, to a certain extent, wants to be writing about European subjects. And then you come to like the middle of the century and you get people like Thoreau on the one hand and Melville on the other hand. And suddenly it's like...

They've invented the modern English vernacular, I feel like. Suddenly, you can read this and you can understand it. Now, whether you find it interesting or not, it's another point. I think that's very astute. That was what struck me when I most recently reread Moby Dick. And this would have been about 10 years ago, I think.

Or rather, I say re-read. That's actually when I first read Moby Dick, because prior to that, it was only in Children's Illustrated adaptations that I love. That was my first time I actually read Moby Dick. And I was struck immediately by the... the kind of familiarity of the prose style. And what's interesting is that, as I understand the history of the text of Moby Dick, that it was really not...

all that famous until the 20th century. So it's not even a matter of it was so influential that it, you know, everyone started copying it or whatever, but it really was kind of ahead of the curve that way. And I, yeah, and Thoreau was very... He read, well, he read, he read like blog posts. That's uncharitable, but I think, I think, you know what I'm saying? No, no, I definitely know what you're saying. I mean. Yeah, you're right about Bobby Dick. Melville was actually an extremely...

popular author in his day, but only for the novels that we don't remember him for. The first couple of novels he wrote were these kind of rousing sea adventures, and everyone was hoping that Moby Dick was going to be... yet another one of these like exciting stories of the south seas and it was not and uh so it was it was kind of

disliked in its time i think it was like in the early 1910s there were i'll have to look it up there was like a specific guy who rediscovered uh mobitech and now it's considered pivotal to american literature but you know there's a lot of these things like, you know, Gowan and the Green Knight.

lost for hundreds and hundreds of years had no effect on any of the literature that came after it then rediscovered in like the 18th century and like everyone's like oh my god what is this thing you know so yeah yeah

Anyway, but that's another podcast. So where to start with Walden? I mean, I think most people understand what Walden is. if they haven't read it, but it is the story of Thoreau going into the woods near Walden Pond, which is near Concord.

Massachusetts. That's kind of your backyard, right? Oh, yeah. I'll get all into that. You can go to Walden Pond. In fact, many, many people go to Walden Pond, and so they got a very nice... a nice park and visitor center and they have a little uh you know they don't have the original cabin they have a remade cabin there but you can go to where the original cabin was

if you like looking at, you know, stones half buried in the ground. Yeah, so Concord, Massachusetts, by the way, a real hotbed of... crazy transverse thought. Hawthorne was there for a while. It's also where Louisa May Alcott was from and her... Her dad, Bronson Alcott, was a big leader of transcendentalism. Even amongst the conquered crowd, though, Thoreau was something of an oddball. He did not.

tend to get along with people. And one of the things that's funny he says in the book is that when he went off and he started living in the woods, people came out to visit him and he actually had more of a social life when he started living in the woods.

One thing you'd have to make clear, you know, because people think maybe this is the story of someone doing some sort of a survivalist thing. No, he just goes off. He makes himself a little house in the woods. He's going in and out of Concord all the time. You know, he's been given a lot of...

You know, he doesn't really go into it so much in the book, but people are worried about him in Concord. They're coming out and like leaving food on his doorstep and stuff, you know. So it was not, you know, he was never in any danger. You know, it's like, it's like a Pulp's.

common people, you know, if he calls his dad, you can stop at all. Yeah. And to be fair, I think he's pretty upfront about that in, in the writings, like, well, funnily enough, like it's, you know, well, it's funny from the standpoint of a 21st century American.

and reading it. But he he he goes on at length at one point talking about how annoyed he is at the proximity of the railroad that he's right here. He's right next to the railroad. Yeah, I really wish I could have been a little more isolated than this. But well, you're right. Yeah. And he talks about, you know, he gets he gets callers, you know, every day and he goes into town for this or that. He sells his beans, you know.

Yeah, that's one of those other crazy things, because if you do go to the pond, it's a beautiful pond. It is an absolutely gorgeous place to go and to think about. and think about all the stuff that comes up in Walden. But the train line does go... like really, really close to one inlet of the pond. And it kind of reminds me of if you go to Stonehenge.

