CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
This file is about the stupidest stupid decision ever made in Thoreau scholarship, and how this stupidest stupid decision came to be made, of course by one of those educated white New England gentleman of unexamined privilege by the likes of whom we are plagued and beset to this very day.
I do recognize that this amounts to a hatchet job. However, I embrace the wisdom of the immortal Lizzie Borden, who counseled us that “If you’re going to use a hatchet, it’s more important to be Thoreau than neat.”
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Mr. Empty Suit HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1860
November 25, Monday: Bliss Perry was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, son of a professor at Williams College. He would be educated at Williams, then at the universities of Berlin and Strassburg. He would edit many volumes of the works of others, such as of Edmund Burke, Walter Scott, and Waldo Emerson, and author a number of monographs, including works on Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, Thomas Carlyle, Waldo Emerson, and others, as well as novels, short fiction, essays, studies of poetry, collections of fiction and essays, and, of course, an autobiography. He would accomplish all this without ever writing a single sentence worth quoting and without ever thinking a single thought worth thinking.
November 25: I count the rings in a spruce plank from the railroad bridge, which extend five and a half inches from the centre of the tree, and make them 146,–1/26+ to a ring. This is slower growth than I find in a black spruce to-day at– Ministerial Swamp, P.M.–It is 10 1/2 feet high, 2 1/2 inches [IN] diameter just above ground, and has 21 rings, 1/17 inch to a ring. A larch near by is 21 feet high, 2 13/16 inches [IN] diameter, and has 20 rings, which makes 1/14+ to a ring. The larch has made nearly twice as much wood as the spruce in the same time. The cones of the spruce which I see are still closed. A few sugar maple seeds still hang on. Last night and to-day are very cold and blustering. Winter weather has come suddenly this year. The house was shaken by wind last night, and there was a general deficiency of bedclothes. This morning some windows were as handsomely covered with frost as ever in winter. I wear mittens or gloves and my greatcoat. There is much ice on the meadows now, the broken edges shining in the sun. Now for the phenomena of winter,–the red buds of the high blueberry and the purple berries of the smilax. As I go up the meadow-side toward Clamshell, I see a very great collection of crows far and wide on the meadows, evidently gathered by this cold and blustering weather. Probably the moist meadows where they feed are frozen up against them. They flit before me in countless numbers, flying very low on account of the strong northwest wind that comes over the hill, and a cold gleam is reflected from the back and wings of each, as from a weather-stained shingle. Some perch within three or four rods of me, and seem weary. I see where they have been pecking the apples by the meadow-side. An immense cohort of cawing crows which sudden winter ha s driven near to the habitations of man. When I return after sunset I see them collecting and hovering over and settling in the dense pine woods west of E. Wood’s, as if about to roost there. Yesterday I saw one flying over the house, its wings so curved by the wind that I thought it a black hawk. How is any scientific discovery made? Why, the discoverer takes it into his head first. He must all but see it. I see several little white pines in Hosmer’s meadow just beyond Lupine Hill, which must have sprung from seed which came some fifty rods,–probably blown so far in the fall. There are also a few in the road beyond Dennis’s, which probably were blown from his swamp wood. So that there is nothing to prevent their springing up all over the village in a very few years–but our own plows and spades. They have also come up quite numerously in the young woodland north of J. P. B.’s Cold Pool (probably blown from the wood south of the pond), though they are evidently half a dozen years younger than the oaks there. I look at this large white pine wood by the pool to see if little ones come up under it. What was recently pasture comes up within a rod of this high wood on the north side, and, though the fence is gone, the different condition and history of the ground is very apparent by the different aspect of the little pines. There the old white pines are dense, and there are no little ones under them, but only a rod north they are very abundant, forming a dense thicket only two or three feet high bounded by a straight line on the south (or east and west), where the edge of the open land was within a rod of the great pines. Here they sprang up abundantly in the open land close by, but not at all under the pines. Yet within the great wood, wherever it is more open from any cause, I see a great many little pines springing up. Though they are thin and feeble comparatively, yet most of them will evidently come to be trees. White pines will spring up in the more open parts of a white pine wood, even under pines, though they are thin and feeble just in proportion to the density of the larger pines, and, where the large trees are quite dense, they will not spring up at all. How commonly you see pitch pines, white pines, and birches filling up a pasture, and, when they are a dozen or fifteen years old, shrub and other oaks beginning to show themselves, inclosing apple trees and walls and fences gradually and so changing the whole aspect of the region. These trees do not cover the whole surface HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
equally at present, but are grouped very agreeably after natural laws which they obey. You remember, perhaps, that fifteen years ago there was not a single tree in this pasture,–not a germinating seed of one,–and now it is a pretty dense forest ten feet high. I confess that I love to be convinced of this inextinguishable vitality in Nature. I would rather that my body should be buried in a soil thus wide-awake than in a mere inert and dead earth. The cow-paths. the hollows where I slid in the winter, the rocks, are fast being enveloped and becoming rabbit-walks and hollows and rocks in the woods. How often you make a man richer in spirit in proportion as you rob him of earthly luxuries and comforts! I see much oak wood cut at thirty years of age,–sprout wood. Many stumps which have only twenty-five or thirty rings send up no shoots, because they are the sprouts from old stumps, which you may still see by their sides, and so are really old trees and exhausted. The chopper should foresee this when he cuts down a wood. The bass by Dugan’s cut a year ago. It is hard to count, so indistinct its rings, but I make 46 to 50 in a diameter of some twenty inches. The sprouts are quite peculiar, so light an ash-color with red tips and large blunt red buds. The old pitch pines (vide back two or three weeks) one hundred and sixty years old, that stood on the south side of the Tommy Wheeler hollow, were twenty-three in number on a space about twelve rods by three (or thirty- six rods), with half a dozen white pines and as many oaks, the last two say twenty to fifty years younger than the pitch pines. Probably some of the pitch pines have died and left no trees, so that it may originally have been a pretty dense grove of pitch pines. There were as many more pitch pines (not to mention the oaks and white pines) on the other side of the hollow. These were on a slope toward the north. Now, four years after they were cut, this hillside is covered with hazel bushes, huckleberries, young oaks, red maples, Viburnum nudum, and a few little white pines, but the hollow below them has little beside grass (fine sedge) in it. It will be long before anything catches there. It is remarkable that no pitch pines grew there before, nor oaks, and very few white pines, which were the only trees there. Some pitch pines have shed their seeds.
