PEOPLE MENTIONED A WEEK DURANTE DEGLI ALIGHIERI1

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK:

DURANTE DEGLI ALGHIERI1

ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY

by Thomas Carlyle:

I. The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology.

II. The Hero as Prophet. Mohammed: Islam. III. The Hero as Poet. Dante: William Shakespeare. IV. The Hero as Priest. Martin Luther; Reformation:

John Knox; Puritanism. V. The Hero as Man of Letters. Samuel Johnson,

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Burns. VI. The Hero as King. Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte:

Modern Revolutionism.

1. For Henry Thoreau’s familiarity with Dante Alighieri, consult J. Chesley Mathews’s “Thoreau’s Reading in Dante,” Italica 27 (1950):77-81.

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/ActiveIndex.pdf

2 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK: DURANTE DEGLI ALGHIERI

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In his “The Allegash” manuscript, Thoreau offered thatthere is little prospect that we may be able to indulgein much good mythmaking in our grand future. Instead hecomplained that as “Anglo Americans” advanced, poetryand mythology seemed to retire. We ignorantly erase themythological tablets to print mere handbills and townmeeting warrants on them. In his late revisions, Thoreaucancelled the two sentences that followed this passage:“This wilderness is a great mythic poem worth a thousandof Spenser’s Faery Queens & Dante’s Divine Comedies.Spenser and Dante Alighieri translated only suchsheets[?] of it as came round their grounds.”

The Guelf faction of Firenzi, after a period of ascendancy, was defeated in the battle of Montaperti (Dante Alighieri’s INFERNO X, XXXII).

Between May 21 and June 20, most likely on May 29th, Durante degli Alighieri (for us, Dante) was born into the important Alighieri family of Firenzi (for us, Florence).

During this late spring, the 17th-year cicadas Magicicada septendecim were swarming in what eventually would become New England.

1260 CE

1265 CE

Tuscan, that wanderest through the realms of gloom, With thoughtful pace, and sad, majestic eyes, Stern thoughts and awful from thy soul arise, Like Farinata from his fiery tomb.Thy sacred song is like the trump of doom; Yet in thy heart what human sympathies, What soft compassion glows, as in the skies The tender stars their clouded lamps relume!Methinks I see thee stand, with pallid cheeks, By Fra Hilario in his diocese,

As up the convent-walls, in golden streaks,The ascending sunbeams mark the day’s decrease;

And, as he asks what there the stranger seeks,Thy voice along the cloister whispers, “Peace!”

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, I

NEW ENGLAND

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/thumbnails/T/HDT.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/explanation.pdf


http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/49/1849_JohnAitkenCarlyle.pdf

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3


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As a sequel to the defeat of Manfred at Benevento, Charles of Anjou conquered Naples and Sicily. Until 1442, the Angevin Dynasty at Naples.

The Guelf faction of Firenzi, supported by papal and French armies, defeated the Ghibelline faction at Benevento and exiled them forever from their native city. The Guelphs, to whose party Dante Alighieri’s family adhered, at this point became able themselves to return to their homes in Firenzi. (Dante’s father had evidently not been of sufficient influence to have himself been sent into this exile.) Dante would thus grow up as an entitled member of a proud and expanding city-state as it sought to dominate the region of Tuscany.

May: Dante Alighieri, at a private feast in Firenzi, was entirely enraptured by a self-possessed little girl, another 9-year-old named Beatrice Portinari.

Dante Alighieri became betrothed to Gemma Donati.

Dante Alighieri’s mother Bella had died by this point, before he reached the age of 14.

Since Dante Alighieri, having as of the age of 18 come into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father and to take in marriage Gemma Donati, we can infer that by this point in time Dante’s father was deceased. (They would have four children, Jacopo, Pietro, Giovanni, and Antonia.) By this point, he would assert in Chapter III of his LA VITA NUOVA, he had taught himself the art of making verse.

1266 CE

1274 CE

1277 CE

1279 CE

1283 CE






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Dante Alighieri fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines in the battle of Campaldino in which the Guelf League (Firenzi and Lucca) defeated the Ghibellines of Arezzo. (Dante would recall this battle, in PURGATORIO.)

Beatrice Portinari died.

During this year and the next, Dante Alighieri was putting together his LA VITA NUOVA, the first of two collections of verse and prose he would make in his lifetime. Later, the CONVIVIO would contain the compositions from just prior to 1294 up to the writing of LA COMMEDIA (later named LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, THE DIVINE COMEDY).

1289 CE

1290 CE

1292 CE

LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, II

DANTE




http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/16/1816_Purgatorio.pdf



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Dante Alighieri met Charles Martel, King of Hungary and heir to the kingdom of Naples and the country of Provence (he would report this meeting in PARADISO VIII).

