Why Thoreau noticed

 Maybe the key test for biographers is whether they can list their subject’s failures. Here’s Henry Seidel Canby’s list for Thoreau:

 

Failure with his friends, failure to discover the great secret, failure to reach a satisfactory stopping place in his studies of detail, failure to make up his mind how to use his thousands of pages of mixed notebook, essay, and poetic philosophy, troubled him but never disturbed the essential joy in experience. It did not need fame, or even a certainty of achievement, to make him a very happy man in his relations with nature …. He observed, first of all I should say, because he liked to do so.

 

The “great secret” was the quest to find the Transcendental — some spiritual reality behind nature. That project made Thoreau’s observations less scientifically useful than they might have been, at least if your science is biology. But Thoreau, to the extent that he was interested in science, was more anthropologist than biologist. He was more interested in natural places as the home or habitat of people. He began by looking for forces in nature that shaped people.

Eventually, he was just looking, just paying attention to what was there, without worrying much about what might be behind it.

Thoreau recorded the details of the place he knew. He was aware that a lot of his neighbors hardly noticed it. There was no universal agreement about the place. There was no Transcendental reality behind it, at least as far as Thoreau could see. But he found that the place was worth his attention. He didn’t need a reason to go look.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 335-6.

Equinox

 We walked in the woods through bands of rain because we’d been cooped up for a week by the dog’s illness. And how can you stay inside on the equinox?

The forest canopy is still thick. During the heavy bands, the sound of rain in the trees was deafening. During the light bands, you could hear the frogs.

Before we think

 Julian Girdham’s “The Wolf You Feed: an essay on Attention” makes some points I wish I’d made in my notes about noticing. Here are two: 

We have to attend before we can think.

 

It’s essential. You can’t think about what you don’t notice, whether not noticing is a simple failure or an act of willful ignorance.

 

It is increasingly clear to me that in education the question of attention is also an ethical issue.

 

As Girdham puts it, the most disturbing problems we humans face are failures to pay attention. 

There are some lines in the essay I’d love to argue about. I’m not sure what memory is — but I wouldn’t describe it as the residue of thought. (He’s quoting Daniel Willingham, a psychologist.) But I love his description of how a teacher can open a work of art — a poem, for example — to a student who is paying attention. I am interested in how someone who has learned to notice can teach another how much there is to be gained by looking carefully and thinking carefully.

• Source: Juilan Girdham’s “The Wolf You Feed: an essay on Attention” is here:

https://www.juliangirdham.com/blog/the-wolf-you-feed-an-essay-on-attention

I’ve mentioned Girdham’s newsletter The Fortnightly repeatedly in these notes.

Noticing

 One of the recurring themes of this collection of notes is noticing. It’s possible for a person to go into a crowded room and be so self-absorbed that he notices no one else. The same thing is possible when a person goes into the woods.

Thoreau’s ability to observe — to notice, to attend, to pay attention — is the trait that still astonishes me. Here’s Canby, describing Thoreau in the 1850s:

 

No other man alive could have seen so much. And all this in a mounting excitement, stirred by his sheer love of wild nature, but also by the constant novelty of familiar places growing daily more complex as he penetrated their infinite variety. When he was able to identify the flowers, there were their habitats and times of opening to be studied. Then suddenly he discovered the lichens, and every weathered rock became a museum. Then the grasses, never really seen before, caught his attention, and proved rich and confusing beyond his guess. After that it was the mosses, the mushrooms, the hawks and the owls, the wild ducks, the flora of the swamps, then trees and their succession‚ and so on and on. One can take this Journal from the fifties on, and label each section as the moss year, the tree year, the muskrat year the bullfrog year. Of course they overlap. 

 

I like that outrageous claim. We tend to notice people who are the wealthiest, the most famous, the most powerful. But shouldn’t we wish for ourselves that we see a lot, rather than earn a lot or impress others a lot? Shouldn’t we want to  go through life noticing the world we live in?