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
Check your Privilege, “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1886
Bliss Perry began to teach at his alma mater, Williams College.
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Mr. Empty Suit HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1890
Professor Bliss Perry’s THE BROUGHTON HOUSE. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)
According to Lawrence Buell, during this decade Henry Thoreau would be considered just another of those cranky hermits in just another of those secluded nooks (the evidence for this is pages 146, 153, and 479 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION: THOREAU, NATURE WRITING, AND THE FORMATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE, as instanced below). The Professor alleges, in addition, that by this point in time John Burroughs had become “aware of Thoreau’s shadow,” aware, that is, that in resorted to a cabin in a secluded nook, “Slabsides,” even though his cabin and its locale were rather unlike Henry’s shack in the Walden woods, he was running a risk of becoming like his mentor a cranky hermit:
[O]ne of WALDEN’s first enthusiastic readers, Friend Daniel Ricketson, had serendipitously built a cabin retreat for himself on his New Bedford property. Thoreau and Ricketson were but two variants of a long-publicized type of American eccentric: the cranky hermit, who for a variety of possible reasons retreated to his (or her) secluded nook. [Continuing in an endnote: For an amusing bestiary of profiles, see Carl Sifakis, AMERICAN ECCENTRICS (New York and Bicester, England: Facts on File, 1984). His roster includes Francis Phyle, “the hermit of Mount Holly”; Sarah Bishop, “the atrocity hermitess”; Albert Large, “the hermit amidst the wolves”; and many more.]... [Henry Thoreau] elevates the Horatian and Virgilian love of rural retirement, a neoclassical motif of great resonance to the Anglo-American squierarchy, a motif on which Thoreau had written a college essay, to the level of a lifework. ...Some readers will resist this side of Thoreau’s genius.... Thus we normalize the Walden sojourn by imagining it as an efficient way to get a lot of writing done, or normalize WALDEN by positing a firm aesthetic structure or ideational commitment. This tends to suppress both the worst and the best about Thoreau.... In the early 1870s, John Muir probably built his shack over a Yosemite sawmill without thinking about Thoreau, even though he already had begun to read him. By the 1890s, John Burroughs was far more aware of Thoreau’s shadow, often evincing a prickly, hypersensitive anxiety of influence; but Burroughs probably was not copying Thoreau when he built his cabin, Slabsides. In modern times, however, the commemoration of Muir and Burroughs as naturist prophets has been cross-pollinated by the myth of a Thoreauvian tradition. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1893
Bliss Perry began to teach at the College of New-Jersey, which while he was there would relocate to Princeton, New Jersey and change its name to Princeton University.
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
Check your Privilege, “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1894
Professor Bliss Perry’s SALEM KITTREDGE AND OTHER STORIES. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)
From this year into 1896, the four volumes of the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS PAINE would be gradually published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons of New York.1
1. Moncure Daniel Conway. THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS PAINE: Collected and Edited by Moncure D. Conway, with an Introduction and Notes. 4 vols., royal 8vo. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, NY and London. READ THE FULL TEXT READ THE FULL TEXT READ THE FULL TEXT READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1895
Henry S. Salt’s SELECTIONS FROM THOREAU, ED. WITH AN INTR. BY H.S. SALT.
Professor Bliss Perry’s WOODSTOCK and THE PLATED CITY. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1899
Professor Bliss Perry began to edit The Atlantic Monthly. His forgettable novel THE POWERS AT PLAY. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)
In Holland, Frederik van Eeden started a cooperative colony named “Walden.” However, he would protest later that:
I did not believe in non-resistance, nor did I reject the aid of machinery in the struggle for existence. And the name “Walden,” given to my settlement, only proved that I admired Thoreau as an author, not that I shared all his views.
TIMELINE OF WALDEN
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
Check your Privilege, “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1902
Professor Bliss Perry’s feckless A STUDY OF PROSE FICTION. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
Check your Privilege, “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1903
April 9, Thursday: The head of Houghton, Mifflin, George H. Mifflin, who may well never have read Henry Thoreau, had allowed himself to be persuaded that “Thoreau should be our next great author after Emerson.” The author in reincarnation, as a sort of cash cow: capitalism at its finest flush. Bliss Perry of Houghton, Mifflin completed negotiations with E. Harlow Russell, who had inherited Thoreau’s three trunks of manuscripts upon the death of H.G.O. Blake in 1898, for an “autograph” edition of Thoreau’s writings which would include almost all of Thoreau’s journal. Perry, visiting Russell at his home in Worcester, Massachusetts, obtained “certain bundles of loose manuscript which have already been used by the printers in making some of the earliest of Thoreau’s volumes.”2
April 21, Tuesday: Bliss Perry of Houghton, Mifflin wrote to E. Harlow Russell in Worcester, Massachusetts about the Henry Thoreau materials, asking him to “place at our disposal a few hundred of this loose manuscript to be inserted in our special edition.”3
2. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY LETTER BOOKS, “Editorial,” volume 26, page 201, at the Houghton Library of Harvard University. 3. This is it, this is the magic moment at which the stupidest stupid idea ever entertained was entertained — by Professor Bliss Perry, Mr. Empty Suit, quintessential New England white gentleman of unexamined privilege THE STUPIDEST STUPID IDEA HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1904
In Chapter 6 of THE SEA WOLF, Jack London’s character Wolf Larsen may or may not have learned his facts from Charles Darwin, but distinctly he had acquired all his attitudes rather from Herbert Spencer. Therefore he knew of some facts that are recounted in WALDEN, but applied to these facts an utterly non-Thoreauvian understanding: “…life is the cheapest thing in the world…. Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me…. Life? Bah! It has not value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest…. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives and its life eats life….”
Professor Bliss Perry’s THE AMATEUR SPIRIT. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Mr. Empty Suit HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1905
Bliss Perry was made general editor of the Cambridge edition of the major American poets.