Supremacy of the Visconti at Milan.

For the purpose of entering public life, Dante Alighieri joined the guild of the apothecaries.

Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed this to be a Jubilee Year. Eastertime of this year would provide the fictional date for the journey which Dante Alighieri would take in THE DIVINE COMEDY.

June 15-August 15For two months Dante Alighieri was a Prior of Florence, one of their six highest magistrates.

1294 CE

1295 CE

1300 CE






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The army of Charles of Valois was approaching Firenzi, and Dante Alighieri was sent as an envoy to Rome to seek assistance from Pope Boniface VIII.

January 27: When the Black Guelphs seized power in Firenzi, they initially banished Dante Alighieri from the city for two years beginning as of this date, and permanently forbade him to occupy any public office. (This 2-year banishment would be reconsidered and made perpetual and he would be condemned to be burned alive should he ever be discovered within the territory of the Florentine Republic.)

Dante Alighieri wrote the 1st and part of the 2nd of a planned 4-volume history and rhetoric of vernacular literature, DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA. During this same period he was writing at the CONVIVIO, only four of a projected fifteen books of which would be completed.

It was probably in this year that Dante Alighieri interrupted work on his CONVIVIO and began his DIVINA COMMEDIA.

Henry of Luxembourg, Holy Roman Emperor, descended into Italy and Dante Alighieri addressed an Epistle to him. This is also the possible date of DANTE MONARCHIA (we know it originated between 1310 and 1313).

1301 CE

1302 CE

1304 CE

1306 CE

1310 CE

LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, ILA DIVINA COMMEDIA, IILA DIVINA COMMEDIA, III






http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/16/1816_Paradiso.pdf



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Dante Alighieri’s INFERNO:

which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would render as:2

Dante Alighieri became a guest of Cangrande della Scala in Verona and there would work on his PURGATORIO and PARADISO and compose his QUESTIO DE ACQUE ET TERRA.

Dante Alighieri became a guest of Guido Novello da Polenta, lord of Ravenna and entered into Latin correspondence with Giovanni del Virgilio.

September 13: Dante Alighieri had fallen ill on his return to Ravenna from Venice, where he had been sent as ambassador by his patron Guido Novello da Polenta, and on this day or the next he died.

1314 CE

2. You’ll do considerably better with Robert Pinsky’s THE INFERNO OF DANTE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994).

1315 CE

1319 CE

1321 CE

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita.

MIDWAY upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.


LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, IILA DIVINA COMMEDIA, III









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In London, the Bodyguard of the Yeoman of the Guard was established to provide security during the coronation of Henry VII. This has become now the oldest extent royal bodyguard and the white crossbelts of its traditional uniform had been originally intended to support the weight of an arquebus.

At about this point Leonardo da Vinci sketched some wheel-lock firing mechanisms.

For the Bereguardo Canal, the Duke of Milan’s engineer Bertola da Novato designed the first modern locks.

In Venice, Dante Alighieri’s DIVINA COMMEDIA was being printed by Petrus de Piasio. Between 1480 and 1483, this printer had been in partnership with the A. Torresanus who had taken possession of Jenson’s printing equipment upon Jenson’s death. (The edition of the COMMEDIA printed in Venice in 1491 by Petrus de Piasio of Cremona is better known, but this happens to be the edition of which I have a page image.) Here is what Dante had to say about what he supposed himself to be doing: “The subject of the whole work, taken literally, is the state of souls after death, regarded as fact. Taken allegorically, its subject is man, insofar as by merit or demerit, in the exercise of free will, he is exposed to the reward or punishment of justice.” In the narrative of his journey, which was inspired by a version in 1300, the authorial persona is accompanied by two guides, “Vigil, who stands for human reason, … and Beatrice, who symbolizes divine grace.” Virgil cannot pass beyond Purgatory, but Beatrice lifts him by contemplation through the spheres of Paradise. The last line depicts the “love which moves the sun and other stars.”

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The Vatican put the DIVINA COMMEDIA of Dante Alighieri on its Index Expurgatorius, with the injunction that the portion of INFERNO dealing with simoniac popes (XIX 48-117),

the portion of PURGATORIO dealing with Pope Adrian V’s avarice and conversion (XIX 106-18),

and the portion of PARADISO dealing with the avarice of the Vatican high clergy (IX 136-142) in addition to being forbidden reading must be “suppressed.”

