MarysLibrary

Our Man in the Willows

This book is known in our house as Our Man in the Willows.

In his Christmas sermon years ago our priest referred to "The Wind in the Willows by Graham Greene." At the end of the pew, a bookish friend, Gary Carter, leaned forward to look at me just as I leaned forward to look at him and for much of the rest of the service we had trouble stifling our giggles.

It is only now that I'm getting around to reading this children's classic (written by Kenneth Grahame) and once again I'm stifling giggles. Mr Toad of Toad Hall is an outrageous, short-cycle bipolar amphibian with an ego unrivaled in literature. His adventures include crashing numerous new cars, which he can afford to buy because he is a very wealthy toad indeed, stealing somebody else's car (twice), disguising himself as a washerwoman, stealing a horse, and eventually joining his friends, Badger, Water Rat, and Mole, to storm Toad Hall, which in his absence has been taken over by the animals from the Wild Wood, ferrets, weasels, and stoats, wicked creatures who have posted lookouts with guns to protect their newly-acquired fortress.

I haven't seen such a book, but I'll bet some scholar has written an academic interpretation of this 1908 story of revolution and restoration, of the foolishness of the governing class, and the importance of solidarity among the proletariat.

But it's much more fun to read it as the story of little animals who are sometimes wise and sometimes not, who work together to rescue one of their own despite his many and egregious character faults, and of course, who "mess about with boats."

Reposted from 22 Feb 2013

Newfoundland dogs

Newfoundland dogs are good to save children from drowning, but you must have a pond of water handy and a child, or else there will be no profit in boarding a Newfoundland. - Josh Billings

The value of a classical education

Thoreau’s education, heavily emphasizing the Greeks and Romans, “… shaped Thoreau profoundly, teaching him to measure the moderns by the standards of the ancients, and it enabled him to lean hard into every word he wrote, hearing echoes of meaning layered across a multitude of languages and ringing down through the ages.” – Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life

Was Thoreau sincere or just virtue-signalling?

Talk about virtue-signalling! Henry David Thoreau (he changed it for no apparent reason from David Henry when he graduated from Harvard) was against the Mexican War (1846--1848.) Lots of people were. It gained the US much of the southwest, which had been Mexico's so it's hard to look back now and evaluate the war. Anyone living in Albuquerque must count his blessings daily that he isn't living in Mexico. But it wasn't outrageous to consider it an unjust war.

So Bronson Alcott and a couple of other Transcendentalists in Concord, Massachusetts, refused to pay their taxes in protest. A fellow townsman paid them instead and kept the objectors out of jail. These were the days before income tax and it was not a large amount of money.

It was the principle of the thing.

A couple of years later Thoreau refused to pay but he got caught up in a last-minute tying up of loose ends when the town jailer was about to leave office and happened on Thoreau as he was on his way to the cobbler to pick up a repaired boot. It was late in the day and so Thoreau spent the night in jail before his aunt paid the $1.50 or so in tax and he was freed. It is thought that she continued to pay the tax thereafter until the end of his life.

But meanwhile Thoreau had demonstrated his willingness to go to jail (or at least to stay in the town jail overnight) to protest the war. 

He worked up a speech for the town lecture series and then he wrote an essay about civil disobedience. Thoreau got a lot of mileage from that night in jail. 

I'm reminded of all this because I've been reading a new biography of the man by Laura Dassow Walls. As you can easily discern, I'm not much of a Thoreau fan. But I was willing to read this even-handed re-examination, ostensibly to see better the whole picture of his life and work and perhaps change my negative views. In reality, I was probably looking for evidence to reinforce my opinion as so many of us often are when reading something about an issue or a person to which/whom we have taken a dislike.

It is no surprise therefore that I'm not seeing a lot of enlightening new positives about the man. He can be lumped in with Bronson Alcott, another Concord citizen who was stunningly self-indulgent and who also failed to support his family. Alcott sat around and philosophized while his wife's relatives supported him and his wife and children until his young daughter, Louisa, began writing her fingers to the bone to bring in the money the pater familias was unwilling to work for.

Thoreau, with a Harvard degree, chose to work as a handyman for about a dollar a day while his ageing father continued to support everyone. Thoreau eventually made a name for himself. He realized that anti-slavery was the coming thing in New England intellectual circles and he joined his sisters, who for years had been working to bring the issue of slavery to public attention and helping to conduct a station on the Underground Railway.

The upshot is I'm learning a lot about Thoreau and coming cautiously to admire his engineering skills and his sincere love of nature if not a lot else. His family made quality drawing pencils and he devised a way to grind more finely the graphite for the "lead" which made Thoreau pencils the best you could buy outside of France in the mid-19th century. He designed and built that sturdy little house on Emerson's land by Walden Pond. And he surveyed the pond, which is a group of three glacial "kettles" and deeper than most of the thousands of such ponds in New England.

And although his ideas were almost entirely Emerson's he did know how to turn a phrase. The biography is excellent. It is evenhanded so if you admire Thoreau you will enjoy it as much as do those of us who disdain him.