The Riverside Press operated 60 presses which processed 2,000-3,000 tons of paper per year. But by this point, all of Thoreau’s corpus with the exception of his journal had entered the public domain, so that anyone who believed they would be able to turn a dollar could reissue any of it which they desired to publish. According to Lawrence Buell, on page 342 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION, [A]ll of Thoreau’s books except his JOURNAL entered the public domain between 1891 and 1905. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
BOUND VOLUMES
HELLMAN (October 8, 1904) SANBORN (August 19, 1905) 11 vols. Indian Extracts 11 volumes of extracts relating to the Indians. 2 “ Nat. Hist. “ 2 volumes of extracts relating to Natural History. 1 “ Misc. " 1 volume of Miscellanies. 1 “ Poetic " 1 volume of Poetic Extracts (the volumes of verse seen by me) 1 “ Canada " 1 volume of extracts relating to Canada. Thirty-three Journals, 1845-1861.
Loose Manuscripts
HELLMAN SANBORN Phenomena of Seasons A ms of Phenomena of the Seasons. 6 Guides & Maps in covers Maps and Guide Books with Thoreau’s autograph. Sir W. Raleigh The ms of Sir Walter Raleigh (really three drafts). Wild Apples The ms of “Wild Apples.” Canada The ms of An Excursion to Canada. Love & Friendship etc. [mss of] … an Essay on Love and Friendship … Life without Principle etc. mss of “Life Without Principle”… Autum[na]l Tints [mss of] … “Autumnal Tints”… Walking [mss of] … “Walking”… Cape Cod The ms of Cape Cod (incomplete). The ms of Walden.
Notes and Fragments
HELLMAN SANBORN Notes on Journey West Notes of the Journey West (1861). HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
Various Fragments (large) Fragments of the Week, Prometheus, Maine Woods. [mss of] … Personal Notes and other Frag- ments. Notes & Fragments (Natural) [mss of] … “Night and Moonlight”… “Wild Fruits” (thick, unpublished) … A ms of the Dispersion of Seeds. Notes on the Phenomena of Nature. Fragment “Sep 24 1843.—” Six extra fragmentary sheets.
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Mr. Empty Suit HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1906
THE WORKS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906Journal I, 1837-1847: TIMELINE OF THE MAINE WOODS TIMELINE OF WALDEN TIMELINE OF ESSAYS TIMELINE OF CANADA TIMELINE OF CAPE COD TIMELINE OF JOURNAL
1837 (æt. 20) 1838 (æt. 20-21) 1839 (æt. 21-22) 1840 (æt. 22-23) 1841 (æt. 23-24) 1842(æt. 24-25) 1845-1846 (æt. 27-29) 1845-1847 (æt. 27-30) 1837-1847 (æt. 20-30) Journal II, 1850-September 15, 1851: 1850 (æt. 32-33) December 1850 (æt. 33) January-April 1851 (æt. 33) May 1851 (æt. 33) June 1851 (æt. 33) July 1851 (æt. 33-34) August 1851 (æt. 34) September 1851 (æt. 34) Journal III, September 16, 1851-April 30, 1852: September-October 1851 (æt. 34) November 1851 (æt. 34) December 1851 (æt. 34) January 1852 (æt. 34) February 1852 (æt. 34) March 1852 (æt. 34) April 1852 (æt. 34) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
Journal IV, March 1, 1852-February 27, 1853: May 1852 (æt. 34) June 1852 (æt. 34) July 1852 (æt. 34-35) August 1852 (æt. 35) September 1852 (æt. 35) October 1852 (æt. 35) November 1852 (æt. 35) December 1852 (æt. 35) January 1853 (æt. 35) February 1853 (æt. 35) Journal V, March 5-November 30, 1853: March 1853 (æt. 35) April 1853 (æt. 35) May 1853 (æt. 35) June 1853 (æt. 35) July 1853 (æt. 35-36) August 1853 (æt. 36) September 1853 (æt. 36) October 1853 (æt. 36) November 1853 (æt. 36) Journal VI, December 1, 1853-August 31, 1854: December 1853 (æt. 36) January 1854 (æt. 36) February 1854 (æt. 36) March 1854 (æt. 36) April 1854 (æt. 36) May 1854 (æt. 36) June 1854 (æt. 36) July 1854 (æt. 36-37) August 1854 (æt. 37) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
Journal VII, September 1, 1854-October 30, 1855: September 1854 (æt. 37) October 1854 (æt. 37) November 1854 (æt. 37) December 1854 (æt. 37) January 1855 (æt. 37) February 1855 (æt. 37) March 1855 (æt. 37) April 1855 (æt. 37) May 1855 (æt. 37) June 1855 (æt. 37) July 1855 (æt. 37-38) August 1855 (æt. 38) September 1855 (æt. 38) October 1855 (æt. 38) Journal VIII, November 1, 1855-August 15, 1856: November 1855 (æt. 38) December 1855 (æt. 38) January 1856 (æt. 38) February 1856 (æt. 38) March 1856 (æt. 38) April 1856 (æt. 38) May 1856 (æt. 38) June 1856 (æt. 38) July 1856 (æt. 38-39) August 1-15, 1856 (æt. 39) Journal IX, August 16, 1856-August 7, 1857: August 16-30, 1856 (æt. 39) September 1856 (æt. 39) October 1856 (æt. 39) November 1856 (æt. 39) December 1856 (æt. 39) January 1857 (æt. 39) February 1857 (æt. 39) March 1857 (æt. 39) April 1857 (æt. 39) May 1857 (æt. 39) June 1857 (æt. 39) July 1857 (æt. 39-40) August 1-7, 1857 (æt. 40) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
Journal X, August 8, 1857-June 29, 1858: August 7-30, 1857 (æt. 40) September 1857 (æt. 40) October 1857 (æt. 40) November 1857 (æt. 40) December 1857 (æt. 40) January 1858 (æt. 40) February 1858 (æt. 40 March 1858 (æt. 40) April 1858 (æt. 40) May 1858 (æt. 40) June 1858 (æt. 40) Journal XI, July 2, 1858-February 28, 1859: July 1858 (æt. 40-41) August 1858 (æt. 41) September 1858 (æt. 41) October 1858 (æt. 41) November 1858 (æt. 41) December 1858 (æt. 41) January 1859 (æt. 41) February 1859 (æt. 41) Journal XII, March 2, 1859-November 30, 1859: March 1859 (æt. 41) April 1859 (æt. 41) May 1859 (æt. 41) June 1859 (æt. 41) July 1859 (æt. 41-42) August 1859 (æt. 42) September 1859 (æt. 42) October 1859 (æt. 42) November 1859 (æt. 42) Journal XIII, December 1, 1859-July 31, 1860: December 1859 (æt. 35) January 1860 (æt. 35) February 1860 (æt. 35) March 1860 (æt. 35) April 1860 (æt. 35-36) May 1860 (æt. 36) June 1860 (æt. 36) July 1860 (æt. 36) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
Journal XIV, August 1, 1860-November 3, 1861: August 1860 (æt. 43) September 1860 (æt. 43) October 1860 (æt. 43) November 1860 (æt. 43) December 1860 (æt. 43) 1861 (æt. 43-44)
In Houghton, Mifflin’s Riverside Press series AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, Professor Bliss Perry’s potboiler WALT WHITMAN. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)
Employees of The Riverside Press belonged to the International Typographical Union, which, with 642 locals, led a drive for an 8-hour day and a union shop. When the Boston locals went out on strike, the Cambridge Typographical Union (which included employees from The Riverside Press, the University Press and the Atheneum Press) held a mass meeting. Capitulating to the threat of a strike, the three employers consented to an 8-hour day, but not to a union shop. Houghton, Mifflin, after trimming many of the 520 leaves the corporation had obtained from Thoreau’s trunk (cutting many in half) and after mounting the full and half leaves on larger sheets, bound Henry Thoreau’s original manuscripts into the first volume of each of its 620 THE MANUSCRIPT EDITION OF THOREAU’S WRITINGS sets and into the first volume of an undisclosed number of its 200 specially bound WALDEN EDITION sets.