At that time the verses were not being understood as a work of poetic art, but instead were being taken to be the sheerest trash-writing. For instance, Paolo Beni (1552-1625) wrote in his IL CAVALCANTI that Dante’s

slack lines, forced rhymes, various improprieties, insufferable

1485

1614


LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, II

LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, III









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obscenities, frequent affectations, and, to be brief, thehorrid, stupid, licentious style, along with endless othererrors of learning and art, show clearly that Dante was a worsethan awful Poet, so little did he have any right to claimsuperiority over other Poets. And so it seems to me that he wasvery unfortunate, with a Poem in which one can perceive noindustry or need of effort, that it should make him (so he sings)grow thin (the word is his) for many years.

A more hedonistic view of poetry characteristic of the Baroque aesthetic began to work against the reputation of the poet Dante Alighieri. For instance, F. Guarino wrote in Canto V of his L'INFERNO D'AMORE:

You sculpt well, Dante, but you do not polish; you are good, but not beautiful; you benefit, but do not please, and with too much knowledge you oppress the Muse.

There would be over the years many attempt to render the DIVINE COMEDY of Dante Alighieri into English, some partial, some complete, some into poetry, some into poetry that accorded with Dante’s Terza Rima scheme in the Italian, and some into straightforward prose. In this year the first such attempt was made by Charles Rogers, with INFERNO only.

• 1785-1802 Reverend Henry Boyd’s DIVINE COMEDY

• 1805-1806 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO only• 1812 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY

• 1807 N. Howard’s INFERNO only• 1812 Hume’s INFERNO only• 1833-1840 I.C. Wright’s DIVINE COMEDY

• 1836 Odoardo Volpi’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian• 1842 C. Hindley’s INFERNO only (in prose)• 1843 Reverend John Dayman’s INFERNO only• 1849 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose)• 1850 Patrick Bannerman’s DIVINE COMEDY

• 1851-1854 C.B. Cayley’s DIVINE COMEDY

• 1852 E. O’Donnell’s DIVINE COMEDY (in prose)• 1854 T. Brooksbank’s INFERNO only• 1854 Frederick Pollock’s DIVINE COMEDY

• 1846 Leigh Hunt’s STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY

• 1859 J.W. Thomas’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian• 1859 Bruce Whyte’s INFERNO only• 1862 “Hugh Bent” (nom de plume)’s INFERNO only• 1862 W.P. Wilkie’s INFERNO only

1620

1782






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• 1862/1863 Mrs. Ramsay’s DIVINE COMEDY

• 1865 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 17 cantos of INFERNO

• 1865 James Ford’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian• 1865 Reverend John Dayman’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian• 1865 William Michael Rossetti’s INFERNO only• 1865/1866 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO only, illustrated by G. Doré• 1867 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) (2d edition)• 1867 Thomas William Parsons’s first canticle of INFERNO only• 1867 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s DIVINE COMEDY

• 1867 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY

• 1867/1868 D. Johnston’s DIVINE COMEDY

• 1871 Miss Rossetti’s SHADOW OF DANTE, portions of DIVINE COMEDY

• 1871 Ernest Ridsdale Ellaby’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian• 1876 J.W. Parsons’s nine cantos of PURGATORIO

• 1877 Mrs. Oliphant’s FOREIGN CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY

• 1892 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO with illustrations by Gustave Doré• 1899 Thomas Okey (PURGATORIO), Dr. John Aitken Carlyle (INFERNO), and Philip H. Wicksteed

(PARADISO) DIVINE COMEDY

• 1980 C.H. Sisson’s DIVINE COMEDY

• 1994 Robert Pinsky’s THE INFERNO OF DANTE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

The Reverend Henry Francis Cary put out a translation of Dante’s INFERNO that would be oft reprinted down through the centuries (the title page of the 1892 edition, that had the well-known illustrations by Gustave Doré, is shown on a following screen).

1805






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Dante Alighieri’s LA DIVINA COMMEDIA was republished in a 3-volume Italian edition LA DIVINA COMMEDIA. CON ARGOMENTI, ED ANNOTAZIONI SCELTE DA’ MIGLIORI COMMENTATORI. NUOVA EDIZIONE COL’ACCENTO DI

1816






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PROSODIA (Avignone: F. Sequin aîné).










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December: Percy Bysshe Shelley drafted “A Philosophical View of Reform.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge began a series of lectures on Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Spenser, and Cervantes, that would persist into March of the following year.

March: George Gordon, Lord Byron wrote THE PROPHECY OF DANTE.

William Blake produced PILGRIM’S PROGRESS designs and a hundred Dante Alighieri drawings. On a following screen, for instance, is his depiction of the plight of Ulysses and Diomedes in section 26 of the Inferno.

