Writing Thoreau: A ‘Masterpiece’ Biography

well welcome welcome to Notre Dame welcome to alumni day and hi Carol I see a friend and a thorough vien from the Concord Museum where I'll be in a few days so it's good to see somebody from Henry Thoreau his home town of Concord Massachusetts so welcome to our beautiful campus the weather is being kind to us and I'm glad because the campus is of course looking particularly splendid all the new plantings and all the new buildings and I hope you'll enjoy your time here so I came here to Notre Dame about seven years ago looking forward hoping very much to write a biography of Henry David Thoreau I had been working on Thoreau thinking about a reading him really back since high school and I did my first book on sorrow on Thoreau and science and then went on and did some other writers some other topics and I was in that slump after my after a book when I wasn't sure what I was going to do next when I was thinking about things that needed to be done in American literature and it occurred to me that nobody had written a biography of Thoreau a full comprehensive biography since Walter Harding's back in 1965 there had been some treatments and a wonderful intellectual biography by Bob Richardson but in terms of just the whole general picture and I thought oh I don't want to do a biography and at the moment I was sort of freezing up thinking about that I heard a voice saying to me but you're going to do that biography it was very spooky so ah that was a bit unnerving and I took a long walk which was a very thorough vien thing to do and when I got back I had settled at all I would be doing that as my next book so that was going on to about ten years ago and the book came out officially published on July 12th 9 2017 and it's here it is nice thick thing it's coming out in paperback soon meanwhile it got a lot of good press and was one of many things that came out in honor of Thoreau's 200th birthday last year that was the big date that I had in view as I was imagining what this bog rafi could do and to be and one of the most important things to me was that it before all readers anybody who is interested in Thoreau not just a technical study and the other demand and this is the sort of thing a thorough places on you is that it be a literary work in itself not just a book about literature but that would at least aspire to be itself a beautifully told story so I spent a fair amount of time at the end of the writing process trying to really go back and looking at every every sentence every paragraph and thinking about if if I didn't know anything about Thoreau would I be captured so it really is a kind of design to capture and enraptured people with Errol he's been a huge part of my life and somebody that has taught me a lot over the years and been just really just basically very good company and I think he might be for others as well so this is the most famous portrait we have of him taken shortly after he published Walden a couple of years later and the emphasis on writing a whole human life I actually wanted that as the subtitle but my publisher said no let's just keep it very very very simple so it's just Henry David Thoreau a life but I like the whole human life because of this moment a nice example of Thoreau is wit what youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are there's not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life and so that sense that he always had of self-consciousness about living a good life is something that we've lost and I think in thinking about him we we have all sorts of incorrect stereotypes about Thoreau as a misanthrope and a hermit and things that might have been true of somebody but it certainly wasn't true of the human being that I've come to know so there's so there's the title of the book as it as it developed and the beautifully beautifully designed at University of Chicago Press and I will say they were absolutely wonderful to work with and so I hope they have copies if you're interested at the bookstore they have had them in the past and if not I know Amazon of course for cago would love to sell you one or more it's been adopted in some I'm having trouble with this thing now one of the interesting things about so I said this is the first photograph or one of the best-known photographs not and and the first photograph we have another image but it's of drawing these look the same and this is the sort of thing as a biographer we don't have film footage of when we don't have a recording of his voice we only have photographs who were taken at this moment this sitting and then just a few years later when he was dying and other than that everything is just description or our imaginations so as a biographer you start trying to get a sense of the person and so there there were three images taken in 1856 of Thoreau it's same sitting same studio and of course this is the old-fashioned daguerreotype and so you had to sit very formally for about five minutes while the camera took your image and I realized a while back that they're not identical and so I got intrigued and this we own this one this is the first my theory is this is the first image that we own it because it's in the library of Congress and you can see it's it's rather stiff rather formal this more rugged looking image I think this was the first one what had happened was he was visiting friends and they get they got quite raucous this was the Wooster group and they were very playful and witty and raucous and fun with each other and they dragged him into a photo studio that story is that he was basically kicking and screaming he didn't want his picture take and they were saying come on come on and so they're sitting him down and you can see how must his hair is and you know