On the following screen is WALDEN in the Riverside edition that would be sold through the 1920s. TIMELINE OF WALDEN
Raymond R. Borst has noted in HENRY DAVID THOREAU: A DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY (Pittsburgh PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1982, page 168) that of the 200 specially bound sets of the Walden Edition with a manuscript tipped into the first volume, only 6 still contained their manuscripts by the time recovery was attempted. Of the 180 or so Manuscript and Walden Edition leaves recovered to date, 23 full and 9 half leaves are “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE” manuscripts. Assuming that the 180 or so manuscripts that have been recovered are a HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
representative sampling of the 520 manuscripts that were dispersed in 1906, then the ratio of “Life without Principle” manuscripts recovered –a total of 27 1/2 leaves– to the total number of manuscripts recovered suggests that just over 15% or about 80 of the 520 manuscripts dispersed were “Life without Principle” leaves. This means that approximately 52 full-leaf “Life without Principle” leaves yet remain to be accounted for. If you can find out anything about any manuscript that is or was bound into the Manuscript or the Walden Edition, you should contact the Thoreau Textual Center at the U of California – Santa Barbara. BRAD DEAN’S COMMENTARY
At some early point HENRY THOREAU’S FRIENDSHIP AND OTHER ESSAYS began to be published by the Little Leather Library Corporation, and later by Robert K. Haas Publishers, in a red-leather series labeled “Little Leather Luxart.” The packet of 92 pages would be reprinted down through the years without publication date:
TIMELINE OF ESSAYS HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1907
Annie Russell Marble’s HERALDS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: A GROUP OF PATRIOT WRITERS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY AND NATIONAL PERIODS (Chicago IL: U of Chicago P), and her ELIZABETH WHITTIER AND THE AMESBURY HOME (The Outlook). Coincident with the publication of Thoreau’s CAPE COD by Houghton Mifflin in Boston (The Riverside Press), an edition was put out with an introduction by Marble at Thomas Y. Crowell & Company in New York.
Professor Bliss Perry began to teach at Harvard University. His unmemorable JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER: ASKETCH OF HIS LIFE ... WITH SELECTED POEMS. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1908
Francis Henry Allen’s A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. (WELL WORTH YOUR WHILE)
Professor Bliss Perry’s PARK-STREET PAPERS. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1909
Harvard College’s University Hall was photographed in this year:
NEW “HARVARD MEN” Briefly, Professor Bliss Perry became Harvard lecturer at the University of Paris (as such he would automatically be awarded the rank of Chevalier, the least of the five possibilities, in the French Ordre National HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
de la Légion d’honneur).
No complete list of recipients of this honor exists (there being way, way too many) but a selective list of some of only those elected chevaliers whose last names began with “P” appears here: A VERY FEW OF THE ELECT
THE SIXTH CATALOGUE OF THE OFFICERS AND MEMBERS OF THE INSTITUTE OF 1770 (Boston: The Rockwell and Churchill Press) recognized that the society had had as one of its members Henry David Thoreau. “THE INSTITUTE OF 1770”
The Speaking Club of Harvard College was founded Sept. 6, 1770, for improvement in elocution. In 1778 it united itself with the Mercurian Club of 1771, still retaining its former title. In December, 1801, the name was changed to the Patriotic Association, for fear, as the records state, that its casual mention might disclose the objects of the society, for it was originally strictly secret. In 1825 the Hermetic Society of 1813 and the ΑΚΡΙΒΟΛΟΓΟϒΜΕΝΟΙ of 1823 were united with it, the combined societies taking the name of the Institute of 1770. In 1848 the I.O.H. was merged into the Institute, and in this form the Institute has come down to the present time. It was not until about the year 1835 that the Institute became HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
a purely sophomore society, which it has ever since remained, though the practice of electing honorary members has been quite common during recent years. The Institute is now composed of 100 members, elected in groups of ten from the sophomore class at regular intervals during the sophomore year, members of the two upper classes, and sometimes members of the sophomore class, being elected honorary members with each group of ten. The Institute possesses a well-selected library of abort 2,000 volumes, to which it is hoped that all Institute alumni will add copies of their works. A catalogue of the members was printed in 1832, one in 1849, one in 1857, one in 1868, and another in 1905. The degrees, titles and necrology have in most cases been taken literally from the Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue of 1905, except that Mass. Hist. Soc. has been further abbreviated into M.H.S., Fellow Am. Acad. to F.A.A., and Am. Philos. Soc. to A.P.S. The final spelling of proper names as there indicated has been followed. The number of members since the founding of the Institute is 6,650, whereof 4,198 survive. This catalogue of 1909 attempts to give a list of the addresses of all living members, but it has been impossible to get hold of all the addresses, since the University records, on which we have relied entirely, do not include the addresses of graduates unless they are holders of some degree. Hence we depend upon members to send in their permanent addresses if their names do not appear in the list. All notices of errors or omissions should be sent to the Secretary, 88 Winthrop street, Cambridge, Mass.