1818

1820

1824

DANTE ALIGHIERI






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Summer: Frances Trollope observed:

CINCINNATI, OHIO.WOMEN AT A CAMP MEETING.

...The exhortation nearly resembled that which I had heard at “the Revival,” but the result wasvery different; for, instead of the few hysterical women who had distinguished themselves onthat occasion, above a hundred persons, nearly all females, came forward, uttering howlingsand groans, so terrible that I shall never cease to shudder when I recall them. They appeared todrag each other forward, and on the word being given, “let us pray,” they all fell on their knees;but this posture was soon changed for others that permitted greater scope for the convulsivemovements of their limbs; and they were soon all lying on the ground, an indescribableconfusion of heads and legs. They threw about their limbs with such incessant and violentmotion, that I was every instant expecting some serious accident to occur. But how am I to describe the sounds that proceeded from this strange mass of human beings?I know no words which can convey an idea of it. Hysterical sobbings, convulsive groans,shrieks and screams the most appalling, burst forth on all sides. I felt sick with horror. As if theirhoarse and overstrained voices failed to make noise enough, they soon began to clap their handsviolently. The scene described by Dante was before me:

“Quivi sospiri, pianti, ed alti guaiRisonavan per l’aere——————Orribili favelleParole di dolore, accenti d’iraVoci alti e fioche, e suon di man con elle.”

Many of these wretched creatures were beautiful young females. The preachers moved aboutamong them, at once exciting and soothing their agonies. I heard the muttered “Sister! dearsister!” I saw the insidious lips approach the cheeks of the unhappy girls; I heard the murmuredconfessions of the poor victims, and I watched their tormentors, breathing into their earsconsolations that tinged the pale cheek with red. Had I been a man, I am sure I should have beenguilty of some rash act of interference; nor do I believe that such a scene could have been actedin the presence of Englishmen without instant punishment being inflicted; not to mention thesalutary discipline of the tread-mill, which, beyond all question, would, in England, have beenapplied to check so turbulent and so vicious a scene.After the first wild burst that followed their prostration, the meanings, in many instances,became loudly articulate: and I then experienced a strange vibration between tragic and comicfeeling. A very pretty girl, who was kneeling in the attitude of Canova’s Magdalene immediately beforeus, amongst an immense quantity of jargon, broke out thus: “Woe! woe to the backsliders! hearit, hear it Jesus! when I was fifteen my mother died, and I backslided, oh Jesus, I backslided!take me home to my mother, Jesus! take me home to her, for I am weary! Oh John Mitchel!John Mitchel!” and after sobbing piteously behind her raised hands, she lifted her sweet faceagain, which was as pale as death, and said, “Shall I sit on the sunny bank of salvation with mymother? my own dear mother? oh Jesus, take me home, take me home!” Who could refuse a tear to this earnest wish for death in one so young and so lovely? But I sawher, ere I left the ground, with her hand fast locked, and her head supported by a man wholooked very much as Don Juan might, when sent back to earth as too bad for the regions below. One woman near us continued to “call on the Lord,” as it is termed, in the loudest possible tone,and without a moment’s interval, for the two hours that we kept our dreadful station.She became frightfully hoarse, and her face so red as to make me expect she would burst ablood-vessel. Among the rest of her rant, she said “I will hold fast to Jesus, I never will let himgo; if they take me to hell, I will still hold him fast, fast, fast!”

DANTE ALIGHIERI






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September 1836 to March 20: During the 1st and 2d terms of his Senior year at Harvard College, David Henry Thoreau would be studying Italian under the Harvard instructor Pietro Bachi. It seems clear that under Bachi he read Dante Alighieri’s INFERNO (presumably, while studying under Professor Longfellow, he also encountered the PURGATORIO and PARADISO3 — this despite the fact that his favorite poet was said to be Torquato Tasso). It was as a student of Bachi that Thoreau was presented for his final examination in Italian.

1836

3. Thoreau had in his personal library a 3-volume set of Dante Alighieri’s LA DIVINA COMMEDIA. CON ARGOMENTI, ED ANNOTAZIONI SCELTE DA’ MIGLIORI COMMENTATORI. NUOVA EDIZIONE COL’ACCENTO DI PROSODIA (Avignone: F. Sequin aîné, 1816) as well Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s DIVINE COMEDY: THE INFERNO. A LITERAL PROSE TRANSLATION WITH THE TEXT OF THE ORIGINAL COLLATED FROM THE BEST EDITIONS, AND EXPLANATORY NOTES (New York: Harper & brothers, 1849).