there's crazy cow licks and everything and of course everybody loves this a little drag down and then and you just see the eyes still are they're trying he's trying not to smile there's just this suppressed and a little gleam in his eye so this is my favorite photograph but this was the Library of Congress you know again it came cheap it was free because we owned it so the publishers went with this one but I noticed somebody went in and smoothed down his hair and basically told him Henry sit still don't smile and so he adopts much more calm formal appropriate for a fine formal photograph so you start getting even if we don't the little bits that we have you tried to use your imagination and set the situation up in your mind's eye and I've always been thinking curious like who was it who went in and and you know tried to pat down his hair and smooth out that crazy cowlick so a few things about Thoreau because I'm not assuming that you know any anything about him by the way I say Thoreau because that is the way the family pronounced the name and that still pronounce that name in Concord his hometown but if you've been calling him Thoreau all your life that's fine it's a French name and the French will tell you with some pointedness that we're both wrong it should be pronounced in the French way which be something more like toto okay anyway so it's the same person so a few things about him yes he was born in Concord Massachusetts Oh wrong button sorry about that that's one of the dangers of this thing Ralph Waldo Emerson famously became his friend and mentor after Emerson moved to his hometown yes this is the guy who lived at Walden Pond for two years 1845 47 while he was at the pond he walked in and famously got himself jailed for non-payment of full taxes which he had refused to pay for a number of years in protest of government policies which he regarded as violent and coercive and so he was jailed just for one night and that one night in jail resulted in a lecture and then finally in the essay that has become famous around the world of civil disobedience that he published shortly back in 18-49 a few years later later that year he began his form is very close careful studies in natural science and this wasn't the old-fashioned stuff this was cutting-edge he was modeling his work on alexander von humboldt a german scientist who is really in some important ways the founder of modern science and on charles darwin he became a pioneer in this work in the science of ecology which was a field that actually didn't exist yet so this is pretty innovative work for him he published Walden in 1854 and even as walden was coming off the presses he stood up and delivered slavery in Massachusetts that they called a words that burn a protest statement against the slavery the the formal recognition of slavery and the enforcement of it through the Fugitive Slave Act which required every citizen to identify anyone that they thought might be a slave and render them to the government for capture and return returned to their masters in the south and this was just extremely controversial flashpoint and Thoreau even as Walden was being printed was in framing outstanding of delivering this incendiary speech where he doubted that his work in Walden anymore had value in such a political climate in a country where this could be possible so I like to imagine again those two together in tension part of part of what he was truly about all his life he kept this a magnificent journal we have over two million words some of it he destroyed so we don't even have it all and many say that that is his true masterpiece and I found the Journal of immense help in trying to understand and who he was what he thought about what really drove him for this so we have of course a sense of the people in his life his family and I won't go through all that there's just not nearly enough time but you know his this is the only image we have of his mother a very passionate outspoken woman and obviously intensely bright and his father a soft-spoken gentle man who was a craftsman the family made their money through making pencils and various other sort of artisan goods like marbled papers and sand paper we don't have the missing is his Henry's older brother John we don't have an image of him John died and Henry's arms when Henry was getting this right 24 they were very very close and this was absolutely a trauma that set henry thoreau on his his path really outward into nature to try to in a sense as he said they've live for to live for the two of them who grown up together in the outdoors his elder sister Helen died also tragically young she was of anti-slavery activist and Henry called her his moral own star always admired her and looked up to her his younger sister Sophia they were buddies friends said that Sophia was Henry in a skirt we know so little about her I think it's really tragic because it's clear that she was an absolutely remarkable woman and much of I mean really that we have Thoreau today in his papers his manuscripts knowledge about him is because she was so fiercely protective of her brother and his reputation and made sure to to carry his papers forward and make sure that he got the attention that she felt her dear brother so originally deserved and of course Emerson stands at the head of the people we know and he's surrounded by friends I could have filled this slide with a whole lot more some of these these folks you have heard of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thoreau got along famously Bronson Alcott was one of his very closest friends and Louisa May Alcott grew up playing and and at having adventures as a little girl with the circle of children around Henry Thoreau Emerson of course the kind of public intellectual for the nation