And similarly, there's a road that goes right by Stonehenge. And it's like their equivalent of a multi-lane highway, too. Yeah, yeah. And it's because, you know, for a long time, nobody cared. They're like, oh, well, there's those stones out there. You know, it feels weird, you know, when you're there and you think it should be somewhere completely away from humanity. And you feel that way about walls and pond, too. But it isn't. It's really just maybe a five, ten minute.

drive outside of Concord. I was trying to kind of contextualize it a bit in like, so that's what would be like maybe what happened, you know, a couple hours walk. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That, that makes sense. Yeah. It was a couple hours walk, but he, uh, in the book, um, Thoreau describes walking back and forth, and he tended to stay late in town and have to walk back at night, and that seems...

frightening to me because there were no lights. And so he's walking basically through the woods in pitch dark and he basically felt his way along. Yeah, it was fascinating. That portion, you know, he's talking about making his way by by feel. And so he knows that like there are these two pine trees are about 18 inches apart. And when I feel those, I know that I'm or he had like a guest who had stayed late.

And he basically just kind of like took him to the door and pointed him in the direction of Concord and said, like, just go that way. So, yeah. So.

So this is, you know, shortly before the Civil War is happening. And this comes after. a couple of decades of transcendentalism, you know, when you were last on, well, not that we were last on, but when we were on talking about Nathaniel Hawthorne, we went over the fact that Hawthorne was at at brook farm for a while which is a utopian community that's associated with transditalism there were a lot of these experiments going on at the time and this was thoreau's um experiment

I think that's a great way to put it. It was he was going to do a his his project was a one man utopian commune. Right. Right. It is very much of a piece with those kind of intentional communities that were especially in place in Massachusetts. Upstate New York, especially, of course, was another hotbed of social agitation and experimentation.

But it was interesting that, yeah, Thoreau's take is a bit unique because he was very, you know, like, but like I said, no point is he saying like, you know, I'm going to be my own man and do everything myself necessarily or whatever. But he is very intentionally attempting to. If not isolate himself, then provide himself with space away from other people to be more properly philosophical, which.

Which is, I think, an interesting, you know, a lot of the social reformers of the time were all very interested in how to create harmonious communities. They were very interested in how human beings get together and stay together. what you can do to perfect that and so the the uh the idea that someone would go off to you know try to do that just to be like i'm going to see how i can be myself the best way it's it was very it's very interesting yeah

I mean, you bring up a good point. I think if you're expecting this to be primarily a book about self-sustenance. It isn't really primarily about how you can live off the grid. You know, today you might think of someone, you know, some doom prepper. talking about how to survive off the grid or whatever, so much as it's Thoreau asking the question, how little can you live on? Yes. What is absolutely crucial?

for you to sustain life and then once you get that what do you want to do with the time you have left yeah yeah it's

The book itself, I thought was very. Like the writing itself, he's very he's very much a kind of writer who. Is taking. I mean, I don't know. I'm sure there's some actual scholarship on this, but the way it reads is it feels like here's someone who starts by describing this thing that they did while they're.

out on their own in there. You know, I think the bean patch is probably the most famous one of those and allowing that to be his jumping off point for what he really wants to talk about, which are these questions of. like sort of intellectual integrity and personal integrity when one is surrounded and constrained by everyone else around them. And he's very, very interested in how to live as an individual.

And that's, you know, that's where most like it's not not not just like how little can I get away with in terms of like my shelter or even food? You know, he has a few few moments where he's like. Tutting at how much beef and butter Americans eat. But as I think he, you know, the most important part of the experiment, what he would say was the most important part of the experiment is how little society.

can I get away with? Which makes all his, it makes all his visitors that much, you know, it's not much funnier. I mean, it's, it's, it also is funny to me that he, he, He opens the book with these passages that are some of the most memorable passages that he ever wrote, including... Like in the second chapter called Where I Lived and What I Lived For is probably the most famous passage of the book where he says, I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately.

to front only the essential facts of life and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. And this is, you know, extremely rousing. You know, and it's about like, I'm going to go, I'm going to find the simplest way of living so that I can really think about what it is to be alive and what my relationship is.

to my sustenance, to my house, to my clothing. And, you know, he spends this first part of the book also, like, really taking all these digs at, like, the... The excesses of material culture, like he talks a lot about how nobody really needs so many clothes, you know, how how how, you know, all all fashion is.

You know, and how people don't need big houses because big houses just weigh you down. People don't need to have animals to work through the ground because the husbandry to animals is just going to take up all your time. You know, he. he borrows animals, you know, it's very, it's very much. Yeah. Right. Yeah. He hires a team of locks in a few times, but it's very much a, it prefigures.