LA DIVINA COMMEDIA

CARLYLE’S THE INFERNO




http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/29/1829_BachiItalianGrammar.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/29/1829_BachiItalianGrammar.pdf



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December 27, Wednesday: Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody heard Jones Very speak at the Salem Lyceum, on the epic poetry of the antique Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton — and on the epic poetry of one who was almost their contemporary, Coleridge.

1837






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At the end, she invited him to come home with her and her father. Shortly after Very had left their home that night, she took up her pen and wrote to Waldo Emerson, saying that he should send for Very “at once” to make his acquaintance and to hear him lecture.

Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal in such manner as to indicate that Emerson was sharing with him a book of self-congratulatory racist “herstory” that he had recently checked out from the library of the Athenaeum, Sharon Turner’s HISTORY OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS:

REVOLUTIONS

Dec. 27. Revolutions are never sudden. Not one man, nor many men, in a few years or generations,suffice to regulate events and dispose mankind for the revolutionary movement. The hero is but the crowningstone of the pyramid, — the keystone of the arch. Who was Romulus or Remus, Hengist or Horsa, that weshould attribute to them Rome or England? They are famous or infamous because the progress of events haschosen to make them its stepping-stones. But we would know where the avalanche commenced, or the hollowin the rock whence springs the Amazon. The most important is apt to be some silent and unobtrusive fact inhistory. In 449 three Saxon cyules arrived on the British coast, — “Three scipen gode comen mid than flode,three hundred enihten.”4 The pirate of the British coast was no more the founder of a state than the scourge ofthe German shore.

HEROESThe real heroes of minstrelsy have been ideal, even when the names of actual heroes have been perpetuated.The real Arthur, who “not only excelled the experienced past, but also the possible future,” of whom it was

4. Cf. the essay “Reform and the Reformers”: “In the year 449 three Saxon cyules arrived on the British coast. ‘Three scipen gode comen mid than flode.’”




Whenever and wherever you see this little pencil icon in the pages of this Kouroo Contexture, it is marking an extract from the journal of Henry David Thoreau. OK?



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affirmed for many centuries that he was not dead, but “had withdrawn from the world into some magical region;from which at a future crisis he was to reappear, and lead the Cymri in triumph through the island,” whosecharacter and actions were the theme of the bards of Bretagne and the foundation of their interminableromances, was only an ideal impersonation. Men claim for the ideal an actual existence also, but do not often expand the actual into the ideal. “If you do notbelieve me, go into Bretagne, and mention in the streets or villages, that Arthur is really dead like other men;you will not escape with impunity; you will be either hooted with the curses of your hearers, or stoned to death.”

HOMESICKNESSThe most remarkable instance of homesickness is that of the colony of Franks transplanted by the Romans fromthe German Ocean to the Euxine, who at length resolving to a man to abandon the country, seized the vesselswhich carried them out, and reached at last their native shores, after innumerable difficulties and dangers uponthe Mediterranean and Atlantic.

THE INTERESTING FACTS IN HISTORYHow cheering is it, after toiling through the darker pages of history, — the heartless and fluctuating crust ofhuman rest and unrest, — to alight on the solid earth where the sun shines, or rest in the checkered shade. Thefact that Edwin of Northumbria “caused stakes to be fixed in the highways where he had seen a clear spring,”and that “brazen dishes were chained to them, to refresh the weary sojourner, whose fatigues Edwin had himselfexperienced,” is worth all Arthur’s twelve battles. The sun again shines along the highway, the landscapepresents us sunny glades and occasional cultivated patches as well as dark primeval forests, and it is merryEngland after all.

A WEEK: Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be moremodern. It is written as if the spectator should be thinking ofthe backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the authorexpected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detailto them their own experience. Men seem anxious to accomplish anorderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding theworks behind, as they are battered down by the encroachments oftime; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall a preyto the arch enemy. History has neither the venerableness ofantiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it wouldgo to the beginning of things, which natural history might withreason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and thentell us, — when did burdock and plantain sprout first? It has beenso written for the most part, that the times it describes are withremarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one hasobserved, because we are so in the dark about them. The sun rarelyshines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when wemeet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of thisluminary, we excerpt and modernize it. As when we read in thehistory of the Saxons that Edwin of Northumbria “caused stakes tobe fixed in the highways where he had seen a clear spring,” and“brazen dishes were chained to them to refresh the wearysojourner, whose fatigues Edwin had himself experienced.” This isworth all Arthur’s twelve battles.






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The wealthy young Frances Appleton, future wife of the celebrant of the humble laborer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, recorded her year’s reading. She had studied Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Reverend Jared Sparks, Sir Francis Bacon, and Frances Trollope. She had read essays by John Locke, the letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the letters of Abigail Adams, and three of the novels of Jane Austen. And she had begun Dante Alighieri’s DIVINE COMEDY after finishing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s FAUST.