he and Emerson friends but often rivals because they both were very competitive Emerson's wife Lydian they were was very close she and Henry were very close and here's little Edward Eddie honor laughs Eddie grew up to write one of really in a way the first biography of Thoreau a very moving portrait of a man that he adored growing up Henry Thoreau is remembered by a young friend and then Frederick Douglass who stayed with the Thoreau's early in his abolitionist career became a correspondent of Helen Thoreau's and it's not too hard we don't have records from that time but it's not too hard to to imagine that douglas and henry thoreau communicated at least knew each other Thoreau makes many references to Douglas in his work which was highly influential on the way that Thoreau thought of Walden so the town itself the landscape became a kind of character in my imagination it doesn't look very spectacular this is a photograph of the river in the countryside around late 19th maybe about 1900 and it's it's Pleasant bucolic but not spectacular scenery but but the intimacy of the landscape and the way it sort of draws you into its little corners and patches or something that I imagine Thoreau getting not well overwhelmed with nature's grande you're right but but just involved in all the little copses and corners and rivers and bays and Glen's and walking a great country for walking the town itself if you go there this was taken last year is of course a bustling tourist town with a real vibrancy and here's the mill dam and full of cars and tourists and Carol smiling because it probably looks it's I can just hear it right now it's it's like a weird contradiction this this wonderful town that's the center of American intellectual culture and birthplace of the American Revolution right and it's full of Commerce and noise and motorcycles screaming past one thing it's made it a nice place to visit and I do every chance I get is that so much of the town retains these these core buildings many of them are exactly the same as those that Henry knew so here's the same space just after Henry's death and you can see if you look at the chimney line there these chimneys are indicate that these this line of buildings same buildings they're still standing today so here's the there's the same line of chimneys and these these are the same buildings right and so you can really walk through the town and get a sense of this is the place that Henry knew and you can get a sense of the past there and many layers of the past which I particularly love so as you're doing that walden gives us on the title page the image of the famous house at Walden Pond which is long gone there's a replica in the parking lot by Walden Pond next to the famous statue of Thoreau and Sophia was an artist among her other talents and so this is the only image we really have of the cabin what it looked like Henry always called it a house we'll call it a house and so this of course is based on that image and a little controversy over whether it really looked like that but you get the idea the way it's set one of the ideas we have about Walden is that it was somewhere out in the wilderness and this it really reorients changes your sense of what it was what it meant and what he was doing out there if you realize how very close to town it was so here's the center of Concord at this time the Thoreau's are living in this what they called the Texas house right there and so my line wandered a little bit on on the stupid computer but this would have been the walk that the way Henry took a shortcut into his house site here on Walden Pond and it's just a little over a mile right and still in the township this was everybody's backyard the pond kids went swimming there everybody you know what they went fishing their families went picnicking there and so it was a bit like setting up a tent in your backyard so there was a main road out of town here and the railroad cut through here and his cabin was visible from both and there was a little pathway that cut down into the favorite fishing Cove right here so he was not exactly hidden away shall we say if anything he was more conspicuous right there with everybody's saying hey what are you doing they're building a house in in you know way out of town then he would have been you know living in all the clusters of houses up here where that's if he wanted silence and to be let alone he should have stayed up where he was not you know made a spectacle of himself down by the pond so he says in the opening that he lived a mile from any neighbor Edie Hosmer was the closest house and they were best friends and so he could walk up to Emerson's the just to orient so the famous North Bridge and the first battle of the American Revolution started in Lexington and carried over and it was in Concord Linda Colonials turned and fired on the British at the old North bridge so it's a national park and Thoreau ascents that moving to Walden on July 4th 1845 he said he acted as if it were coincidence but of course the Declaration of Independence was very very much in his mind if you go to the pond today this is well today it wouldn't quite this is an October day this is a screen of trees the house site as I took this photo is just to my right a beautiful spot it's been preserved it's a lovely State Park and you'll find many people there using it for all kinds of reasons the house site itself is marked an archaeologist and the 20th century determined exactly where the house it stood and that's marked by granite posts there's no real memorial to Thoreau himself for his work except for this immense pile of stones which has grown even since this old photograph was taken it became a tradition to honor Thoreau but when you visit by bringing a stone and depositing it