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. 

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard said this about writing:

 

It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

 

One of the recurring themes of this online collection of notes is that writing doesn’t start with questions of craft. Dillard talked about writing as a way of life, rather than a collection of skills or competencies.

I suppose you saw her obituary in the newspapers too.

• Source: Annie Dillard, The Writing Life; New York, HarperPerennial, 1990, p. 11.

Scuppernongs

 Ancient Algonquian speakers noticed the sweetbay magnolias and named the river in North Carolina askuponong, place of the sweetbay tree. In the early 1800s, Europeans noticed the bronze-colored grapes growing on the riverbank and called the grape and the river Scuppernong.

The grapes are muscadines. Most muscadines are purple to black. The coloring of the scuppernongs is the work of a recessive gene — as simple as blue eyes in humans.

Muscadines grow in states along the coast from Delaware to Texas. They grow up the Mississippi Valley to the Missouri. As I boy, I pillaged vines at my grandparents’ places in East Texas and West Tennessee. But I have never seen anything like the vines in the Georgia Piedmont.

I owe readers a clarification: I’d spoken of August as the peak month for wild muscadines here. The vines  are still producing. I have learned to think of peak months.

I’m interested in the grapes because the idea of “sustainability” has been spreading from biologists to farmers.

European grapes are wonderful, but they are susceptible to Pierce’s disease, caused by bacteria. Muscadines are naturally resistant, which is why an amateur naturalist like me is baffled by the bumper crop. If you’re a farmer, we’re talking about the lower costs of fighting pathogens and less chance of crop failure.

• Source: Peter C. Andersen, Ali Sarkhosh, Dustin Huff, and Jacque W. Breman, “The Muscadine Grape (Vitis rotundifolia Michx)”; askifas, n.d. The site is run by extension agents associated with the University of Florida.The article is here:

https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/HS100

Footnote, with skaters

 A showoff, a Greek statue and stooped man went skating.

It’s not a joke — just a footnote on American literature.

Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne lived in the same village — Concord, Mass. — and knew each other. Hawthorne’s daughter Rose Lathrop left an account of the three writers skating on the river.

 

Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice‚ very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air. 

 

Lathrop thought her father would have liked to have been better friends with Thoreau. But Thoreau wasn’t much interested in Hawthorne’s writing.

Henry Seidel Canby says Thoreau read for knowledge and disliked fiction. Canby’s verdict:

 

There can be no other American man of letters who read so little American literature.

 

• Sources: The passage on the skaters is from Rose Lathrop’s “Memories of Hawthorne.” It’s quoted in Henry Seidel Canby’s Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 174. Canby’s note on Thoreau’s reading is on p. 188.

What book should be taught in schools?

 The Guardian, a newspaper that does interesting things, recently asked some writers to recommend a book that should be taught in schools. The writers were asked to pick a book they thought would inspire a lifelong love of reading.

No spoilers. No comments on the selections. A link to the list is below.

If I were a newspaper editor, I’d ask the question of political candidates.

In the old days, we used to send questionnaires to candidates for public office. We published the replies.

What book do you think should be taught in public schools?

An answer might tell voters about the kinds of things that are on the candidate’s mind.

• Source: Kate Mosse, “’Bold, brilliant, thrilling’: leading authors on the novels every school should teach”; The Guardian, 5 Sep 2026. It’s here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/sep/05/bold-brilliant-thrilling-leading-authors-on-the-novels-every-school-should-teach

Book fair in Dahlonega

 We are at the Regional Book Fair at the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega.

If you’ve ever thought about starting a tabletop publishing company, this is one of the benefits.

If you’re a bookseller, no matter how small, you get to sit at a table and talk to people who love to read. Some are English professors and some are grandmothers looking for a children’s book. They will tell you what they like and what they don’t. I am taking notes.

Things I forget

 I forget details that you might not — that Thoreau was an experienced builder when he started his cabin at Walden Pond in 1845, for example.