In fact the young lady was falling sadly behind in her reading, for this year would see:

• William Makepeace Thackeray’s PARIS SKETCH BOOK.• Thomas Hood’s UP THE RHINE, THE LOVES OF SALLY BROWN AND BEN THE CARPENTER, MISS

KILMANSEGG AND HER PRECIOUS LEG (in the New Monthly Magazine).

May 12, Tuesday: Thomas Carlyle gave the lecture “The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakspeare” which would achieve publication in 1892 as Lecture 3 in ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY.

1840




http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/Carlyle/HEROES/12may40.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/Carlyle/HEROES/HEROES.pdf



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July: Early in this month Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody opened, in the front parlor of the building she had leased at 13 West Street in Boston, her Foreign Library, a bookstore and circulating library.5

At the suggestion of Washington Allston she would stock imported art supplies. One section was allocated to the homeopathic nostrums created by her father, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody. She displayed on the walls the paintings her sister Sophia was offering for sale. Margaret Fuller had staged her “conversations” here in late 1839 and this would continue in the early 1840s. The Reverend William Ellery Channing would stop by to read the newspaper. Sophia would marry Nathaniel Hawthorne at West Street in 1842. The editors of and contributors to THE DIAL would meet there, and for a time in 1842 and 1843 she would publish this journal as well as writing for it (her “A Glimpse of Christ’s Idea of Society,” a piece about Brook Farm, would appear in the October 1841 issue, and her “Fourierism” would appear in the April 1844 issue).

I had ... a foreign library of new French and German books, andthen I came into contact with the world as never before. TheRipleys were starting Brook Farm, and they were friends of ours.Theodore Parker was beginning his career, and all these thingswere discussed in my book-store by Boston lawyers and Cambridgeprofessors. Those were very living years for me.

5. Circulating libraries were privately owned collections of books and periodicals lent out for profit at fixed rates; this institution had its heyday in America in the first half of the 19th Century, just prior to the rise of the public library movement.






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In this year Miss Peabody issued the first of two printed catalogs of her book collection.6 The collection included such titles as Wolfgang Menzel’s GERMAN LITERATURE. TR. FROM THE GERMAN OF WOLFGANG MENZEL. BY C.C. FELTON.... (3 volumes, Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1840),7 Miss Peabody’s edition of Anna Cabot Lowell’s THEORY OF TEACHING, Lamartine’s HISTORY OF THE GIRONDISTS and TRAVELS IN THE EAST, Michelet’s MÉMOIRES DE LUTHER, Waldo Emerson’s NATURE, the Reverend Ripley’s LETTERS ON THE LATEST FORM OF INFIDELITY (a response to Andrews Norton’s attack on Transcendentalism), Robespierre’s MÉMOIRES, and Rosini’s LUISA STROZZI, in addition to classic works by Æschylus, Ludovico Ariosto, Honoré de Balzac, George Bancroft, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Thomas Carlyle, Miguel de Cervantes, the Reverend Channing, Chateaubriand, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cousin, Dante, Dumas, Euripides, Gerando, Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hesiod, Homer, Victor Hugo, Mirabeau, Molière, Petrarch, Plato, Racine, Richter, Rousseau, George Sand, Schiller, Schlegel, William Shakespeare, Madame de Staël, Alexis de Tocqueville, Voltaire, William Wordsworth, and Xenophon. The collection also included various periodicals such as the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, Blackwood’s Magazine, the Boston Quarterly Review, THE DIAL, the Edinburgh Review, the Journal des Literarische Unterhaltung, the London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine, the Musical Journal, the New-York Review, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the Western Messenger.

6. A facsimile of this catalog still exists, as part of Madeleine B. Stern’s “Elizabeth Peabody’s Foreign Library (1840),” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 20 Supplement, Part 1, pages 5-12.7. Henry Thoreau would consult this volume on December 5, 1840. His extracts would consist of quotations from Lorenz Oken and from Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert.






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February 20, Sunday: Henry Thoreau commented in his journal that “In Homer and Æschylus and Dante I miss a nice discrimination of the important shades of character.”

1841






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January 2, Sunday: Henry Thoreau commented in his journal, in regard to the time period of Geoffrey Chaucer, that “Dante, though just departed, still exerted the influence of a living presence,” a remark he would later insert into A WEEK.