Or perhaps, you know, really influenced the kind of stereotypical mid-century critique of consumer culture of like, hey, it sounds like, you know. it sounds like you are working for your house, you know, or they're not working for you, you know, that kind of thing. Right. Right. It is very much prefigured. He, he, uh, boy, he does, he does. He has a lot of unkind words to say about farmers and farming. I thought what's pretty funny.

Oh, he's, he's, he, the thing, this is the thing about Thoreau is he is a real son of a bitch sometimes. Right. I was surprised by like, this man is a world-class hater. I mean, it's really something. It's probably why it's so much fun.

with it i was like you know totally like honey you gotta hear this you know right and and after all this stuff about simplifying his life what is the first thing he talks about doing with his time is he's going to read homer in the original greek and he talks and then he like Takes the piss on everybody. He's like, oh, if you read him in translation, you're not really reading him. And all this stuff. And you realize, yeah, this guy went to Harvard. Oh, yeah.

I get it. We're coming across a bit common people. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And the funny thing is, though, that he does talk trash about some of his neighbors, but he also talks about some people he admires because they have... a bit of classical culture rattling around in their heads. Odd farmers who speak other languages. There's one who can speak French and he says he tries to keep it up because he has no chance to...

to use it anymore. Yeah, he subscribes to French-language newspapers. Yeah, yeah. There's a couple of instances where I think this was a different... I think this might have... Or it might be the same guy. He was like a French-Canadian guy that he really admired because this man had kind of accidentally arrived at the simplicity code in a much less deliberate manner than Thoreau did.

And I detected in that portion, in that essay, almost a bit of, not envy exactly, but you could tell that he had this kind of like noble savage. vision of this this you know this unassuming french canadian guy who lived nearby to the you know the world the you know world's uh best diogenes impersonator yeah

I mean, Thoreau, he's such a complicated guy because one of the other things that is admirable about his writing is he takes time to admit that the Europeans are not the first people here. And he's finding everywhere the... the evidence of Indigenous people living here. And he talks, you know, but he ties the name of Walden to a story he once heard about some Indigenous people. And he's...

Interesting that he also talks about African-Americans living in the area, and he's very generous with that. Who he's not generous with is the Irish. Yes, which was very, very amusing as a gentleman of Irish tracking myself. That was really, it was really striking how...

Well, even being able to talk about a group, the Irish, which he does quite a bit, and he was like, oh, there are some people in town and also some Irish were over there. It's interesting, but it also, I mean, it makes some sense in that at that time, of course. You had a lot of fresh off the boat. Irish people had been emigrating to New England, you know, especially that's, you know, Boston is famously the capital of Irish America.

So these would have been a lot of, you know, kind of reason people there was actually. Yeah. Well, we can thank an Irishman or the Walden cabin because it was with an Irishman's shanty boards that he paid eight dollars for. He was able to construct the whole thing. I think he's fascinated by the Irish because in his... In his pursuit of simplicity, in his radical simplify, simplify, simplify, he also takes great pains to not like. You can tell he's struggling to try to express.

I don't mean be indolent. You know, I don't mean be lazy like these bog trotting Irish. I believe he does use the word bog trotting at some point. Well, Thoreau had a checkered.

passed before he... uh became known as a man of letters you know he he worked for a while uh like a lot of writers as a journalist but he also worked at his father's pencil factory he talks at the beginning of a of the book about like having all these different jobs and never quite fitting in. And of course, the way he says is like, you know, I was, you know, I was too good for this. I could see that this was not for me. And there is this kind of an odd way in which...

While he is advocating for simplicity, he also wants people to acknowledge that he's a, you know, something of a financial wizard that he's able to like. to account for everything and even turn a little profit while he's from the crops he grows. And that's the thing that's so funny about this. This is really late in the book. It's actually a section that, from what I understand,

was written after he left Walden Pond. And it kind of has like a different feeling to it. But there's a story where he goes to a nearby farm that has been abandoned. One night, you know, he's out and he's... things all go over there and all maybe overnight in one of the abandoned buildings. And he finds a family of Irish immigrants, you know, squatting there basically.

