Eric's Reviews > Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind
Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind
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by
Thoreau appears constantly in Emerson's journals. To the end of his life, Emerson regarded Thoreau as his best friend. Even when Alzheimer's disease had set in and memory disintegrated before wit (unable to call up the word "umbrella," he would say "the thing visitors carry away"), affection too outlived memory. "What was the name of my best friend?" he once had to ask. Emerson also wrote what is still the best single short piece ever done on Thoreau, but Thoreau was never able to do the same thing for Emerson. Perhaps he felt that Emerson, unlike Channing and Alcott, didn't need his good opinion. When Emerson's mother died in November of 1853, Thoreau helped in a major way with the funeral arrangements, and in a journal note a few days later, there is this admission: "If there is any one with whom we have a quarrel, it is most likely [with] that one [who] makes some just demand on us which we disappoint." In his current draft of Walden, after the glowing testimonials to Channing and Alcott, Thoreau writes, "There is one other with whom I had 'solid seasons,' long to be remembered, at his house in the village and who looked in upon me from time to time." It is the saddest sentence in the book, because of what it does not, will not say. Perhaps it is merely the ultrasimple truth of Cordelia, but the most important friendship of Thoreau's life is buried in that flat sentence with no further attempt at a public marker.
Just as sad - no simpler word exists - is the fact that however esteemed and even loved Thoreau was, he was often severely misunderstood by those closest to him. Emerson came to be so out of touch with Thoreau's reading and writing as to think that the man who wanted to create new Vedas lacked ambition. Sophia was so far from understanding what he was after in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that she could be reported as having found "parts of it that sounded to me very much like blasphemy," and Channing once admitted that "I have never been able to understand what he meant by his life."
(pp. 299-300)
Just as sad - no simpler word exists - is the fact that however esteemed and even loved Thoreau was, he was often severely misunderstood by those closest to him. Emerson came to be so out of touch with Thoreau's reading and writing as to think that the man who wanted to create new Vedas lacked ambition. Sophia was so far from understanding what he was after in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that she could be reported as having found "parts of it that sounded to me very much like blasphemy," and Channing once admitted that "I have never been able to understand what he meant by his life."
(pp. 299-300)
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October 18, 2023
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