1842

A WEEK: There is no wisdom that can take place of humanity, andwe find that in Chaucer. We can expand at last in his breadth,and we think that we could have been that man’s acquaintance. Hewas worthy to be a citizen of England, while Petrarch and Boccaciolived in Italy, and Tell and Tamerlane in Switzerland and in Asia,and Bruce in Scotland, and Wickliffe, and Gower, and Edward theThird, and John of Gaunt, and the Black Prince, were his owncountrymen as well as contemporaries; all stout and stirringnames. The fame of Roger Bacon came down from the precedingcentury, and the name of Dante still possessed the influence ofa living presence. On the whole, Chaucer impresses us as greaterthan his reputation, and not a little like Homer and Shakespeare,for he would have held up his head in their company. Among earlyEnglish poets he is the landlord and host, and has the authorityof such. The affectionate mention which succeeding early poetsmake of him, coupling him with Homer and Virgil, is to be takeninto the account in estimating his character and influence. KingJames and Dunbar of Scotland speak of him with more love andreverence than any modern author of his predecessors of the lastcentury. The same childlike relation is without a parallel now.For the most part we read him without criticism, for he does notplead his own cause, but speaks for his readers, and has thatgreatness of trust and reliance which compels popularity. Heconfides in the reader, and speaks privily with him, keepingnothing back. And in return the reader has great confidence inhim, that he tells no lies, and reads his story with indulgence,as if it were the circumlocution of a child, but often discoversafterwards that he has spoken with more directness and economy ofwords than a sage. He is never heartless,

“For first the thing is thought within the hart, Er any word out from the mouth astart.”

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

DANTE

GOWER






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(Thoreau would also comment, in A WEEK, that Chaucer “rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”)

Thoreau would also cite, in A WEEK, the CONFESSIO AMANTIS (IV, 2427-2432) of “Poet Laureate” John Gower:

A WEEK: Chaucer had eminently the habits of a literary man and ascholar. There were never any times so stirring that there werenot to be found some sedentary still. He was surrounded by thedin of arms. The battles of Hallidon Hill and Neville’s Cross,and the still more memorable battles of Cressy and Poictiers, werefought in his youth; but these did not concern our poet much,Wickliffe and his reform much more. He regarded himself always asone privileged to sit and converse with books. He helped toestablish the literary class. His character as one of the fathersof the English language would alone make his works important, eventhose which have little poetical merit. He was as simple asWordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue,when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained tothe dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service tohis country to that which Dante rendered to Italy. If Greeksufficeth for Greek, and Arabic for Arabian, and Hebrew for Jew,and Latin for Latin, then English shall suffice for him, for anyof these will serve to teach truth “right as divers pathes leadendivers folke the right waye to Rome.” In the Testament of Love hewrites, “Let then clerkes enditen in Latin, for they have thepropertie of science, and the knowinge in that facultie, and letteFrenchmen in their Frenche also enditen their queinte termes, forit is kyndely to their mouthes, and let us shewe our fantasies insoche wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge.”

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

DANTE






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January 2, Sunday. The ringing of the church bell is a much more melodious sound than any that isheard within the church. All great values are thus public, and undulate like sound through the atmosphere.Wealth cannot purchase any great private solace or convenience. Riches are only the means of sociality. I willdepend on the extravagance of my neighbors for my luxuries, for they will take care to pamper me if I will beoverfed. The poor man who sacrificed nothing for the gratification seems to derive a safer and more naturalenjoyment from his neighbor’s extravagance than he does himself. It is a new natural product, from thecontemplation of which he derives new vigor and solace as from a natural phenomenon.In moments of quiet and leisure my thoughts are more apt to revert to some natural than any human relation.Chaucer’s sincere sorrow in his latter days for the grossness of his earlier works, and that he “cannot recall andannul” what he had “written of the base and filthy love of men towards women; but alas they are now continuedfrom man to man,” says he, “and I cannot do what I desire,” is all very creditable to his character.Chaucer is the make-weight of his century, — a worthy representative of England while Petrarch and Boccacciolived in Italy, and Tell and Tamerlane in Switzerland and Asia, and Bruce and Rienzi in Europe, and Wickliffeand Gower in his own land. Edward III and John of Gaunt and the Black prince complete the company. Thefame of Roger Bacon came down from the preceding century, and Dante, though just departed, still exerted theinfluence of a living presence.’ With all his grossness he is not undistinguished for the tenderness and delicacyof his muse. A simple pathos and feminine gentleness is peculiar to him which not even Wordsworth can match.And then his best passages of length are marked by a happy and healthy wit which is rather rare in the poetryof any nation. On the whole, he impresses me as greater than his reputation, and not a little like Homer andShakespeare, for he would have held up his head in their company. Among the earliest English poets lie is theirlandlord and host, and has the authority of such. We read him with affection and without criticism, for he pleadsno cause, but speaks for us, his readers, always. He has that greatness of trust and reliance which compelspopularity. He is for a whole country and country [sic] to know and to be proud of. The affectionate mentionwhich succeeding early poets make of him, coupling him with Homer and Virgil, is also to be taken into theaccount in estimating his character. King James and Dunbar of Scotland speak with more love and reverence ofhim than any cotemporary poet of his predecessors of the last century. That childlike relation, indeed, does notseem to exist now which was then.