He immediately starts taking the father to task and saying, well, you should really be more careful with your money. With some ingenuity, you'll just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Dude, these guys are, these are, they're, you know, immigrants who came here with nothing. They were fortunate.

to find a place that they could use for shelter. They're doing the best they can, you know, and they're able to stay out of the rain. They had to flee from their home country because there was no food. Like, yeah, and this is also and this also comes after. He spends a couple pages lambasting all these New England Yankee farmers for being so penny pinching and how their mind is always on their debt and always on, you know, turning, turning this about. They're not really.

rowing anything they're just they see dollars they turn every there's a it's a pretty affecting paragraph it's a little silly but i do like one where he was talking about like You know, these farmers just all they grow are dollars and all they see in the land is dollars. They don't see the land, you know. And here you are. Yeah, he has like breakdowns, like itemized breakdowns of like. what he paid for the scrap wood that he used to build the, you know, look at my thrift, look at how, you know.

Right. Well, this is, you were alluding to this early on. I mean, I think people who come to Walden, I came to Walden this way. I knew a few select quotes. I knew that it was highly influential to a lot of.

philosophical thought. I know that a lot of people come to Concord, Massachusetts as a kind of a mecca because it's so important to them with this book. And you think you're going to read this book that's going to be just... back-to-back uh you know spiritual insights philosophical brilliance and it's not it's you know what you have instead is you have this

crazy, complicated character whose voice is going to carry you through all kinds of stuff. You know, some of it is absolutely brilliant, you know.

blood chillingly beautiful writing some of it is petty grievances against neighbors some of it is like how to you know things and some of it's like amateur natureism like oh i saw this bird today and i saw that you know like i'm going to keep my burning records here and if if you don't have um if you don't have a proclivity towards that kind of hodgepodge writing

I don't know what you can do with this book because it will bore you to tears. And that might be one of the reasons why I thought it was a hoot. You know, I really I really love that. And I was put in mind of the essays of Montaigne. That really it really rhymes with that for me. That was we read that for back when I was doing the cannonball.

And that was another one that I went in cold. If I had been assigned it, I didn't remember any of it, you know, and I think it has it has a similar tone of being this is a really thoughtful guy. is a very thoughtful man who has a great facility with language. The man can write a sentence.

But he's going to write about what he's thinking about. And the kind of, you know, he can veer away from the mission statement or really, I'm sure in Thoreau's mind. And really, I think, you know, and the reader can see that, too. it's you know he's tying those threads together it's you know he i think one of the one of the passages was that was most fascinating to me was a

Him describing at, you know, in great detail, a battle among a couple of species of ant. He observed and of course was using all of the, you know, all the common military. metaphor and whatnot for this particular animal behavior. But it really did like, yeah, like this, this guy is literally spending pages and pages talking about looking at ants. And I just I think it's terrific. I think we need more of that. And but it's also.

That kind of writing, that kind of well, like, you know, his deep and detailed description of the pawn, for instance, and he really gets into it talking about like. It's depth. It's setting among the forest, the hills, the landforms that he talks about how it seems to rise and fall.

of its own accord not really tied to what the rains are doing so perhaps it's something to do with the deeper water table of the springs and like he spends so much time on that and it's really At least I got the sense that like it is that that process of observation is so important to how he's to his thinking that he has to put that on the page to then talk about the things that it made him think about. It's this kind of highly eclectic personal assay that...

I agree. Montaigne has some of that. And I'm not going to say that Thoreau invents this because he didn't. But I do will say that Thoreau... did it very, very well. And after that, after Walden, is when we see... this kind of eclectic approach in writing. I think, you know, someone like Mark Twain, who's going back and forth between... personal reminiscence to completely made up story to some sort of a very pointed political thought, you know.

And that continues on into the 20th century and shapes things like Harold Ross's attitudes towards writers in The New Yorker, that kind of essay that has become... ubiquitous you know and and you do bring up uh blogging that's sort of the best of what blogging can do the people who whose work i admire are always the ones who are able to talk amusingly about something that happened that morning and then suddenly

Switch it off to like discussing something from Herodotus. It takes a certain kind of writer to be able to do that deftly and to make it amusing. Yeah. And Thoreau really, he really does that.

I meant to actually look into this, and John, you may know, were any of these pieces published before it was all collected as Walden? I don't... I don't believe so. I think that there was this very famous publishing house, what was it, that eventually, unfortunately got... got bought out eventually and it doesn't exist anymore. What is that? Oh, right. It was, it was, it was published by Tickner and Fields, which.