RICHARD WHITNEY,
Secretary. October 1st, 1909, In the year of the Institute of 1770 the 189th. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1912
Professor Bliss Perry’s THE AMERICAN MIND: THE E.T. EARL LECTURES. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1913
Professor Bliss Perry’s THE AMERICAN MIND AND AMERICAN IDEALISM. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)
H.G. Wells’s LITTLE WARS was the initial book to describe hobby war gaming done with miniatures. In such war games, Wells noticed, firearms tended to dominate the battlefield and tended to induce the players to focus on eliminating their opponent’s forces. To curtail these tendencies and render the gaming more sophisticated, Wells developed new rulebooks. Meanwhile, he was scribbling away at THE WORLD SET FREE, a novel in which he described aerial bombs made from isotopes of uranium (in 1934 a German-language translation of Wells’s THE WORLD SET FREE would induce Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard to patent the idea of nuclear chain reactions).
Frederick Soddy announced discoveries concerning isotopes of radioactive elements (for this he would receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921, and have a crater named in his honor on the far side of the moon).4
In this year Neils Henrik David Bohr of Denmark was arriving at a concept of the atom in which its electrons were presumed to occupy stable quantized orbits with well-defined quantized energy. According to his new model, absorption and emission of light by an atom was occurring as a result of an electron vanishing from its given quantum orbit as it absorbed or emitted a photon and appearing, simultaneously, in another orbit involving a different quantum of energy. For the 1st time we had an explanation of our observation that atoms absorb and emit light at particular frequencies that are characteristic of that atom.
HISTORY OF OPTICS
We did not yet have any inkling that we would be able to shoot these atomic particles at each other. However, on a macro scale we were continuing to be inventive of new ways to kill people. For instance, in this year Isaac Newton Lewis, a retired Coast Defense artillery officer, began to manufacture a light machine-gun in Belgium. This would come to be known as the Lewis gun and would be probably the most effective such weapon in the World War I timeframe.
Arthur Holmes reasoned that the rate of breakdown of radioactive isotopes in igneous rocks might be used to determine when these rocks had originally solidified (an ability to determine the absolute ages of rocks would enable paleontologists to more accurately date their fossil finds). THE SCIENCE OF 1913
4. H.G. Wells would access Soddy’s isotope work for his 1914 THE WORLD SET FREE, also titled THE LAST WAR, a wish-fulfilment fantasy in which A-bombs dropped from airplanes make inevitable a world of peace (in WEALTH, VIRTUAL WEALTH AND DEBT Soddy would return the favor, praising this sci-fi scenario created by Wells). HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1915
The Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded — this year likewise there wasn’t anyone to hand it to.
Professor Bliss Perry’s THOMAS CARLYLE. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)
A revised version of the manifesto of the Vorticist movement, Blast.
Harry S Truman was appointed postmaster in Grandview, Missouri. He suffered losses in an investment in a zinc-mining venture. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1916
Professor Bliss Perry’s FISHING WITH A WORM, a book of thoughts in which there isn’t a single sentence worth the reading. A defective logic is the born fisherman’s portion. He is a pattern of inconsistency. He does the things which he ought not to do, and he leaves undone the things which other people think he ought to do. He observes the wind when he should be sowing, and he regards the clouds, with temptation tugging familiarly at his heartstrings, when he might be grasping the useful sickle. It is a wonder that there is so much health in him. A sorrowing political economist remarked to me in early boyhood, as a jolly red-bearded neighbor, followed by an abnormally fat dog, sauntered past us for his nooning: “That man is the best carpenter in town, but he will leave the most important job whenever he wants to go fishing.” I stared at the sinful carpenter, who swung along leisurely in the May sunshine, keeping just ahead of his dog. To leave one’s job in order to go fishing! How illogical! Years bring the reconciling mind. The world grows big enough to include within its scheme both the instructive political economist and the truant mechanic. But that trick of truly logical behavior seems harder to the man than to the child. For example, I climbed up to my den under the eaves last night--a sour, black sea-fog lying all about, and the December sleet crackling against the window-panes--in order to varnish a certain fly-rod. Now rods ought to be put in order in September, when the fishing closes, or else in April, when it opens. To varnish a rod in December proves that one possesses either a dilatory or a childishly anticipatory mind. But before uncorking the varnish bottle, it occurred to me to examine a dog-eared, water-stained fly-book, to guard against the ravages of possible moths. This interlude proved fatal to the varnishing. A half hour went happily by in rearranging the flies. Then, with a fisherman’s lack of sequence, as I picked out here and there a plain snell-hook from the gaudy feathered ones, I said to myself with a generous glow at the heart: “Fly-fishing has had enough sacred poets celebrating it already. Is n’t there a good deal to be said, after all, for fishing with a worm?” Could there be a more illogical proceeding? And here follows the treatise,--a Defense of Results, an Apology for Opportunism,-- conceived in agreeable procrastination, devoted to the praise of the inconsequential angleworm, and dedicated to a childish memory of a whistling carpenter and his fat dog. Let us face the worst at the very beginning. It shall be a shameless example of fishing under conditions that make the fly a mockery. Take the Taylor Brook, “between the roads,” on the headwaters of the Lamoille. The place is a jungle. The swamp maples and cedars were felled a generation ago, and the tops HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
were trimmed into the brook. The alders and moosewood are higher than your head; on every tiny knoll the fir balsams have gained a footing, and creep down, impenetrable, to the edge of the water. In the open spaces the Joe-Pye weed swarms. In two minutes After leaving the upper road you have scared a mink or a rabbit, and you have probably lost the brook. Listen! It is only a gurgle here, droning along, smooth and dark, under the tangle of cedar- tops and the shadow of the balsams. Follow the sound cautiously. There, beyond the Joe-Pye weed, and between the stump and the cedar-top, is a hand’s breadth of black water. Fly-casting is impossible in this maze of dead and living branches. Shorten your line to two feet, or even less, bait your hook with a worm, and drop it gingerly into that gurgling crevice of water. Before it has sunk six inches, if there is not one of those black- backed, orange-bellied, Taylor Brook trout fighting with it, something is wrong with your worm or with you. For the trout are always there, sheltered by the brushwood that makes this half mile of fishing “not worth while.” Below the lower road the Taylor Brook becomes uncertain water. For half a mile it yields only fingerlings, for no explainable reason; then there are two miles of clean fishing through the deep woods, where the branches are so high that you can cast a fly again if you like, and there are long pools, where now and then a heavy fish will rise; then comes a final half