Thoreau had been helping to build the family’s new house across the railroad in Concord. It was called the Texas house because of its distance from the Mill-Dam, which was reckoned as the center of civilization. Even then, “Texas” was another word for “backwater” or “wilderness.”

Henry Seibel Canby says the cabin was so well made that it survived two moves after Thoreau died and ended up as part of a garage.

Because he taught us to simplify our lives, I remember that Thoreau didn’t have to move much in the way of clothes, furniture and household goods. I forget that he had to haul his boat from the river to the pond.

• Sources: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 209, 217.

The effort to know the world

 Wendell Berry wrote some things I argue with. But I’m not sure we’ve had a writer who was better at getting to a glaring problem with American life. This clear, brief summary is from his essay “A Native Hill”:

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world … We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never fully understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

 

You can read almost anything and want to change our country’s miserable policies. Berry makes me want to change my own habits. He also gives me hope that if we learn to know the world a little better, something good will come of it. 

• Source: Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays 1965-1980; San Franciso: North Point Press, 1980. The quotation, from the essay “A Native Hill,” is on page 98.

Yellow River, early September

 We found a thick stand of beebalm, Monarda punctata, on the banks of the Yellow River on Labor Day.

The plant reminds me of those tiered trays that English people used to serve sandwiches on at teatime, at least in the movies. With beebalm, you have layers of yellow flowers with pink, purple and green bracts in between.

All those flowers attract pollinators, hence the common name. You can see plenty of bees in a stand of beebalm — but also hummingbirds, butterflies, moths and wasps.

Another common name, allegedly, is horsemint. The plant is in the mint family. If in doubt, crush a leaf and smell.

Also blooming in early September:

• Camphorweed is putting out scraggly yellow flowers. Talk about smell. Break a stem of Heterotheca subaxillaris and you’re in the medicine cabinet.

• The crownbeards in genus Verbesina are also have yellow flowers.

• Kudzu vines are putting out showy blossoms. I’d say the blooms are magenta, oxblood or purple, but I’m not good with colors. I wish I knew more about the variations within genus Pueraria.

• We also saw some fuzzybeans, in genus Strophostyles, which put out lovely soft purple flowers that remind me of pigeonwings, Clitoria mariana. Fuzzybeans are legumes and were used as food and medicine by the ancient peoples.

When you get to know a place, you have a sense of when it’s time to see a blossom of a peculiar shape or color. You start looking, and you might notice, as at the poet Franz Wright put it, “the unnoticed miracle of things precisely as they are.”

Selected and unabridged

 I admire Thoreau. But I don’t have it in me to read the entire Journal.

Thoreau saw it as one book, rather than a collection of notebooks. It’s 2 million words. Opinions differ about what’s worth reading.

Henry Seibel Canby points out that in the early years Thoreau played around with short essays. Thoreau was experimenting with topics to see which could be developed into lectures, which were paying gigs. Canby says most of these one-paragraph essays are “pretty dreadful.”

Carl Bode, who edited a selection of Journal entries, says Thoreau soon put his journal to the right use. I can imagine Professor Bode urging his students to read the whole thing.

In college, I spent an afternoon in the library with what was then viewed as the unabridged Journal. I think it was the 1906 edition. I realized that I needed an editor, even if Thoreau did not. My battered copy of Bode’s selections dates from those days.

I think this is one of the interesting features of remarks, thoughts written in journals, aphorisms. Their brevity leaves a lot of room for the readers to do their own work. One reader interprets, while another goes off on a flight of fancy.

In more formal compositions, the author shows the reader where to go.

Since more is left to the readers’ imagination, you’d expect more disagreement about what’s good and what’s not.

An enormous pile of remarks — Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, for example — can be mined in different ways by different editors.

• Sources: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 128-9.

Selected Journals of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode; New York: Signet Classics, 1967, p. 9.

Thoughts in a journal

 I have argued — tongue only half in cheek — that the remark should be a literary form. I think remarks sometimes stand alone and don’t need to fit into some larger context, such as an essay. 