They were also the publisher of Emerson. They were the publisher for Nathaniel Hoffman. They're very important. New England publishing house, and then they got bought out. I actually think that someone is trying to bring back Tickner and Fields as an imprint for just this kind of... uh a headed writing um yeah well that's that's curious to me because like if i would have had to have guessed just with what you know what the book is and as i am confident it read very much like you know

Like a weekly dispatch, almost like a bit like, oh, what was his name? The great essayist. 17th century. No, no, no. 18th century. Ben Johnson. Is that what I'm thinking of? Ben Johnson. Yeah, sure. That's right. OK, yeah. But, you know, like Ben Johnson was kind of famously like, you know, he was he was another guy who had the talent for the.

personal essay that spins out into talking about something universal but he was kind of famously under like a deadline crunch so much of the time so that's that's interesting to me that Yeah, I would have I would have thought that because I knew a little bit about Thoreau. Like we had that journalism careers. I presume that this was like, OK, while he's out in the woods for a couple of years, he's writing his essays.

And then sends them off to Concord to be published. And that's why people are coming and visiting him or something like that. But that's very interesting to know that it was more like. I don't don't quote me on this, but I don't think he did. And I think that the thing is, he did write this. He did write a lot of this as it was happening. And then he wrote some of it afterwards and he put it all together.

The part of this book that actually made me laugh the hardest was you get to the very end of the book and he says, thus was my first year's life in the wood completed. And the second year was similar to it. That's all he talks about the second year. I finally left Wald in September 6, 1847. He's out of the second year.

It's like, man, if you've seen one year, you've seen them all. That's terrific. Yeah, I had a laugh out loud line. Just not all that, you know, pursuant to what we're talking about now, but I just want to make sure that I mentioned it. where he's it's in one of the portions of the book where he's talking quite a bit about like how to be an independent person like any and how like

how interested he is in being his own man and how little he sees anyone else having interest in that. Um, but, uh, he had, he had a line here that said, our life is like a German Confederacy. made up of petty states with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. And I just imagined like Otto von Bismarck reading that before and getting so hopping mad. I'll show Henry David Thoreau. I'll unify the German Empire.

There was also one line here that made me laugh, but for a different reason, which was in the section of where he talks about spring coming. He's talking about listening to birds outside his window. And then he says at one point as a single sentence with an exclamation point, the first sparrow of spring. And I did a double take because I live in New England.

sparrows are here the year round yeah yeah they don't go away from migratory birds yeah and i and i was wondering to myself This kind of casts a shadow over all of his natural observations looking backwards because I'm like, I really trust this man now I know his ornithology is so lackluster. But, you know, it's charming. He talks about, you know, there's times where he talks about seeing birds on the... On the pond, he sees muskrats, he sees otters at some point, and describes them with such...

charm. You can imagine those things, especially if you live in this area and you know what winters here look like. Yes, he talked at length about the woodchuck who ravaged his bean field, and that was like a recurring character. I think there were a number of portions when the woodchuck made an appearance again, and I was always delighted because it just made me think like a kind of like almost Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd relationship between Henry David Thoreau and this woodchuck.

It had a bit of a different ending than a Looney Tune because it does, we do have here, the next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my bean field. affect his transmigration, as a Tartar would say. Devour him, partly for experiment's sake. Yeah, he's inducing the reincarnation of this woodchuck as the, you know, the Buddhist, I guess he's thinking of the Kalmyks, the Buddhist Turkic step people. Anyway.

I do want to say, you know, living so close to Concord and having been to Walden Palm several times now. It is worth going. I mean, Concord is actually an amazing place to go to if you're in Boston. It has military history. It has literary history. It's just a beautiful place. If you go there, you know, the last time I was there actually was when a long time.

sophomore-led co-host Shannon Camp came, and Marina and I, my wife Marina and I, took her to Concord because Shannon is a huge Little Women fan and wanted to see the Orchard House. there, which was the highlight of her visit there. But we also went to see Walden Pond. And what's funny is if you go to Walden Pond, you see the little...

reconstruction of the cabin. Outside is a statue of Thoreau. And I don't know, you know, I don't know whether I think it's a great statue or a horrible statue. You should look up this. It's one of these things where the decision was made, you know, it was obviously modeled in clay and they left it, the artist left it very rough. And in it...

