Curious about the impulse behind Thoreau’s famous journal, I looked up Henry Seidel Canby’s account. Canby said all the Concord intellectuals kept a journal. It was the standard means of self-improvement of the day.
There was a naïve idea, which the young Thoreau swallowed whole and never got rid of, that the more freightage of quotations and abstracts from good books, and the more comment on what people ought to think, the more self-improvement. Self-expression for all of them, even Emerson, was the adequate expression of what they thought they ought to think.
To me, this is another version of yesterday’s note. We start with a notion of doing something good for ourselves — call it self-improvement or self-help or self-nurturing or wellbeing. The difficulty is hearing the still small voice within rather than the din coming from the chorus outside.
• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 78.
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