Here’s Thoreau with the same idea:

 

I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form to greater advantage — than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life — & are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched — It is more simple — less artful — I feel that in the other case I should have no proper frame for my sketches.

 

Here’s Winfield Townley Scott on the same notion: 

 

I am trying to put down things I have thought — collecting them as well as I can remember … It is more fun than writing essays: arrangement, progression, transition, are hard for me to manage …

 

In my mind, remarks, thoughts and notebook entries are the same thing.

I’ve been reading Thoreau’s Journal and thinking about journals, diaries and collections of aphorisms. The question about what we think of remarks seems relevant to me in the age where we post a lot of what we write. Maybe I’m doing the same thing when I post a note online and when I compose something. But I’m not sure my old English teacher would see it that way.

• Sources: Thoreau’s remark was from his Journal on Jan. 27, 1852. I think the source is Henry David Thoreau, Journal, edited by John C. Broderick et. al.; Princeton University Press, 1981-. But, alas, it’s now a lost soul in an old notebook.

A similar version of the entry is in Selected Journals of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode; New York: Signet Classics, 1967, p. 15.

A Dirty Hand: The Literary Notebooks of Winfield Townley Scott, University of Texas Press, 1969. I’ve quoted it at least three times, most recently in “On turning 5, Aug. 26, 2026.” It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/08/on-turning-5.html

Politics and predictive numbers

 Several notes in this collection have described Georgia as a swing state.

Cory Ruth of Atlanta, a political strategist and tech consultant, says that’s wrong. He says the Republican Party has had a structural advantage in every election since 2010. Republicans carried every constitutional office that year.

I might owe readers a correction.

Ruth also said that primary turnout is the strongest indicator of general election outcomes in Georgia. Whatever party shows up with the most voters in the primaries in May is the favorite to win the general election in November.

As Ruth put it, “primary turnout is the best polling.”

Here were the figures reported for the May primaries:

• Democratic: 1.08 million, 53.7 percent.

• Republican: 933,000, 46.3 percent.

Those figures ignore ballots cast for nonpartisan races, mostly judicial.

To me, the most important number is voter turnout.

Georgia has more than 7.5 million registered voters. It says a lot when 27 percent is a record — a cause for rejoicing among those concerned about civic engagement.

The Independent Voter Project does not track independent voters in the same way as the sources used above, so the numbers aren’t comparable. But it’s the only source I’ve found that tracks turnout rates across parties.

Here’s the Independent Voter Project’s report on the total number of registered voters with turnout rates for the primaries:

• Democratic — 3.32 million, 43.8 percent turnout.

• Republican — 2.08 million, 27.5 percent turnout.

• Independent — 2.17 million, 28.7 percent turnout.

• Sources: Cory Ruth, “Georgia is not a swing state, but it could veer blue in 2026”’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sept. 4, 2026.

The report by the Independent Voter Project is here:

https://independentvoterproject.org/voter-stats/ga

A new phrase: 'ICE tax'

 My newspaper reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, arrested 2,250 people in Georgia in July, a 50 percent increase over June. On the same day agency officials were bragging about their public service, I heard the expression “ICE tax.”

The phrase, which was new to me, refers to the hidden costs people pay because of the intimidation of mass arrests and deportations.

A lot of the agricultural workers in the South and Southwest are from Mexico. The pay is borderline, and ICE agents are viewed like sicarios, the enforcers for the cartels. If you’re a migrant worker weighing costs and benefits, you might decide the annual trip north is just not worth it.

It’s apparently surprised some American farmers that they have not been overrun by local folks who want to work in the heat harvesting crops.

Farmers, who are already paying disastrous fuel prices because of a disastrous war, are having to pay higher wages. The higher costs are showing up at the supermarket.

It’s not just agricultural workers. A lot of the people working for low wages at nursing homes and at construction sites are also from Mexico. The homebuilding industry is slowing down in some areas. Nursing homes are raising rates.

I wonder whether the new phrase will catch on.