Thoreau was kind of like striding away from the house, like looking at his hand. Oh, yeah. And for the life of me, it's, you know, the epitome of the stoner. Look at your hand. And I bring up Shannon because she told me something funny once, which was that... Louisa May Alcott made the most hilarious dig at Thoreau because Thoreau was a constant presence around the circles of her father. She said that Thoreau had a chin beard.

at one point. And she said, which he thinks makes him very comely to the opposite sex, which will assure that he will never feel the chamber touch. Oh, or Henry David. No, that's yeah, that's that's that's terrific. That that statue is it is really something. Yeah, it's in that rough.

style of, you know, impressionistic almost. Yeah, that's very interesting because I'm sure, you know, Henry David Grell himself would balk at being the subject of a statue in this in this manner. At least that's what I get from him. It's a lot of the music, especially earlier on, talking about building his cabin and stuff like that. But he does get into why he did all this.

And what's what's interesting is how much he's like so fixated on people being permitted to live as fully as themselves as they can or as they. can strive to do, right? Like that's, that's his big motivating factor is like, I don't want to live like everyone else. I want to live like how I live and I need to go find out what that is. Yeah. You know, You know, growing up in the 70s, as I did, a lot of my childhood was filled with all these kinds of like whole earth.

review books or um like the foxfire books if you know what those were were very popular yeah and there were there were all these like uh even something like uh steal this book there were there were all these like guides to life that were out there that were also going to somehow change.

you you know for the better it was going to somehow like you were going to have some sort of a transcendent or life-altering experience doing the thing you know and it was and there was this this vogue for uh for do-it-yourself stuff and and all these books in my mind are always covered like the the title is in cooper black and the it's always like some printed on like the cheapest newsprint that they could because of some small hippie press somewhere but

And I was kind of like thinking about Walden that way until I got to the very end. And when he says, you know, that he left for as good reasons as he... went to the woods, and he said he felt like he had many other lives to live. And the thing that's funny about that is I think to myself, yeah, maybe his next life he's going into finance. You know, it's like there's this weird... Like...

almost like George Plimpton kind of attitude of I'm going to try everything and I'm going to write about it, you know, and he did the things that he he had access to. But I feel like if he lived today, he would be one of these people who would like have a. a reality show where he he tried out a career you know every every week yeah yeah it's like a different uh yeah yeah different line of work every week yeah it's it's it's interesting you know he's very

He's clearly if I don't know if they had the terminology at the time, but he's driven by almost a fear of being a phony. And so he's so. interested in or at least his writing is so interesting walden is so interested in uh this idea of authentic living and authentic experience of the world and that i think is in maybe not conflict, it's intention with the individualist tack, really. And it comes across in the text.

Where he's very much like, you know, we should all be permitted to live as we're going to live. And then he has nothing but bad things to say about the way everyone else lives. But I guess that's. that's part and parcel of it really you know you're in a way it can almost come off as teenagerish yeah there's a lot in there about that kind of

that is kind of revolving around that tension between becoming your own person and being dependent that so, so many teenagers kind of struggle with that. It can kind of come across as a little bit, you know, I don't know, like, you know, Going out the door, like, you know, when I recall when my my my little brother was about actually probably about Moira's age, my daughter. So like, you know, seven or eight.

And, you know, my dad had asked him to pick up his room and he just was just just heart rinse, just flopped down on the floor and theatrics and just threw gritted teeth. uh says to my mom dad just doesn't understand that life is for living amount of ennui coming from this grade schooler there's a I don't know. There are shades of that at times. But I also think that's an important topic to wrestle with. I don't think I think a less patient, an earlier version of me probably would have.

really turned his nose up at this but as i've kind of matured as a reader as i've gotten you know as i've gotten older myself i kind of realized that you know something may seem stupid and juvenile maybe but also when you are a kid when you are someone growing up those are really important questions they really are

I mean, you're encountering these kinds of feelings, these kinds of tensions, these things pulling you in different directions. And that's important. That's really something to grapple with. And just because, you know, this grown man is talking about things that I consider a bit, you know, like, well, I should have gone over that when you're 19, buddy. Like, well, no, perhaps I should not have gotten over. Maybe I should be a little more deliberate with.

I spend my time on this beautiful transcendentalist tree globe that we have. I don't know. I'm a little rambly, Wes. No, but yeah, I do think...

You bring up the idea of tension. I feel like this is in some ways what I find most charming about the book is there are all kinds of tension. And it does illustrate the way in which... we can hold sometimes conflicting ideas or conflicting attitudes, and then somehow our mind is able to meld those together into something that makes sense. And I was thinking about this because late in the book, In fact, when he talks about spring, he has this passage where he talks about how...

