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.