mile through the alders, where you must wade, knee to waist deep, before you come to the bridge and the river. Glorious fishing is sometimes to be had here,-- especially if you work down the gorge at twilight, casting a white miller until it is too dark to see. But alas, there is a well-worn path along the brook, and often enough there are the very footprints of the “fellow ahead of you,” signs as disheartening to the fisherman as ever were the footprints on the sand to Robinson Crusoe. But “between the roads” it is “too much trouble to fish;” and there lies the salvation of the humble fisherman who disdains not to use the crawling worm, nor, for that matter, to crawl himself, if need be, in order to sneak under the boughs of some overhanging cedar that casts a perpetual shadow upon the sleepy brook. Lying here at full length, with no elbow-room to manage the rod, you must occasionally even unjoint your tip, and fish with that, using but a dozen inches of line, and not letting so much as your eyebrows show above the bank. Is it a becoming attitude for a middle-aged citizen of the world? That depends upon how the fish are biting. Holing a put looks rather ridiculous also, to the mere observer, but it requires, like brook-fishing with a tip only, a very delicate wrist, perfect tactile sense, and a fine disregard of appearances. There are some fishermen who always fish as if they were being photographed. The Taylor Brook “between the roads” is not for them. To fish it at all is back-breaking, trouser-tearing work; to see it thoroughly fished is to learn new lessons in the art of angling. To watch R., for example, steadily filling his six- pound creel from that unlikely stream, is like watching Sargent HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
paint a portrait. R. weighs two hundred and ten. Twenty years ago he was a famous amateur pitcher, and among his present avocations are violin playing, which is good for the wrist, taxidermy, which is good for the eye, and shooting woodcock, which before the days of the new Nature Study used to be thought good for the whole man. R. began as a fly-fisherman, but by dint of passing his summers near brooks where fly-fishing is impossible, he has become a stout-hearted apologist for the worm. His apparatus is most singular. It consists of a very long, cheap rod, stout enough to smash through bushes, and with the stiffest tip obtainable. The lower end of the butt, below the reel, fits into the socket of a huge extra butt of bamboo, which R. carries unconcernedly. To reach a distant hole, or to fish the lower end of a ripple, R. simply locks his reel, slips on the extra butt, and there is a fourteen-foot rod ready for action. He fishes with a line unbelievably short, and a Kendal hook far too big; and when a trout jumps for that hook, R. wastes no time in manoeuvring for position. The unlucky fish is simply “derricked,”--to borrow a word from Theodore, most saturnine and profane of Moosehead guides. “Shall I play him awhile?” shouted an excited sportsman to Theodore, after hooking his first big trout. “----no!” growled Theodore in disgust. “Just derrick him right into the canoe!” A heroic method, surely; though it once cost me the best square-tail I ever hooked, for Theodore had forgotten the landing-net, and the gut broke in his fingers as he tried to swing the fish aboard. But with these lively quarter- pounders of the Taylor Brook, derricking is a safer procedure. Indeed, I have sat dejectedly on the far end of a log, after fishing the hole under it in vain, and seen the mighty R. wade downstream close behind me, adjust that comical extra butt, and jerk a couple of half-pound trout from under the very log on which I was sitting. His device on this occasion, as I well remember, was to pass his hook but once through the middle of a big worm, let the worm sink to the bottom, and crawl along it at his leisure. The trout could not resist. Once, and once only, have I come near equaling R.’s record, and the way he beat me then is the justification for a whole philosophy of worm-fishing. We were on this very Taylor Brook, and at five in the afternoon both baskets were two thirds full. By count I had just one more fish than he. It was raining hard. “You fish down through the alders,” said R. magnanimously. “I’ll cut across and wait for you at the sawmill. I don’t want to get any wetter, on account of my rheumatism.” This was rather barefaced kindness,--for whose rheumatism was ever the worse for another hour’s fishing? But I weakly accepted it. I coveted three or four good trout to top off with,--that was all. So I tied on a couple of flies, and began to fish the alders, wading waist deep in the rapidly rising water, down the long green tunnel under the curving boughs. The brook fairly smoked with the rain, by this time, but when did one fail to get at least three or four trout out of this best half mile of the HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
lower brook? Yet I had no luck I tried one fly after another, and then, as a forlorn hope,--though it sometimes has a magic of its own,--I combined a brown hackle for the tail fly with a twisting worm on the dropper. Not a rise! I thought of E. sitting patiently in the saw mill, and I fished more conscientiously than ever. “Venture as warily, use the same skill, Do your best, whether winning or losing it, If you choose to play!--is my principle.” Even those lines, which by some subtle telepathy of the trout brook murmur themselves over and over to me in the waning hours of an unlucky day, brought now no consolation. There was simply not one fish to be had, to any fly in the book, out of that long, drenching, darkening tunnel. At last I climbed out of the brook, by the bridge. R. was sitting on the fence, his neck and ears carefully turtled under his coat collar, the smoke rising and the rain dripping from the inverted bowl of his pipe. He did not seem to be worrying about his rheumatism. “What luck?” he asked. “None at all,” I answered morosely. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” “That’s all right,” remarked R. “What do you think I’ve been doing? I’ve been fishing out of the saw-mill window just to kill time. There was a patch of floating sawdust there,--kind of unlikely place for trout, anyway,--but I thought I’d put on a worm and let him crawl around a little.” He opened his creel as he spoke. “But I did n’t look for a pair of ’em,” he added. And there, on top of his smaller fish, were as pretty a pair of three-quarter-pound brook trout as were ever basketed. “I’m afraid you got pretty wet,” said R. kindly. “I don’t mind that,” I replied. And I didn’t. What I minded was the thought of an hour’s vain wading in that roaring stream, whipping it with fly after fly, while R., the foreordained fisherman, was sitting comfortably in a sawmill, and derricking that pair of three-quarter-pounders in through the window! I had ventured more warily than he, and used, if not the same skill, at least the best skill at my command. My conscience was clear, but so was his; and he had had the drier skin and the greater magnanimity and the biggest fish besides. There is much to be said, in a world like ours, for taking the world as you find it and for fishing with a worm. One’s memories of such fishing, however agreeable they may be, are not to be identified with a defense of the practice. Yet, after all, the most effective defense of worm-fishing is the concrete recollection of some brook that could be fished best or only in that way, or the image of a particular trout that yielded to the temptation of an angleworm after you had flicked fly after fly over him in vain. Indeed, half the zest of brook fishing is in your campaign for “individuals,”--as the Salvation Army workers say,--not merely for a basketful of fish qua fish, but for a series of individual trout which your instinct tells you ought to lurk under that log or be hovering in that ripple. How to get him, by some sportsmanlike process, is the question. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
