henry david thoreau

We do not breathe well

Saturday, November 18, 2017

“The remembrance of my country spoils my walk,” said Emerson’s friend, Henry David Thoreau, 3 years later, to a crowd of 2,000 people, gathered on the 4th of July, 1854, in front of a “black-draped American flag hung upside down.” (Detail from Laura Walls’ wonderful bio.)

They were both talking about the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, but their words can easily speak for some of us now, 160 years later.

A bit more from Emerson’s speech: “one cannot open a newspaper without being disgusted by the new records of shame…a man looks gloomily at his children, and thinks, ‘What have I done that you should begin life in dishonor?’”

My twitter friend @debcha said it’s the 19th-century equivalent of how she’s described this last year: “A DDOS attack on people with empathy.”

Hurry slowly

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

“The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time.”
—Junot Diaz

It was my pleasure recently to be interviewed by Jocelyn Glei for her podcast, Hurry Slowly. We talked about analog vs. digital tools, how space affects your work, working by hand, and slowing down. You can listen to our conversation here.

“Hurry slowly” has its roots in an old Latin phrase: “Festina Lente,” or “Make haste slowly,” or “more haste, less speed.” (See: The Tortoise and The Hare.)

Here’s Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, on the phrase:

Festina lente should totally be a model for our age. I came across it just reading about the early days of printing and Aldus Manutius—the great printer who of course figures in the plot of my book. It’s his motto. I’m sure that you could translate it different ways—but the one I liked best is “make haste slowly.” And I just love it cuz it seems like a contradiction, but in fact it’s exactly right. It seems to fit our time really well, but I stole it from a guy 500 years old. Oh wait, maybe this isn’t new, maybe this is not a new feeling.

Here’s Erasmus in his Adagia, 500 years before Sloan:

[Festina Lente] ought to be carved on columns. It ought to be written on the archways of churches, and indeed in letters of gold. It ought to be painted on the gates of great men’s palaces, engraved on the rings of cardinals and primates, and chased on the scepters of kings. To go further, it ought to be seen on all monuments everywhere, published abroad and multiplied so that everyone will know it and it will be before every mortal eye, and there will be no one who doesn’t hold it of greatest use…

Later, Erasmus writes, “Things that ripen prematurely are wont suddenly to go limp. What grows slowly and steadily can endure.” Echoing Erasmus, about 360 years later, is Henry David Thoreau, in his journal entry for November 5, 1860:

I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected.

“Let’s slow down,” Steinbeck wrote in his journal while working on The Grapes of Wrath, “not in pace or wordage but in nerves.”

Some of my favorite writers use older technologies to force themselves to slow down: Lynda Barry used a paintbrush and red ink on legal paper to write the first draft of her manuscript for Cruddy. This page hangs in my bedroom:

“People say, But with a computer you could go so much faster,” says David McCullough. “Well, I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I should go slower.”

“The real issue with speed,” writes film editor Walter Murch in his book, In The Blink of an Eye, “Is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.”

Finally, here is one of my favorite works by Corita Kent, which she sent to LBJ in 1963 “after reading that his wife Ladybird had been telling him to slow down.”

Top image: my friend Marty’s back yard — photo taken in 2010.

That first book

Saturday, November 4, 2017

During my daily reading of Thoreau’s journal, I came across an entry from October 28, 1853, 164 years ago, in which he writes about getting back 706 of the 1,000 printed copies of his first (self-published) book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. (“Of the remaining 290 and odd, 75 were given away, the rest sold.”) His “publisher, falsely so called” said that “he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar.” Thoreau had the remainders sent to his house by wagon, and he carried them all upstairs “to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin.”

They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin… I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself. It is not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor? My works are piled up on one side of my chamber half as high as my head, my opera omnia. This was authorship, these are the works of my brain.

He tried his best to see it all in a good light:

I can see now what I write for, the result of my labors. Nevertheless in spite of this result, sitting beside the intert mass of my works, I take up my pen to-night to record what thought or experience I may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever. Indeed I believe that the result is more inspiring and better for me than if a thousand had bought my wares. It affects my privacy less and leaves me freer.

“There’s nothing quite like an author’s excitement upon beholding his first book,” writes Laura Dassow Walls, in her biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life. And there’s nothing quite like watching a book fail to sell, particularly your first one. (My first book sold decently for a poetry book, and finally earned back its advance a couple years ago, but I think most readers sort of forget it exists. Honestly, I don’t mind. Sometimes you need your first book to not be a total failure, but to be a little bit embarrassing, so you’ll go on to write another one…)

Reading about Thoreau’s piles of remaindered books, I couldn’t help but think of Clive James’ deliciously nasty poem, “The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered,” that begins:

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized…

The narrator of the poem goes on to admit, “Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,” but in his case it will be “due / to a miscalculated print run, a marketing error — / Nothing to do with merit.”

Of merit vs. business model, Laura Dassow Walls points out that Thoreau’s first book was pretty much doomed from the beginning. His literary agent was begging him to send shorter pieces to publish and build up his fame before he put out a book. He was giving well-received lectures on his days at Walden, and if he wanted to release a book, he probably should’ve been focused on that one. But instead, he agreed to terrible terms with his printer, James Munroe, who was recommended to Thoreau by his pal Ralph Waldo Emerson. Of the 1,000 books printed, Munroe took the printing costs out of the sales, and if the book didn’t sell, “Thoreau would guarantee reimbursement in full.” His family worried, thinking it wouldn’t sell, but Emerson urged him to go for it. Big mistake.