You know, like spring is making things the grass greener. He's saying like, so like good thoughts make our thoughts bloom. And he talks about the sort of internal life of the mind and this idea that going to the woods.

is a way to develop your own intellect and your own sense of self. And the reason that strikes me is Emerson had a very famous... essay called nature and the thing that everyone knows about nature because nobody has read the rest of nature is there's a line in there where he says when i am in nature i am i become a transparent eyeball And there have been so many dumb cartoons drawn of this. You can look up Emerson's transparent eyeball and you'll find them all over the Internet.

That implies that the value of nature is this oceanic feeling, this dissolution of ego. You remove ego from the equation. And there is this tension between this idea that this is the way you're going to absolutely assert yourself and this is where you go in some ways to escape yourself. And I like that because I think that both things are true. And I guess, you know, I don't necessarily think that they're actually in opposition, even if they're in conflict.

Yeah, that's a great way to put it. It's well, it's two different facets of the human condition, you know, they exist simultaneously.

And so it's so, and I think that's part of why it's part, it's part of why the, at least to me reading it, I, I, I, it resonated so much. It's still, you know, it still hits so to speak because it is. if not maybe universal, I wouldn't necessarily call it universal because this is very much, I think, tied up in American ideas about what it is to be your own person, what that means, how you go about that.

Where do you can do that? Because, I mean, you know, he talks before he mentions in the text that like. You know, he's lucky that he lives here on the continent of North America where he can go and do this. And, you know, and not back in old crowded Europe where, you know, you try to go walk off somewhere and you run into another village. Right, right. Russell, in some ways, he is the ultimate parody of the rich middle class liberal.

who doesn't realize how much of his opportunities to find himself, to spend time in nature, to reject society. How much of that is simply permitted by the fact that he has enough money to do so and by the fact that he's white and male? There's occasionally there's... I think there's glimmers of a little bit of that understanding here and there. But yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. Like he's he's very proud of and I'll tell you, like, I think he came by honestly, like, you know, if we take.

If we take the text that it's word, the man built the damn house, you know, he hoed the damn bean field and he went tradition, you know, he baked the bread. I'll give it to him. But it's also like, you know, when he has his like, you know, his itemized budget for his bean field. Right. Or like, you know, his crops that he grew. And you realize like, OK, like your little experiment and being your own man and doing everything.

Well, you know, you didn't you didn't cast the iron to make that hoe. You know, you didn't you know, you think like there's there's all manner of ways in which you are dependent on the people before you and around you. to be able to do this and i i don't know that he ever really maybe i'm misremembering i don't think he talks about that all that very much he's mostly crowing about you know how much he did by himself

As I've said before in this podcast, I got a late in life diagnosis of autism. While there was no diagnosis back in the 19th century, I do know that today. The autistic community really wants to claim Thoreau as this great ASD individual. And I think that the very fact that he wants so desperately to just be alone. That more than anything else, I don't want to be an armchair psychologist myself, but that does cement it for me. I do think it would be, I can definitely see it.

Also, as as as someone who also has a neurodivergent diagnosis, I can definitely see that. I do think it would be a real coup for the autism community to bag the the the the famous autist. who doesn't like trains. It was very amusing to me from a kind of dramatic irony standpoint to read an essay from 1854 bemoaning the hectic pace of the 30 miles per hour railroad and the handsome carts going up and down.

And the telegram that you simply can't wait more than a day to find out what happened around the world. And this, this kind of pace can't be kept up like, Oh buddy, you'd, you would really hate the smart. Thanks again to guest host Daniel Doughty. If you have an idea for a book, story, poem, or any other reading to cover on a future episode, or a suggestion for a guest host,

Or if you'd like to say hi, you can write me at sophomore.literature at gmail.com. You can also keep up with me at my blog at johnmccoy.org, where I discuss this podcast, literature. Pop culture, the works. Subscribe and you'll get new posts by email. The Sophomore Lit theme song is by Malcolm Nygaard. This podcast is brought to you by the Incomparable Network. There's an AI filter that... Adobe does to make things sound like you used a real microphone. Okay, cool.

Well, we don't feel quite so bad, but I do think... I mean, I feel bad about using AI in any way, but I suppose this is one actual case where you're not taking... work away from anybody. Yeah, exactly. Doing something that a human being would not be good.