And what should we want for our children: “No other person could have made so much money” or “No other person could have seen so much”?

• Sources: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 312.

There are so many posts about noticing it’s hard to find a place to start, but this might do: “Davenport’s search for arrowheads,” March 15, 2022.

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/03/davenports-search-for-arrowheads.html

Lucas the cat

 Lucas, our old cat, died. I buried him in the woodlot, a place he loved.

When the Wise Woman adopted him from the animal shelter, the veterinarian told us he was about 3 years old and had a heart problem. The vet predicted Lucas wouldn’t last long.

Lucas was almost 20 when his heart finally failed.

The Wise Woman has always had cats. When she talks to cats, they listen.

I was raised among dogs by dog people. Cats have always been foreign to me.

I crossed some kind of bridge with Lucas.

When he came to live with us, Lucas insisted on sleeping either on me or next to me. When he got hungry, he told me, as if he were afraid to bother the Wise Woman. When service by the waitstaff was slow, he complained to me. If I slept past his breakfast time, he swatted me in the head, not the Wise Woman.

He sat on the seat beside me when I drove the truck as we moved from Galveston to San Antonio. He sat beside me when I drove the truck when we moved to Georgia.

Just about every word of this online collection of notes was written with Lucas curled up nearby. He found my writing to be a dull activity, which pleased him. He saw opportunities for undisturbed naps.

Psychologists say that grief disorients you — if you feel a loss as a great loss, a fundamental loss, you begin to question all your assumptions. You wonder what else you’ve taken for granted and what else could be taken away. You blunder around, confused and lost, for a while.

I buried Lucas almost two weeks ago. I’m just now able to post a note about it.

Who proposed to Henry?

 I love short stories. I especially love a short story about a historical event that is so well researched that it’s hard to tell where the fiction starts. Guy Davenport and Bernard Malamud wrote wonderful specimens.

If you know contemporary writers who are interested in that genre, please pass along a suggestion: I’d love to read a story about who proposed to Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau, 30, was staying at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house while the great man was lecturing in Europe. Thoreau wrote him a letter on Nov. 14, 1847, that reported:

 

I have had a tragic correspondence, for the most part all on one side, with Miss ——. She did really wish to — I hesitate to write — marry me. That is the way they spell it. Of course I did not write a deliberate answer. How could I deliberate upon it? I sent back as distinct a no as I have learned to pronounce after considerable practice, and I trust that this no has succeeded.

 

Thoreau goes on, but that’s the gist of it.

Canby thought it likely that Sophia Foord, 43, was the proposer. But he made a case that it was Margaret Fuller, 37, the first editor of The Dial.

Canby said that he hoped it was Fuller, a brilliant woman who was frequently exasperated by Thoreau and his writing.

To me, the question is: What did any woman see in the man?

Thoreau was not widely viewed as companionable. As Canby described him in another context:

 

A chestnut bur, hiding its sweetness, Thoreau was to most men.

 

Who would pursue a chestnut bur? I would love to meet her.

Fiction writers can get to questions that historians cannot. 

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 261 and 245.

I’ve gone on about this sub-genre of short story. Here are two examples:

“Davenport: ‘John Charles Tapner,’” Nov. 22, 2022.

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/11/davenport-john-charles-tapner.html

“Malamud: ‘In Kew Gardens,’” March 20, 2024.

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/03/malamud-in-kew-gardens.html

What it's like to write a book

 Here’s Annie Dillard on what’s it like to write a book: 

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

 

I’m not sure it would be a good idea to share that view with freshmen studying English Composition. It probably wouldn’t have helped me decide what to do with myself.

Still, I wish I’d had a better sense, early in life, of the many different things that writers have tried to do — or could try to do. I wish I’d had a better sense of the possibilities.

 • Source: Annie Dillard, The Writing Life; New York, HarperPerennial, 1990, p. 52.