If he will rise to some fly in your book, few fishermen will deny that the fly is the more pleasurable weapon. Dainty, luring, beautiful toy, light as thistle-down, falling where you will it to fall, holding when the leader tightens and sings like the string of a violin, the artificial fly represents the poetry of angling. Given the gleam of early morning on some wide water, a heavy trout breaking the surface as he curves and plunges, with the fly holding well, with the right sort of rod in your fingers, and the right man in the other end of the canoe, and you perceive how easy is that Emersonian trick of making the pomp of emperors ridiculous. But angling’s honest prose, as represented by the lowly worm, has also its exalted moments. “The last fish I caught was with a worm,” says the honest Walton, and so say I. It was the last evening of last August. The dusk was settling deep upon a tiny meadow, scarcely ten rods from end to end. The rank bog grass, already drenched with dew, bent over the narrow, deep little brook so closely that it could not be fished except with a double-shotted, baited hook, dropped delicately between the heads of the long grasses. Underneath this canopy the trout were feeding, taking the hook with a straight downward tug, as they made for the hidden bank. It was already twilight when I began, and before I reached the black belt of woods that separated the meadow from the lake, the swift darkness of the North Country made it impossible to see the hook. A short half hour’s fishing only, and behold nearly twenty good trout derricked into a basket until then sadly empty. Your rigorous fly-fisherman would have passed that grass-hidden brook in disdain, but it proved a treasure for the humble. Here, indeed, there was no question of individually-minded fish, but simply a neglected brook, full of trout which could be reached with the baited hook only. In more open brook-fishing it is always a fascinating problem to decide how to fish a favorite pool or ripple, for much depends upon the hour of the day, the light, the height of water, the precise period of the spring or summer. But after one has decided upon the best theoretical procedure, how often the stupid trout prefers some other plan! And when you have missed a fish that you counted upon landing, what solid satisfaction is still possible for you, if you are philosopher enough to sit down then and there, eat your lunch, smoke a meditative pipe, and devise a new campaign against that particular fish! To get another rise from him after lunch is a triumph of diplomacy, to land him is nothing short of statesmanship. For sometimes he will jump furiously at a fly, for very devilishness, without ever meaning to take it, and then, wearying suddenly of his gymnastics, he will snatch sulkily at a grasshopper, beetle, or worm. Trout feed upon an extraordinary variety of crawling things, as all fishermen know who practice the useful habit of opening the first two or three fish they catch, to see what food is that day the favorite. But here, as elsewhere in this world, the best things lie nearest, and there is no bait so killing, week in and week out, as your plain garden or golf-green angleworm. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
Walton’s list of possible worms is impressive, and his directions for placing them upon the hook have the placid completeness that belonged to his character. Yet in such matters a little nonconformity may be encouraged. No two men or boys dig bait in quite the same way, though all share, no doubt, the singular elation which gilds that grimy occupation with the spirit of romance. The mind is really occupied, not with the wriggling red creatures in the lumps of earth, but with the stout fish which each worm may capture, just as a saint might rejoice in the squalor of this world as a preparation for the glories of the world to come. Nor do any two experienced fishermen hold quite the same theory as to the best mode of baiting the hook. There are a hundred ways, each of them good. As to the best hook for worm-fishing, you will find dicta in every catalogue of fishing tackle, but size and shape and tempering are qualities that should vary with the brook, the season, and the fisherman. Should one use a three-foot leader, or none at all? Whose rods are best for bait-fishing, granted that all of them should be stiff enough in the tip to lift a good fish by dead strain from a tangle of brush or logs? Such questions, like those pertaining to the boots or coat which one should wear, the style of bait- box one should carry, or the brand of tobacco best suited for smoking in the wind, are topics for unending discussion among the serious minded around the camp-fire. Much edification is in them, and yet they are but prudential maxims after all. They are mere moralities of the Franklin or Chesterfield variety, counsels of worldly wisdom, but they leave the soul untouched. A man may have them at his finger’s ends and be no better fisherman at bottom; or he may, like R., ignore most of the admitted rules and come home with a full basket. It is a sufficient defense of fishing with a worm to pronounce the truism that no man is a complete angler until he has mastered all the modes of angling. Lovely streams, lonely and enticing, but impossible to fish with a fly, await the fisherman who is not too proud to use, with a man’s skill, the same unpretentious tackle which he began with as a boy. But ah, to fish with a worm, and then not catch your fish! To fail with a fly is no disgrace: your art may have been impeccable, your patience faultless to the end. But the philosophy of worm-fishing is that of Results, of having something tangible in your basket when the day’s work is done. It is a plea for Compromise, for cutting the coat according to the cloth, for taking the world as it actually is. The fly- fisherman is a natural Foe of Compromise. He throws to the trout a certain kind of lure; an they will take it, so; if not, adieu. He knows no middle path. “This high man, aiming at a million, Misses an unit.” The raptures and the tragedies of consistency are his. He is a scorner of the ground. All honor to him! When he comes back at nightfall and says happily, “I have never cast a line more perfectly than I have to-day,” it is almost indecent to peek HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
into his creel. It is like rating Colonel Newcome by his bank account. But the worm-fisherman is no such proud and isolated soul. He is a “low man” rather than a high one; he honestly cares what his friends will think when they look into his basket to see what he has to show for his day’s sport. He watches the Foe of Compromise men go stumbling forward and superbly falling, while he, with less inflexible courage, manages to keep his feet. He wants to score, and not merely to give a pretty exhibition of base-running. At the Harvard-Yale football game of 1903 the Harvard team showed superior strength in rushing the ball; they carried it almost to the Yale goal line repeatedly, but they could not, for some reason, take it over. In the instant of absolute need, the Yale line held, and when the Yale team had to score in order to win, they scored. As the crowd streamed out of the Stadium, a veteran Harvard alumnus said: “This news will cause great sorrow in one home I know of, until they learn by to-morrow’s papers that the Harvard team acquitted itself creditably.” Exactly. Given one team bent upon acquitting itself creditably, and another team determined to win, which will be victorious? The stay-at-homes on the Yale campus that day were not curious to know whether their team was acquitting itself creditably, but whether it