Sometimes, a week or two after I finish a book, I realize that it’s been simmering on the back burner ever since I put it down. I realize that Henry Seidel Canby gave me a pretty good sense of what Thoreau was like as a person.
Some items that stuck in mind:
• He hated games, parades, shows and company.
• He wore a green coat to chapel at Harvard when black was required. He wasn’t being eccentric. He could afford only one coat, and his was homemade.
• After he failed at teaching, his first idea, before Walden Pond, was to farm. He thought about an orchard.
• He said he was 5-foot-7, but people in Concord thought he was shorter. However, he was accurate in his measurements.
• People said he always walked out of the house with more grace than he walked in, a way of saying that he loved outdoors.
• He had three pairs of boots: cowhide, India rubbers and full rubber. He wore a neckerchief, and his hat had a flap inside the crown that he used as a shelf to hold botanical specimens.
• On his walks, he carried a stick that was notched so he could measure things, an old music book that he used as a plant press, some cord and a knife. Eventually, he bought a spyglass.
• He probably read less American literature than any other American writer. He read Emerson and Whitman. He didn’t like fiction. His main reading was in the Ancient Greeks, 17th century English literature, the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita.
• He could smell a tobacco pipe a-third of a mile away. He discovered that his friend Melvin, a muskrat hunter, kept an azalea bush by sense of smell.
• When he realized he was sick, he compiled a list of the houses he’d lived in. He reasoned that the first step of a biographer or an obituary writer is to establish the basic facts.
Ten details about the man. I think they catch of the sense of him.
• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.
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