Do they still teach Henry David Thoreau in American Literature in high school?
God, I hope not. Talk about the emperor with no clothes. What a fraud. Leech. Commie. I never liked him when he was force-fed to me back then and my esteem for him over the years has only plummeted.
He did succeed in persuading a genuine writing talent, Ralph Waldo Emerson, into being his friend. Lucky for him. That meant a place to live and food and someone to pay his fines while he practiced being an unemployed free spirit.
He did come up with some sayings that are on all the "famous quotation" websites. Like marching to the beat of a different drummer (no shit, Hank) and "Simplify, simplify, simplyfy." Or was it only two simplifies? I can't remember any more.
An actual good American author by the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne had this to say about Thoreau:
"Mr. Thoreau dined with us yesterday. He is a singular character - a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty. He was educated, I believe, at Cambridge, and formerly kept school in this town; but for two or three years back, he has repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men - an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood."
He was a bum, Nat.
A Scottish writer across the pond by the name of Robert Louis Stevenson was even less kind:
"THOREAU'S thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut, conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character. With his almost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world's heroes. He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, but was all improved and sharpened to a point. "He was bred to no profession," says Emerson; "he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinner what dish he preferred, he answered, 'the nearest.' " So many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig."
You tell 'em Bobbie. The only thing Thoreau and Stevenson had in common was that they both died of tuberculosis at age 44.
Thoreau did indeed go to Harvard, as Hawthorne said. As a result of all that liberal education, he became a pencil-maker like his father. And sometime surveyor with his brother. Shades of George Washington.
Before he leeched off Emerson, he leeched off his brother. Unfortunately, his brother cut himself shaving one morning and subsequently died of lockjaw in Henry's arms. How the hell does one die of lockjaw in another's arms? A weird family, all around. A moral? I don't know. "If you drop your straight razor in the toilet, wash it off?"
But he lived off the land (and Emerson's purse) at Waldon Pond for something like two years and two months, living off...what? bark and grubs?... and became a famous author for writing a book by the same name or something close to it. I refuse to look it up.
Do me a favor? If you ever find yourself reading a book of classical literature and run across a chapter by Thoreau, rip it out for me, eh? You'll be doing the next reader a favor.
No offense.
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"If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away. "
(feel free to use the above at will or change it if you like - it's in the public domain and he wouldn't have known what to do with the money anyway.)
