The profound importance of two eccentric weirdos

The 150th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s last trip into the Maine woods was marked recently by a canoeing excursion on Chesuncook Lake, and the BDN covered the trip. This seemed appropriate, given the impact Thoreau has on the way we see the world.

It’s interesting to me that the two Americans who might have had the most profound impact of any on the way we think about the world here in the 21st century are widely regarded as eccentric weirdos. Not by everybody of course – that’s why someone still thought to commemorate Thoreau’s visit – but by enough to make a sort of cultural quorum.

I’m talking about Thoreau (1817-1862) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). Poe is still widely read, mostly for his macabre subjects and less for his literary theories. When I used to teach Poe, students were often fascinated by his personality, which they assumed was aberrant. What kind of a weirdo thinks up stuff like that? It was hard to get their attention on the fact that his ideas about poetry changed modern literature and art. Of course, the ideas had to go to France and be adapted by the poet Charles Baudelaire, and then come back to be re-adapted by American poets a half century later. But Poe’s observation that pure poetry creates an effect, and does not make a statement, still reverberates like a gong in art, music and film. (In literary studies it has for all practical purposes been forgotten, to the grievous detriment of our poetry.)

Thoreau is still read too, but less than in, say, the 1960s and ’70s when the environmental movement hit its peak and “civil disobedience” became a by-phrase of the civil rights and anti-war movements. Thoreau’s ideas also had to travel overseas – to Mahatma Gandhi, who used Thoreau’s ideas about nonviolent resistance to engineer India’s freedom from Britain – and then come back through Martin Luther King Jr., who adapted the ideas Gandhi had adapted from Thoreau.

But environmentalism, in the general run of contemporary American culture, is seen roughly as a pastime of cranks and kooks. There are a lot of sincere and level-headed environmentalists, no doubt. But they are dismissed by significant numbers of Americans as extremists. And Thoreau, to a lot of people, is vaguely thought of as their nominal ringleader.

For example, in an online literature course I taught in 2003, I had (without foreknowledge) scheduled readings in Thoreau for exactly the time the U.S. invaded Iraq. In his essay “Resistance to Civil Government” (aka “Civil Disobedience”) Thoreau argues that each person has a responsibility to oppose a government that acts contrary, in important issues, to the person’s conscience. His two examples are America’s legalized slavery and the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846. The Mexican War has unmistakable parallels to the Iraq invasion, and this did not go unnoticed by members of the class. Much to their credit. But the results startled me.

One student wrote, straight up, on our course site: If Thoreau doesn’t like America, he should get the hell out. Others said the same thing, more politely but still strident. A few cautiously defended him. When we got to “Walden,” the animosity continued. Several asserted their right to enjoy their cars, dismissing Thoreau’s warnings as hopeless idealism or extremist environmentalism. Not all. But the computer discussion took on a weird atmosphere, like you imagine must exist at a witch trial. In decades of teaching, I had never experienced anything like this. The comments obviously were creating more confusion than clarity.

We then turned to Poe, who many of them assumed was a maniac. They could not be persuaded otherwise.

As far as I know, Poe never visited Maine. But Edna St. Vincent Millay translated Baudelaire. Thoreau made three trips here, in 1846, 1853 and 1857. After his death a book titled “The Maine Woods” collected together three of the essays he wrote about those trips: “Ktaadn,” “Chesuncook” and “The Allegash and East Branch.” The reason the third anniversary was marked by a canoe trip is that his ideas are still reverberating, and some people are still noticing. Thoreau – building on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas – basically invented the way we think about the relationship between nature and civilization, between the wilderness and being human. Your sense that nature is meaningful gets its shape in your mind from Thoreau, whether you’ve read him or not.

Weirdly, evidence of this surfaced when the students used Thoreau’s own ideas to denounce him: Almost all of them invoked the authority of their own consciences, without realizing their own moral sense was shaped by the early paragraphs of “Resistance to Civil Government”: “The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.”

Halfway up the side of Mount Katahdin in 1846, Thoreau got lost. He felt suddenly that he was face to face with the wilderness in its nakedness, and the effect on him was like something out of Poe:

“Talk of mysteries! – Think of our life in nature … the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”

Probably it’s just as well we did not read “Ktaadn” in our online class. Thoreau might just have seemed even weirder.

Dana Wilde taught college English for two decades and is now an editor and columnist for the BDN. His e-mail address is dwilde@bangordailynews.net. George Will is on vacation.