Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

This is a two-cup-of-tea morning.  It's January, a new year, and a new day.  Hope looms on many fronts.  We're still staying safe by staying close to home as much as possible, and will continue to do so for as long as it takes.  To help, Santa brought me a box of new jigsaw puzzles, with images from some of my favorite artists.  I'll start one soon, because I'm rewarding myself in satisfying small ways for finishing something big.  Except for a few very minor nuts-and-bolts issues, which a local editor is helping me resolve, my memoir about painting on Bear Island is done.  I feel like it finally says what I want to say, and I think I'll be moving ahead with self-publishing some copies in the spring.  Pursuing traditional publishing routes isn't for me, at this time.  What I'd really like is to be published by Houghton, Mifflin circa 1905, say, or even 1925.  But those days are done, and since I wrote my odd book to gain clarity within myself, I don't know if it would find any kind of wider readership, or if I would even want it to.  Besides, what I really want is to continue to devote myself to painting and reading, and move on to other things.  That doesn't mean I'm not celebrating, though!  Writing this book was the most difficult (creative or otherwise) project I've ever set my mind to, and I'm glad I completed it.

One of the new projects on my horizon is actually an old project:  returning to the manuscript I wrote when I still had my open shop.  I'm looking forward to revisiting it, and adding to it with the benefit of hindsight.  Meanwhile I'm preparing some work in my studio for painting shows for 2021, and reading a lot.  In Thoreau-news, Volume Four is nearly complete:  

Volume One was difficult to read.  Thoreau is in his twenties and the Journal isn't like a traditional diary (I did this, I do that), but more like a collection of intellectual and spiritual treatises, or the frameworks for such things.  Fragmented; high flights of spiritual or quasi-religious thought, with poetry alongside.  It seems as if he's attempting to come to terms with himself, but not yet succeeding.  I persevered, while hoping that the whole thing wouldn't be this way.  And it isn't.  When I fetched up on one of the first truly run-of-the-mill diary-like entries, in 1842, I just about shouted from joy (Volume One p.335):

"March 17. Thursday.  I have been making pencils all day..."

This plain statement of fact, after so many pages of otherwise, gave me good reason to continue.  Not that I'd planned to abandon ship, but.  In Volumes Two and Three he turns that corner for good.  In his early thirties, he seems to be solid in who he is, formed into the nature-lover and questioner of all things societal and political.  Some of my favorite moments in the Journal are his accounts of long walks at night (seriously, he gets up in the middle of the night, and walks out to the woods, or to a cliff overlook he often visits, and takes notes by starlight or moonlight), and his descriptions of nature close-up, when he's examining grass at eye-level, from flat on the ground, or similarly prone, bubbles of air trapped in the ice on a frozen pond, over several days.  The detail he engages in, regarding plants, trees, birds, mammals, waterways, and even sometimes his human neighbors, is more than a little stunning.  The text purls on and on like a freshet.

The set I have is fairly interruption-free.  Editor Bradford Torrey makes minimal comments in the footnotes.  I mean, there are hardly any, and what Torrey does add is for brief clarification, such as where a passage or paragraph turns up in one of Thoreau's published books.  I love seeing the raw footage, as it were, of what will become his great works.

The wealth of natural description is tempered by occasional inroads into other subjects.  One of his main recurring themes is the seeking of and being disappointed in human friendships.  His many entries regarding this are truly heartbreaking.  He looks around and sees himself alone as can be, while his compatriots and peers are, in his view, putting on an act, going along with the rules of society, to their own (and his, and humanity's) detriment.  Other more minor themes crop up from time to time:  his fascination with the hum of the local telegraph wires, to him a holy kind of music; his current reading, including Darwin and many other books of natural history; the signs of indigenous people in and around Concord; and a few others that make brief appearances, such as aiding an escaped enslaved man in his trip to Canada and freedom (Applause!), and the intellectual inferiority of women (Boo!).  The Journal is right up there, though, with the best of the great personal narratives I've ever read.

About Thoreau's writing style: it's romantic.  He is an adverb-proponent and a friend to the exclamation point.  But his effusion and tendency toward paeans are grounded by his minute careful observation, throughout.  And oh, Thoreau is so very quotable.  A selection, in the order I encounterd them and copied them into my own diary:

Volume One, the 1840s:

"Certain sounds more than others have found favor with the poets only as foils to silence." (p.66)

"We are constantly invited to be what we are; as to something worthy and noble." (p.191)

"Who hears the rippling of the rivers will not utterly despair of anything." (p.293)

"Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading." (p.305)

"I will sift the sunbeams for the public good." (p.350)

Volume Two, 1850-1851:

"It is as sweet a mystery to me as ever, what this world is." (p.9)

"If you know of any risk to run, run it.  If you don't know of any, enjoy confidence." (p.44)

"My greatest skill has been to want but little." (p.319)

"Cultivate reverence." (p.463)

Volume Three, 1851-1852:

"I feel blessed.  I love my life.  I warm toward all nature." (p.86)

"'Says I to myself' should be the motto of my journal." (p.107)

"Nothing stands up more free from blame in this world than a pine tree." (p.145)

"There is a low mist in the woods.  It is a good day to study lichens." (p.166)

"Fate will go all lengths to aid her protégés." (p.315)

"If anybody thinks a thought, how sure we are to hear of it!" (p.328)

Volume Four, 1852-1853:

"It is a good day to saunter." (p.62)

"It would be pleasant to write the history of one hillside for one year." (p.127)

"A journal, a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy." (p.223)

Whew.  And these are just the shortest passages!  I copied out many much longer ones too.  I had to order some new blank diaries, since I'm filling up my current one so fast.  I've also purchased a lovely copy of Walden, and when it comes in the mail, I'll take a break from the Journal to read that instead.  The book's arrival will roughly coincide with the date of publication of the first edition of Walden in the Journal, so that will be a perfect time to read a stand-alone book as Thoreau intended.  Is it hard to believe I've never read Walden?  Well, I haven't.  This seems like a fine time to remedy that situation.  Onward.  Happy New Year!

*An added caveat:  In a rare mood of hope and optimism for the future, I wrote the above and posted it before becoming aware of what was unfolding in Washington, D.C.  I won't go back and change anything, but want to acknowledge that I'm no longer feeling hopeful or optimistic.  Thoreau's words seem unbearable in their idealism and innocence, even while they embody the world in which I wish we lived.  Peace, friends.*    

# posted by Sarah Faragher @ 2:27 PM