on this Karen in its memory a very old tradition so here's the the sign as it looks today with one of his most famous sentences from Walden and one that I always talk with my students about I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately and to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not when I came to die discover that I had not lived so again as a biographer that's the sort of sentence you think about what it what was he thinking in what sense was he afraid of discovering that he had never lived this man who lived so intensely and of course what does it mean to live deliberately and so when I teach Thoreau teach Walden I talked to them about the deliberation as a kind of you know you can unpack the word he loved words he loved language he knew Latin and Greek and Italian and French and German and maybe even a little native languages and deliberately you hear the echo of Liberty and you hear librarians pick up on library Libre the V bear the book root for book so upon on the freedom to read the world to read books to read your surroundings but also Libre the deliberation from the word from the root for Libre the symbol of justice to way to way cases to and as I tell my students and try to help them to understand when you take a question to the Courts of Justice and put them before a judge who deliberates all right that deliberation is on things that are difficult for which there is justice potentially on both sides and so you must weigh your thoughts and your considerations and make those tough choices and that that's what Walden tries to do to deliberate to weigh our choices in life and ask us not to forget that we should be doing that so one of the things that Thoreau had to front you know one of the facts of life was the railroad because it did and it's there today this is now the commuter line from Boston out to Fitchburg and it runs every half hour or so I've taken it many times and here are this screaming down the tracks and from the windows if you're sitting on the correct side of the train you can look out at Walden Pond itself and Henry's cabin at this in this shot is just around this Cove tucked into the back of this Pharaoh's Cove there so he could not escape technology if anything again it was like he moved out and built his little house on a platform that made him think about what was this railroad it had only been built two years before brand-new it was changing everything in America and particularly in Concord and you know to stand in front of his doorway which is roughly where this picture has taken some decades later and and we'll watch that train and listen and feel it and see what was carrying and think about what it was meaning for America and for modern life how life was changing was was a big part of what he was doing at Walden Pond so this photograph gives you a sense of how close it was it came past about 20 times a day and after a long consideration of it Feroze closing comment I about the railroad tracks I cross the tracks like a cart path in the woods I will not have my eyes put out in my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing so he wanted to think about it and when he was done he wanted to his back on it and here's the house where he sheltered himself while he was indoors writing which it wasn't endure as much this is of course the replica at the parking lot and if you see the chair out it means it's an invitation to come in and talk and that's exactly what Henry did you could see his house from the road if you were walking by and you saw that he'd put the chair out in front it said hey come on in I'm happy to talk and many many reports of all the people who came and chatted you know about life and philosophy with Henry if the chair was not visible it meant I'm busy please respect my privacy and most people did if they didn't they got rebuked Henry was very jealous of his time so when he was social he was social when he was not don't bother him inside the house this is a an old photograph of the jumbled up the way that these objects were gathered and literally shoved up in an attic for until the Concord Museum brought them out and dignified them by presenting them so beautifully it gives you a sense of so here's the chair that he used he put on these rockers his famous green desk which is almost a holy object for us now it's where all his writing was done all his life and there it is just shoved in a corner but they kept it at least they honored it and then his bed which was a recycled platform he nailed the the legs onto it from a Chinese sofa bed the simplicity truly simplify simplify so this was his basic furniture he had another little side table and he had a couple more chairs but that was really good and so the point of course of simplicity to to create conditions where you could live deliberately and children would talk about how they would they remembered the bed because when they came and visited if they sat on that little sofa that little bed their feet could just barely touch the floor again the kind of nice memory that helps a biographer understand it's it raises the point that these rocks are part of this kind of sharing we can't visit Henry people visit him virtually most of these rocks if you pick them up and examine or many of them at least have writing on them people leave them not just bare rocks but messages they sign them they write comments and thanks to Thoreau who's become part of their life and I like this one happiness only real when shared from Chris McCandless the young man who in a thorough vien vein went to Alaska and was memorialized in Jon Krakauer's book into the wild so we've got that strain of into the wild right and this young man had to discover in the wild the lesson that Thoreau teaches that it's the sharing it's the sharing and of course famously he died up in that bus a very very moving book and film but very tragic so Thoreau himself would would bathe in the pond every morning so this child it's a swimming hole now probably quite busy today he really went there to write and this photograph from the Morgan Library in New York gives us he wrote using the family pencils there's a bundle of them not many of those left and he helped the family produce these pencils but even more to the point for the family and well for us too was he actually invented the number to call it the number to yellow pencil pencils were very greasy and brittle in his youth and he wanted literally to make a better pencil so he knew that they made good ones in France but he couldn't nobody knew how it was trade secret so he got his chemistry textbooks together and and just went to work on it as an engineering problem as an engineering problem and figured out how you could mix graphite and clay and bake them as a ceramic and extrude you know extrude it as a as a rod and so forth and put the in case the rod and wood he developed the machinery to do all these operations and as a result for a while these thorw pencils were some of the best made in America you could make them hard you could make them soft you could make them flat for carpenters pencils they made blue pencils anyway so that was part of his almost an extension of his body and then the marbled papers something else made beautiful marbled papers something else that his father made in the family factory and factory is too big a word it's just you've got to think about a little tiny shop they're making all this stuff by hand they just had you know handful of employees and it and these notebooks his journals that's where he did is thinking in this is where all of his writing originates so when he's protecting his time not putting the chair out come on he's writing and here is a photograph of the page he opened a brand new notebook on his first full day at the pond and this is the first entry when he's writing at his desk he writes with a quill pen so it's only out in the woods that he writes with pencil Walden Saturday July 5th 45 yesterday I came here to live so he came to Walden 2 right but not Walden he came to write a book about his brother the dear brother who he loves so much who had died so tragically and he wanted to memorialize their years together and and they're there with what they had loved and shared so that's the book he went right and then while he was there he started taking notes on what he was seeing experiencing thinking and pretty soon it you could just feel it starts to turn into his second book right so it does become a second book and this is where it starts he also as a mathematician he enjoyed surveying he loved the instruments he loved mathematical principles and believe it or not just for fun his first winter he did this survey of Walden Pond and it becomes this famous moment I think Walden itself is really born in this moment of this this survey when he starts to engage it looks I mean if you start looking at what it took to do this the kind of operation to he's drilling he's making these lines each of these as a whole that he bored in the ice and each hole he dropped a plumb line and to the bottom of the pond drew it up to measure the depth of the pond and so on the whole thing is just an extraordinary you know engineering as art it's it's extraordinary and but it is typical of the way his mind works the Concord Museum has some of his actual surveying instruments his survey skills were so good and he enjoyed it enough that when his first book didn't make enough money to make him the famous writer he had dreamed of being well he needed an income he took to surveying so we still have many of his original surveys and as a so he made his living as a civil engineer he liked surveying because it got him outside into into nature and that was something the the kind of practice of it engaged him but the whole point of it is captured a little bit better by our art philosophers today Charles Taylor Canadian philosopher worries that our present sense of things fails to touch bottom anywhere that this is the condition of modernity that we we don't have any convinced convincing sense of a kind of solid truth and this is not uniquely our moment this was the moment that began a Thoreau's lifetime and walden becomes a response as authority end of walden let us not play at Kitley benders there is a solid bottom everywhere so surveying the bottom of the pond surveying here the world around him became Thoreau's quest to find what he said solid bottom and rocks in place right so another let us settle ourselves this is from baldon to work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion and Prejudice and tradition and delusion and appearance and sometimes I add fake news I that alluvion which covers the globe through Paris and London New York and Boston and conquer through church and state poetry philosophy religion politics till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place which we can call reality and say this is and no mistake so there is the tone of Thoreau's quest right what is it that we can stand on as hard reality as as firmness and if you like the idea of building castles sure build castles in the air that's that's where they should be but now put your foundations under them so Walden was about you know you dream your castles but then you have to found them on something solid so here's the survey which he retained and had a professional engraver put it together all beautifully and it became the one else of the pond itself in Multan which again is crazy I always I love apt to ask my students think about it if you were writing a book about your to you idyllic wonderful years living at a pond where you're doing thinking and writing wouldn't you have a picture of the pond of course you would you this is his picture of the pond an engineer's survey so as somebody whose own background was originally in the sciences I love this this fascinates me it's a different way of thinking it's a thinking that is blending notions that we normally keep very very widely separated so part of that thinking is to get you involved he says that he's looking for the deepest part of the pond and he says that it it occurs right where the greatest length meets the greatest width but if you look you'll see you have to add that line because it's not actually on his survey and one of my students one time I love I love teaching when the students come up to you and as point out things that as soon as she said that I thought of course and she said I think I understand why I think he did that because he's forcing you to look at the survey and draw that line yourself in your imagination maybe even on the page and if you draw that line then you find he's right there's there's the center of the pond a hundred and two feet and so having drawn us and made us participants in this act of surveying this physical space he then in walden draws the moral it is the hard and man it's the son and the system always speaking in terms of these deep metaphors draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular daily experiences and volumes of life into his coves and inlets and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character so you could say the pond itself becomes an analysis of the human character right or humanity itself the question not only of what is nature but what is humanity and to him - to answer both those questions they ultimately become the same question walden itself that that survey I was fascinated got to reading about Kozma grams and the symmetry between the way Thoreau designed that survey and the kind of thought and Kari put into it and the classic Kozma Graham this one comes from the book Hangul culture which is where some of the slaves whose cellar holes and remains of their houses around Walden Pond Thoreau excavated and may have may have actually seen some of these so the notion of the cause of a gram dividing the earth and our life into four quarters the upper and the under and the kind of Sun sunrise sunset patterning the six like cycles of life obviously I could go on for a while but that intrigues me so you can actually follow Thoreau's Kozma Graham on the path around Walden Pond now it's been so well used they've had to put these ugly fences up to keep people on the path because it was they were eroding the banks but this is at about eleven o'clock on on that if you imagine the cost program as a clock and so you can actually take this circuit yourself and sort of think about this this cosmology as a way of living a life that kind of deeper philosophy so Walden there's the title page again when he published it he put as his motto I do not propose to write an ode to dejection but to brag as lustily as Chanticleer in the morning standing on his roost if only to wake my neighbors up right be noisy about this you know stand up there and brag this was the or the brag part of his personality he was actually quite shy very quiet and withdrawn but he found a way of presenting himself in writing as this kind of almost Walt Whitman type bold daring loud and some people find that a bit off-putting I find it intriguing that he's willing to provoke us in these ways the book ends with and I finally I looked at the manuscript ending again held this is held at the Huntington Library in California when you're a researcher you get to go to all sorts of amazing places and I was so startled to see this because it's not like this in the in the normal printed version the famous last words well I better go to the next slide so you can read them too so picks up here the light which puts out our eyes as darkness to us only that day dawns to which we are awake there is more day to dawn the Sun is but a morning star right and here's the biographers thrill again to look at the manuscript of this and to see that originally he had cut a little small s son a little small M a little small s and that he wasn't satisfied with that even though that's the way they're printed if you buy a copy walled and read it you'll see he looked at that and he said yeah more emphasis the Sun is but a morning star double underlined that triumph of that ending the pride the the satisfaction the sense of glory that he had created something of such stunning beauty and found that that what he found his way into the soul of the universe in such a fundamental way and somehow had found a language to put it onto paper I must have been a moment of triumph for him if you go to Concord and visit him you'll want to find his beautiful quiet grave gravestone it's one there with the rest of the family and I always like to see whenever I visit I'll be there next week I'll see what things people have left because people bring they leave flowers of course but they'll bring stones and pinecones and pencils there's a mechanical pencil there's always pencils sometimes flocks of them but it's very moving to me that people have and can have connected with him through time and continued to connect with him today and it's to foster those connections to to show the kinds of communities that he built around him in his own day and the way that those communities can extend to us today that's really why I read why I wrote the book they say that you should write the books that you want to read that was the book I always wanted to read and so I had such a extraordinary time writing it and writing it here at Notre Dame it was truly truly the right book at the right place and in the nick of time to published in 2017 for its 200th birthday that's what I have to say now we have a few moments left for questions so thank you very much it's a small but wonderful audience and so there's tons of things that I didn't talk about and there may be questions that you came in thinking or maybe something I said prompted the number of years I was working I can't date exactly when I when the voice I heard that voice because it was not the sort of thing that you know I didn't put it on the calendar but it was only later I started wondering just when was that I think it was about 2000 or 2009 maybe I know I was I was not at Notre Dame yet and one of the reasons I came here was I really felt that to write this book well first of all it would need time but also I needed an environment where I could think about Thoreau spirituality when I saw the advertisement for the position I now old and I saw the the way that it was worded I thought I should look into this because Notre Dame would have played you know people I could speak with and resources that I could draw on to understand this combination of science they have a history philosophy of science department their program here that I'm now affiliated with as well as the wonderfully deep and well-known Department of English and of course religious studies and theology here and I thought that is just the perfect combination so to write this book will take time but also that sense that you need you know I'm I'm not a scientist I'm not a theologian I'm you know a historian of some extent and pretty good with certain kinds of literature but I knew that I would need a community of people around me to help me think about the book too so it would have been somewhere around 2009 and it was shortly after that that I saw the job ad for Notre Dame and thought that's that's the place that could really nourish book and they they've done they've done that oh well the first thing right from when I came to campus and it started interviewing for the position here the one of the people I met was Katherine braiding who was the program chair of the history and philosophy of science program and we just I started talking with her about about the philosophy and history of science and she made it very clear that with my background and interest that I would not just be somebody who would be on the fringe that they would see me as part of that program which was an incredibly exciting because some programs like this are built such that they're very disciplined specific so you have to be a PhD in history or in philosophy with training perhaps a degree in these Sciences and I come to it through literary studies which and and to some extent of sociology of science which is you know part of the mix but not discipline specific so you know knowing my publications and knowing my interest Katherine made it clear that that would be perfect for them and meeting theologians I mean it's just part of they're in the same building you know we're in meetings together we we meet at lectures so this is this is the Notre Dame allows these kinds of fruitful collaborations does that get to your question there yeah thank you yeah yeah I thought this was an absolutely fascinating but but I didn't want one thing in particular that I really liked was that ending quote I read the book fall in back when I was in pls program in those days mm-hmm which is fascinating we read it more on the philosophy aspect but yeah it's kind of cool because that that any performer seems to be more of his expansion of consciousness in a way but knowing the more biographical details like you were talking about it's almost like his in a way I sent off to his brother and not he's found that there's something beyond there's something more that maybe is is is come to some terms with the passing of his brother and that sort of thing yeah I think you've captured very well that sense of that that there's something more that his philosophy of life sort of originates he was a very good classical scholar and had ambitions to be a writer he was studying with Emerson but when his brother died there was this long period of silence in his journals and then when he does start to write he speaks in terms very much that you just used that there must be something more and he speaks of at first he can't go out into nature at all it's it just feels wooden and dead and then he starts to write of like but nature nature is speaking to me I'm broadly paraphrasing here and what he hears is through through the the sounds of nature through the birdsong his brother was a bird or in love birds especially Thoreau started to write how walking out into nature gave him connection to his brother because his brother was in a sense speaking to him through all these experiences of nature and then he wrote a poem that is absolutely your very moving poem where dost thou dwell my brother and he writes of his brother going on or and he says you were always going on before I was always the one following and that's and so now you've gone on before you're calling to me and I'm and I have to go out into nature to hear you and all these places I go and I hear you so that sense of connection that when when Thoreau talks about connecting heaven and earth that sense that somehow heaven is here that somehow even his brother is here or the human connection which becomes a spiritual connection is here heaven under our feet as well as over our heads right so it really does seem to me that's it's it's as though you've you could see it coming together as a kind of life's work the idea that it literally carries out life's work to Walden Pond as his first book which isn't that well-known a week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers I love it but it's a very long thoughtful young man's book it covers everything if you haven't read it you might actually really being a pls student you might really enjoy it other yeah you mentioned that some of his journals were lost were they lost perfectly or did his sister beside some she didn't want to retain well the publishers for about the latter half in terms of do we yeah I'm supposed to repeat the question do we have why were the journals some of them lost the publishers of the 1906 edition of the journals it turns out took out a lot and for about the second half of his life that's of the breadth of the journal we still only have that old 1906 Edition in print you can go look online at the transcripts but they're very difficult to read and I was shocked when I started doing comparisons to realize how many sort of explorations there there were so there's that element Thoreau himself we know he writes in college about keeping a journal and says this is a good thing and it's clear that he's been doing something he if you look at the published Journal today the the first sentences refers to Ralph Waldo Emerson cornering him on the street and say you know do you keep a journal and he writes so I make my first entry today I'm sure that he had some kind of journal going before that he destroyed that becomes the first entry to his real journal his trance and Donna lists journal but after a few years he takes all the pages that he'd written thousands of pages and he destroys almost all of it what he does is he spends a month going through it and he copies out all the good bits into what becomes now the beginning of the journal as we know it so he copies out the good bits right and destroys the rest and then for a long time he's in the habit of ripping pages out and and recopying them and using them in his writings so you you open the journal volumes and you get a lot of ripped out you know the the remnants have ripped out pages and who knows what else was on those pages or what they looked like before he you know revised them into the published works and the mysterious thing is that around 1850 he stops doing that and it's very very much a kind of again using the word a deliberate act that and that's what's fascinating to us her scholars of this at some point he starts thinking the journal isn't something I just read and shred and it's not just the good bits the journal is actually its own work of art that has to have its own integrity and I will not rip out pages and I will write every day he'd wrote almost every day for the rest of life so that sense that a life well-lived becomes a kind of life well-written emerges fairly late in life it's it's really the last 10 years of his life that we have this incredible arc so it's an interesting question yeah one of the disconcerting moments I have in my teaching here was I was doing a course I teach an introduction to sustainability studies and I did a an exercise where I showed powerpoints of 10 common birds animals and plants and I just was curious would they know what these were and they they knew about two of them you know I think they knew Jaguar and I'm trying to remember oh they knew Robin most of them knew Robin but but anything else and they weren't that difficult these these selections I mean I mean I mean really common and it really startled me because we don't and so the way I wrote the book I wanted to have a sense of the physicality of the of the world that these people lived in and also to communicate the the sense that they did not experience you didn't have to go out into nature I mean it just was there so there's a moment where I'm talking about Thoros childhood and they kept a cow and the cow wanders in into the house in search of the pumpkins that are drawing on the hearth and I and I love that just you know think about that for a moment this is a house that has a cow that's wandering around and the door is open and the cow just walks into the house and there's chickens and that this was normal so when we read books that are written from this era and we import our own sense of our divisions and the way our tidy categories this is not the way they're thinking and experiencing and so the Pharos desire to bring children out he was kind of he was the guy if you wanted to get the kids out of the house you could you / and he get the kids out and they would go have adventures as I said and it becomes real clear that he as a teacher he would do the field trips this is one of his innovations he kept a school for a while and the kids all remembered how wonderful these field trips were that this was and not just a casual thing but actually he's thinking as as you were saying that to build these connections requires getting young people to build them in their youth and make it part of play make it part of their life and that way they'll never lose that but he would be just immensely distressed at the way young people grew up today you know nothing but virtual you know computer screen can no connectedness with with the ground under their feet or the environment around them or the people you know actual people around them he would he would be he would be terrified for us in terms of what is that doing to our humanity he'd also be terrified what is it that we are doing to our world our planet so it's another reason to write the book to try to to again pass along that sense of waking people up to the conditions that we've created for ourselves so thank you I guess we're out of time thank you this just flew by I appreciate that thank you all thank you enjoy the rest of your day and the rest of your weekend here at Notre Dame

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Length: 60min 56sec (3656 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 03 2018