was winning the game. Every other question than that was to those young Philistines merely a fine- spun irrelevance. They took the Cash and let the Credit go. There is much to be said, no doubt, for the Harvard veteran’s point of view. The proper kind of credit may be a better asset for eleven boys than any championship; and to fish a bit of water consistently and skillfully, with your best flies and in your best manner, is perhaps achievement enough. So says the Foe of Compromise, at least. But the Yale spirit will be prying into the basket in search of fish; it prefers concrete results. If all men are by nature either Platonists or Aristotelians, fly- fishermen or worm-fishermen, how difficult it is for us to do one another justice! Differing in mind, in aim and method, how shall we say infallibly that this man or that is wrong? To fail with Plato for companion may be better than to succeed with Aristotle. But one thing is perfectly clear: there is no warrant for Compromise but in Success. Use a worm if you will, but you must have fish to show for it, if you would escape the finger of scorn. If you find yourself camping by an unknown brook, and are deputed to catch the necessary trout for breakfast, it is wiser to choose the surest bait. The crackle of the fish in the frying-pan will atone for any theoretical defect in your method. But to choose the surest bait, and then to bring back no fish, is unforgivable. Forsake Plato if you must,--but you may do so only at the price of justifying yourself in the terms of Aristotelian arithmetic. The college president who abandoned his college in order to run a cotton mill was free to make his own choice of a calling; but he was never pardoned for bankrupting the mill. If one is bound to be a low man rather than an impractical idealist, he should at least make sure of his vulgar HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
success. Is all this but a disguised defense of pot-hunting? No. There is no possible defense of pot-hunting, whether it be upon a trout brook or in the stock market. Against fish or men, one should play the game fairly. Yet for that matter some of the most skillful fly-fishermen I have known were pot-hunters at heart, and some of the most prosaic-looking merchants were idealists compared to whom Shelley was but a dreaming boy. All depends upon the spirit with which one makes his venture. I recall a boy of five who gravely watched his father tramp off after rabbits,- -gun on shoulder and beagle in leash. Thereupon he shouldered a wooden sword, and dragging his reluctant black kitten by a string, sallied forth upon the dusty Vermont road “to get a lion for breakfast.” That is the true sporting temper! Let there be but a fine idealism in the quest, and the particular object is unessential. “A true fisherman’s happiness,” says Mr. Cleveland, “is not dependent upon his luck.” It depends upon his heart. No doubt all amateur fishing is but “play,”--as the psychologists soberly term it: not a necessary, but a freely assumed activity, born of surplusage of vitality. Nobody, not even a carpenter wearied of his job, has to go fishing unless he wants to. He may indeed find himself breakfast-less in camp, and obliged to betake himself to the brook,--but then he need not have gone into the woods at all. Yet if he does decide to fish, let him “Venture as warily, use the same skill, Do his best, ...“ whatever variety of tackle he may choose. He can be a whole- souled sportsman with the poorest equipment, or a mean “trout- hog” with the most elaborate. Only, in the name of gentle Izaak himself, let him be a complete angler; and let the man be a passionate amateur of all the arts of life, despising none of them, and using all of them for his soul’s good and for the joy of his fellows. If he be, so to speak, but a worm-fisherman,--a follower of humble occupations, and pledged to unromantic duties,--let him still thrill with the pleasures of the true sportsman. To make the most of dull hours, to make the best of dull people, to like a poor jest better than none, to wear the threadbare coat like a gentleman, to be outvoted with a smile, to hitch your wagon to the old horse if no star is handy,--this is the wholesome philosophy taught by fishing with a worm. The fun of it depends upon the heart. There may be as much zest in saving as in spending, in working for small wages as for great, in avoiding the snapshots of publicity as in being invariably first “among those present.” But a man should be honest. If he catches most of his fish with a worm, secures the larger portion of his success by commonplace industry, let him glory in it, for this, too, is part of the great game. Yet he ought not in that case to pose as a fly- fisherman only,--to carry himself as one aware of the immortalizing camera,--to pretend that life is easy, if one but knows how to drop a fly into the right ripple. For life is not HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
easy, after all is said. It is a long brook to fish, and it needs a stout heart and a wise patience. All the flies there are in the book, and all the bait that can be carried in the box, are likely to be needed ere the day is over. But, like the Psalmist’s “river of God,” this brook is “full of water,” and there is plenty of good fishing to be had in it if one is neither afraid nor ashamed of fishing sometimes with a worm. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1920
Professor Bliss Perry’s THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE: [O]ur literature has no more curious story than the evolution of this local crank [Thoreau] into his rightful place of mastership.
Professor Perry offered, in regard to the raid on Harpers Ferry, that:5 Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Thoreau “signed on” again to an American ideal, and no man could have signed more nobly.
5. Somebody really ought to make a study of the tie-in between the search for the dominant author in belletristic pursuits during interwar periods, which expresses itself in the establishment of a dominant “canon,” and the quest for the dominant authority as it is found in times of belligerence, which expresses itself, often, in the placement of rows of cannon. For sure, as we can see here, Professor Perry had something like that going in his mind! HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1921
Professor Bliss Perry’s THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE, A CHRONICLE OF GREAT INTERPRETERS. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)
By this year Houghton Mifflin Company had become the 4th-largest educational publisher in the United States. It still owned copyright to the literary productions of Henry David Thoreau (many things do change about the United States of America — but not property rights) and was continuing to flog this cash cow for all it was worth.
Meanwhile, in Tokyo, another translation of WALDEN into the Japanese language, by Kazuo Iwai, was published by Shincho-sha, and was being widely publicized. The book was to become a favorite in the camping movement (which makes one rather dubious of the sophistication of this translation) and there would be a number of reprintings. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
1954
February 13, Saturday: Reinforcements were airdropped into Muong Sai, the only remaining French stronghold in northern Laos.
In Mill Valley, California, “O Frabjous Day!” from Two Settings from Lewis Carroll for voice and original instruments by Harry Partch was performed for the initial time.
Bliss Perry died in Exeter, New Hampshire at the age of 93.
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Mr. Empty Suit HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
Prepared: May 3, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. EMPTY SUIT
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with