[Munroe] didn’t publish books; he only printed them. He refused to advertise, and he had no distribution network. One could purchase Thoreau’s book only at Munroe’s shop in Boston or by ordering it from Munroe by mail. This business model had worked for Emerson, who was already well known and whose fame was centered in Boston. But for a first book by an unknown author seeking a national audience, it was a disaster.

Walls writes that “while the book is a flawed masterpiece, it is still a masterpiece,” and “had it been truly published, rather than printed and laid into storage” it would’ve announced Thoreau’s potential, even though “[it] would never have found a wide audience.”

But that’s the thing about the first book, the second book, or even, should you be lucky enough, the 17th book: There’s always the question of the next book — where it will come from, what it will be, and what will become of it…

Creative mornings

Thursday, October 26, 2017

“Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” —Thoreau

Almost every single morning, rain or shine, my wife and I load our two sons into a red double stroller (we call it The War Rig) and we take a 3-mile walk around our neighborhood. It’s often painful, sometimes sublime, but it’s always essential to our day. It’s when ideas are born, when we make plans, when we spot suburban wildlife, when we rant about politics, when we exorcise our demons.

That last one might be the most important. Here’s Linn Ullmann, on her father, the film director Ingmar Bergman:

My father was a very disciplined and punctual man; it was a prerequisite for his creativity. There was a time for everything: for work, for talk, for solitude, for rest. No matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk and then work, he’d say, because the demons hate it when you get out of bed, demons hate fresh air.

These morning walks are so important to me, and so crucial to my work and home life, that I try to never plan anything before nine in the morning. They are also the reason why I, regrettably, almost never attend our local Creative Mornings meetups: every morning pushing The War Rig is a creative morning, and I just can’t afford to miss one.

Related reading: Get out now

On this day

Saturday, October 21, 2017

I bought this handsome NYRB edition of Thoreau’s journal a few months ago when I saw that John Stilgoe had written the preface. (I took it as a BUY NOW sign: I’d read his book Outside Lies Magic earlier this year liked it quite a bit.)

It’s a highly edited and condensed version of the complete 47 volumes of Thoreau’s output, but I still wasn’t sure how to read the thing. I couldn’t imagine actually reading it front to back. Then I noticed that the left-hand page headers refer to the approximate date, but the right-hand page headers refer to what age Thoreau was when he wrote the entry. This seemed like a fun game: Let me see what Thoreau was writing when he was exactly my age.

Then I thought it’d be fun to just follow along with his life day-by-day and year-by-year, almost like turning The Journal into one of those 5 year diaries that you see in stationery stores. I’d stick post-it notes on the current date of each year of the journal, then check the tabs each day to see if there’s an entry.

This turns out to be a terrific way to read Thoreau, because he was so obsessed with observing nature and the changing seasons. You see, for example, how Thoreau repeats himself, noting the fallen leaves in October. (“How beautifully they go to their graves!”)

Yesterday, I read the entry for October 20, 1857, exactly 160 years ago, in which Thoreau writes beautifully about meeting a barefoot old man carrying a dead robin & his shoes full of apples:

I got such a kick out of reading this way I wondered what other books I had lying around the house that I could turn into a daily devotional. How about my Big Book of Peanuts?

I mean, of course a collection of daily newspaper strips, originally written to be consumed on one particular day, makes for good daily reading. (Think of all the “Page-A-Day” Peanuts calendars.) But there’s another reason they’re so great to read day-by-day: Peanuts function as a sort of coded diary for Schulz. This is explained by Bruce Eric Kaplan in the introduction to his collection, This Is A Bad Time:

[T]hese drawings are really my journals. I use them to explore whatever I find interesting, confusing, or upsetting on any given day. But here’s the beauty part—these private thoughts are filtered through the prism of moody children and blasé pets, disillusioned middle-aged men and weary matrons, among others. And so I get to work through whatever I am thinking about in a coded way. No one but me will ever know what the real seed of each image and caption was. So I can be free as I want to say whatever I want, and no one can catch me. It’s great….Every morning… I sit down and think about why I am disgruntled or why I am not as disgruntled as I was yesterday and out come these little drawings…

This connection between daily comic strips and diaries is made more explicit in the work of someone like James Kochalka in his sketchbook diaries, American Elf. I have all 14 years on my iPad now, so it wouldn’t be hard to read them in the same way I do the Peanuts collection. Strangely, I find that having a digital collection of the strips makes me want to reorganize the entries in non-chronological ways, like, reading every strip that includes leaves or clouds.

I have an ebook of Andy Warhol’s diary, and I like to search it whenever I’m in a spot that I know he had some connection to. (When I was in Milan, I typed in “Milan,” and landed on his entry for Monday, September 17, 1979, which contains the question, “Why would anybody want to go to Milan?”)

Anyways, I’m wandering towards a point: To read collected works is to also grapple with the question of how (or when!) to read collected works.

This, by the way, is the end of the Peanuts strip published on Oct. 20, 1962, 56 years ago: