The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau

AUTHOR: Thoreau, Henry David

In Thoreau's correspondence he remarks on a number of related issues concerning environmentalism, the interconnectedness and agency of nature, human-nonhuman relations, the essence of good labor, and his dietary preferences.

On the interconnectedness and agency of nature: “Nature takes as much care for little animals as for mankind” (38; letter to his sister Helen, 13 June 1840).

Thoreau uses simile and synecdoche to emphasize both the irrevocable embeddedness of humans in nature and nature's influence on human thought by means of affect, mood, and temperament:

I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side, while my eyes revolve in an Egyptian slime of health, – I to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves. Now-a-nights I go on to the hill to see the sun set, as one would go home at evening; the bustle of the village has run on all day, and left me quite in the rear; but I see the sunset, and find that it can wait for my slow virtue.
But I forget that you think more of this human nature than of this nature I praise. Why won't you believe that mine is more human than any single man or woman can be? that in it, in the sunset there, are all the qualities that can adorn a household, and that sometimes, in a fluttering leaf, one may hear all your Christianity preached (45; letter to Lucy Brown, a sister of Emerson's second wife, 21 July 1841).

I can sympathize, perhaps, with the barberry bush, whose business it is solely to ripen its fruit  (though that may not be to sweeten it) and to protect it with thorns, so that it holds on all winter, even, unless some hungry crows come to pluck it (210; letter to James Elliott Cabot, 8 March 1848).

I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks (222; letter to H. G. O. Blake, 2 May 1848).

On the relation of labor and nutrition or diet to thought and temperament. In the same letter to H. G. O. Blake, he writes:

There is not one kind of food for all men. You must and you will feed those faculties which you exercise. The laborer whose body is weary does not require the same food with the scholar whose brain is weary. Men should not labor foolishly like brutes, but the brain and the body should always, or as much as possible, work and rest together, and then the work will be of such a kind that when the body is hungry the brain will be hungry also, and the same food will suffice for both; otherwise the food which repairs the waste energy of the over-wrought body will oppress the sedentary brain, and the degenerate scholar will come to esteem all food vulgar, and all getting a living drudgery (220; letter to H. G. O. Blake, 2 May 1848).

The newspaper gossip with which our hosts abuse our ears is as far from a true hospitality as the viands which they set before us. We did not need them to feed our bodies; and the news can be bought for a penny. We want the inevitable news, be it sad or cheering – wherefore and by what means they are extant, this new day. If they are well let them whistle and dance; If they are dyspeptic, it is their duty to complain, that so they may in any case be entertaining. If words are invented to conceal thought, I think that newspapers are a great improvement on a bad invention. Do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers (251; letter to H. G. O. Blake, 20 November 1849).

Is it not delightful to provide one’s self with the necessaries of life, – to collect dry wood when the weather grows cool, or fruits when we grow hungry? – not till then. And then we have all the time left for thought! (303; letter to H. G. O. Blake, 10 April 1854).

On fashion and the habits of clothing, Thoreau suggests clothes should be to humans like bark is to its tree:

Ah, the process by which we get over-coats is not what it should be. Though the church declare it righteous & its priest pardons me, my own Good Genius tells me that it is hasty & coarse & false. I expect a time when, or rather an integrity by which a man will get his coat as honestly, and as perfectly fitting as a tree I ts bark. Now our garments are typical of our conformity to the ways of the world, i.e. of the Devil, & to some extent react on us and poison us like that shirt which Hercules put on (319; letter to H. G. O. Blake, 21  January 1854).

Thoreau likens himself to (aspects of) nature when he tells of “weeks of pasturing and browsing, like beeves and deer – which give me animal health” (295-296; letter to H. G. O. Blake, 27 February 1853) and more emphatically in a letter to Daniel Ricketson in which he asks his correspondent to think of his silence (Thoreau apparently had not written for more than a year) as:

the silence of a dense pine wood. It is its natural condition, except when the winds blow, and the jays scream, & the chickadee winds up his clock. My silence is just as inhuman as that, and no more” (599). He then doubles down on this forest imagery a few lines further on, when he implores Ricketson not to think of him (and his rare visits and letters) “as a regular diet, but at most only as acorns, which too are not to be despised, which, at least, we love to think are edible in a bracing walk (600; letter to Daniel Ricketson, 4 November 1860).

This inhuman, forest-like being is the ideal human way of being in the world: absolutely in tune with nature as it is. Thus, he does “not believe there are eight hundred human beings on the globe – It is all a fable” (123; letter to the Emersons, 8 July 1848), because only those who feel and act according to their communion with nature can be said to be proper humans, to be living ethical lives.

 

Last updated on April 19th, 2024

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