• Source: I’m not sure who coined the phrase, but an advocacy group called America’s Voice used it in a report mentioned here:

https://americasvoice.org/press_releases/watch-lawmakers-an-economist-and-a-care-worker-sound-the-alarm-on-the-ice-tax-hitting-southwestern-families/

So long, hummingbirds

 Fewer hummingbirds are at our feeders. August was such a frenzy I found myself just barely able to watch from my easy chair. It’s feeling you get from watching a nailbiter of a ballgame from the bleachers.

Terry Johnson, a fine naturalist who lives in Central Georgia, said the Ruby-throated hummingbirds go in waves — the males leaving as early as July, the females going next, and this year’s birds going last. 

Most of us know that the birds mobbed the feeders to store up fuel for the migration southwest, crossing the Gulf of Mexico.

Johnson had the numbers: During the feeding frenzy, the weight of the average female increases from 3.5 grams to 5.5. Each gram of fat can be converted into about 300 miles.

I have been trying to imagine it — what a 57 percent change in weight would be like. The gain in a few weeks. The loss in a few days.

'The Problem of Tobacco'

 Wendell Berry, who taught English at the University of Kentucky, was probably the state’s most famous farmer. He argued with the dean of the university’s agriculture school.

The dean was right about some things: Berry used draft horses and other “primitive” methods. If every farmer adapted those methods tomorrow, American farmers couldn’t feed the American people.

I think that’s true, but I’m sure it misses the point. Berry’s point was that we humans had better adopt a way of agriculture that doesn’t poison and destroy the earth.

That’s what right about his defense of “primitive” farming methods. And it’s what’s wrong with his defense of tobacco.

Berry said some things about tobacco that are true but that contradict the argument he made everywhere else. We humans badly need an agriculture that doesn’t poison the earth and doesn’t kill other plants and animals. “Animals” should be taken broadly, to include us.

If we humans are going to develop a better way of growing our food that does less damage to the earth and its creatures, we ought to stop growing crops that poison us. Tobacco is addictive and carcinogenic. It’s poison.

It you’re curious about Berry’s arguments, I’ve including a link below. He says a lot of things about the economics of farming, the policies behind federal agricultural programs and about free choice involving legal products that might interest you.

But the arguments just make me mad. Part of that is because Berry and I share a heritage.

The South has always been a peculiar place and part of that off-kilter quality is because it buys into arguments like this.

In colonial days, at least some people knew that slavery was wrong. But “respectable” people — people with money, people in pulpits, people in banks — raised grave concerns about the economy and the structure of society.

When I was a boy, people in the South knew that Jim Crow was wrong, that denying human rights to human beings was outrageously wrong. But “respectable” people raised grave concerns about the economy and social structure. It made me mad then — and makes me mad now.

It made me mad that the region’s writers peddled these arguments. It made me mad enough to start writing for perhaps the smallest daily newspaper in Texas. I wasn’t trying to change the world. I wanted to try to influence a small community that included the family farm.

I think Wendell Berry was wrong about tobacco. But I know he was right about the larger argument: We’ve got to stop poisoning the earth — and its creatures — as we go about the business of growing something to eat.

I think Berry is one of the most important thinkers and writers of my lifetime. I’ll continue to read him. I don’t think he was perfect.

• Source: You can find Wendell Berry’s essay “The Problem of Tobacco” here:

https://www.kerrykkuehn.com/resources/large/berry_tobacco.pdf

And thanks, Michael, for the nudge.

‘A Timbered Choir’

 Yesterday’s note was on Wendell Berry’s collection of Sabbath poems, A Timbered Choir. I’m not sure you’d enjoy it, but I thought I’d give you some samples so you could see what kind of book it is.

My favorite poem is just four lines, and I’ve quoted it before:

 

Best of any song

is bird song

in the quiet, but first

you must have the quiet.

 

I’ve written essays about why I am, by profession, a woods walker. Berry got it in 17 words.

Some of Berry’s poems always provoke a personal reaction — that is, they get to me in a way they might not get to you. Berry, while walking the woods on Sunday mornings, sometimes mused about his work as a writer.

 

I would not have been a poet

except that I have been in love

alive in this mortal world,

or any essayist except that I

have been bewildered or afraid …

 

I read those lines and knew in my bones I was an essayist, though newspaper people call them columnists.

Finally, there is no level ground in the Geogia Piedmont. The Wise Woman and I live on a slope with a woodlot and a garden on terraces made by hand with a shovel and crowbar.

 

We keep an old way

In light and breath to stay

This household on its slope.

 

Berry wrote more than 50 books. I’ve admired his essays on agriculture and rural life, his long essay on American racism and his short stories. But if I were looking for a place to start on this wonderful American writer, it’d be A Timbered Choir.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir; Berkeley, Calif.: Centerpoint, 1998, pp. 207, 182, 128.

Where no path is worn

 I think of Wendell Berry as an essayist, but I tend to read his poetry. 

He made it a practice to spend Sunday mornings in the woods, just being quiet and listening. A Timbered Choiris a collection of his Sabbath poems from 1979 to 1997. Here’s the beginning of II from 1979: 

 

Another Sunday morning comes

And I resume the standing Sabbath

Of the woods, where the finest blooms

Of time return, and where no path

 

Is worn but wears its makers out

At last, and disappears in leaves

Of fallen seasons. The tracked rut

Fills and levels; here nothing grieves

 

In the risen season. Past life lives

In the living.

 

Berry called himself an amateur poet. He said he did the work for the love of the work to his own satisfaction. Those were two of the conditions of self-employment, he said.

I’m not a poet. But, like Berry, I’m a self-employed woods walker. And like Berry, I sometimes find that my mind seems open and aware for a moment. I see things that I had overlooked — those “finest blooms” that I previously had been in too much of a hurry to see.

I get a whiff of what these poems are about. I tend to come back to them. I can’t imagine a spiritual life that doesn’t grow out of the natural world.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir; Berkeley, Calif.: Centerpoint, 1998, p. 6.

Wendell Berry, 1934 – 2026

 Wendell Berry was the kind of fellow who hated to go anywhere without his pocketknife or his dog. He was the kind of fellow who spoke to me, the kind of writer I read.

News of any death is sad. But I’m grateful that such a writer lived in our lifetime. The landscapes he saw are the landscapes in front of us now. We can see them, appreciate them and conserve them. Or we can, as we are apt to do, see nothing much at all.

I’m going to be reading Berry for bit. I think I’ll start with A Timbered Choir.

Thoreau and the publishing world

 A recurring theme: I’m trying to think about writing — not the craft of writing but the part that comes before it.

Imagine Henry David Thoreau at 25, being told by everyone that he really should find a career. He’s got a degree from Harvard, though he often wonders what it’s for. He’s tried keeping a school. There had been more spectacular failures, one can suppose.

He worked for Emerson for a while, and the great man got him a gig tutoring a nephew. Ralph Waldo’s brother William was a businessman on Staten Island, close enough to give Thoreau a gateway to the publishing world of New York.

The problem, in 1843, was there wasn’t much of a publishing world.

Poe was scraping by, barely, with poetry and short fiction. Longfellow was publishing poetry, but it’d be another decade before he felt he could leave his teaching job and focus on writing.

Can you imagine Thoreau trying to write for a market? Doing a knockoff or cover of one of Poe’s horror stories, for example? Or a long poem narrating the exploits of a Revolutionary War hero?

No one was writing the kind of thing that Thoreau wanted to write. He was interested in the question of the best way to live. He wanted to conduct tests and trials — to travel on rivers or hike across Cape Cod or maybe live in a cabin at Walden Pond — and report on the experiences. What could he learn? What could he convey to friends and readers?

That’s a vital bit of knowledge, finding out what it is that you want to do. Thoreau wasn’t clear when he left college.

He was clearer after seeing the glittering publishing world of New York. By seeing what was there, he got a better sense of what he didn’t want to do. And it wasn’t long before he began thinking about books that contained reports of his investigations and what he’d learned.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 128-49.