A WEEK: These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect meas those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even ofhusbandry in its primitive and simple form; as ancient andhonorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval withthe faculties of man, and invented when these were invented. We donot know their John Gutenberg, or Richard Arkwright, though thepoets would fain make them to have been gradually learned andtaught. According to Gower, —

“And Iadahel, as saith the boke, Firste made nette, and fishes toke. Of huntyng eke he fond the chace, Whiche nowe is knowe in many place; A tent of clothe, with corde and stake, He sette up first, and did it make.”

Also, Lydgate says: —

“Jason first sayled, in story it is tolde, Toward Colchos, to wynne the flees of golde. Ceres the Goddess fond first the tilthe of londe;Also, Aristeus fonde first the usageOf mylke, and cruddis, and of honey swote; Peryodes, for grete avauntage, From flyntes smote fuyre, daryng in the roote.”

GOWER




Whenever and wherever you see this little pencil icon in the pages of this Kouroo Contexture, it is marking an extract from the journal of Henry David Thoreau. OK?



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Waldo Emerson translated Dante’s VITA NUOVA.

At the end of the journal entries for this year, he listed his recent readings in Oriental materials: “Plotinus; Iamblichus; Synesius; Proclus; (Thomas Taylor’s translations); Thomas Taylor; Sheking8; THE FOUR BOOKS (Chinese Classics); Vishnu Sarna; Saadi; Desatir (Persian).”

Emerson had recorded during this year the fact that “My Chinese book does not forget to record to Confucius, that his nightgown was one length and a half of his body.” He may on some unknown occasions have caught a glimpse of one or another Chinaman and one or another Jew (or one or another giraffe), for he also opinioned in his journal that “The Chinese are as wonderful for their etiquette as the Hebrews for their piety.”

(This is in Volume VI, page 418. The Sage of Concord might of course as well have been expressing an informed opinion that “The lion is as wonderful for its ferocity as the ant for its diligence” or that “The negroes are as wonderful for their sense of rhythm as the English for their sense of propriety”!)

Emerson copied many sentences from the translation by the Reverend D. Collier of THE FOUR BOOKS, published in Malacca, into his journals for inclusion in his later works, and in fact he would insert into almost

1843

8. THE BOOK OF ODES. Presumably this was borrowed from Samuel Gray Ward of Lenox MA, as there is a reference in this year to “Ward’s Chinese book.”






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every book he would issue, at one point or another, a few such Chinese sayings, which (I will parenthetically remark) he was deploying clearly for mere purposes of color and never delving into in any interesting manner. In radical contrast with the serious manner in which Henry Thoreau would consider his Confucian extracts, Emerson used such materials as mere “throwaways,” inserted into his materials for reader titillation — for him Chinese wisdom was merely opportunistic as opposed to religious, and was so impoverished by Eastern inertia and quietism that it was not to be taken seriously. Chinese philosophy boiled down to Confucius, and that guy, in Emerson’s view of the matter, had been no originator, no innovator, no creator — but a mere “middle man.” The writings of Confucius, Emerson suggested, were to Eastern philosophy as the writings of General Washington were to Western philosophy — merely a record of practicality and of practice.In this year Emerson made some permissive remarks about the go-ahead spirit of the Americans:

5. Now these things are so in Nature. All things ascend, and theroyal rule of economy is, that it should ascend also, or,whatever we do must always have a higher aim. Thus it is a maxim,that money is another kind of blood. Pecunia alter sanguis: or,the estate of a man is only a larger kind of body, and admitsof regimen analogous to his bodily circulations. So there is nomaxim of the merchant, e. g., “Best use of money is to paydebts;” “Every business by itself;” “Best time is present time;”“The right investment is in tools of your trade;” or the like,which does not admit of an extended sense. The counting-roommaxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe.The merchant’s economy is a coarse symbol of the soul’s economy.It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure. It is to investincome; that is to say, to take up particulars into generals;days into integral eras, — literary, emotive, practical, of itslife, and still to ascend in its investment. The merchant hasbut one rule, absorb and invest: he is to be capitalist: thescraps and filings must be gathered back into the crucible; thegas and smoke must be burned, and earnings must not go toincrease expense, but to capital again. Well, the man must becapitalist. Will he spend his income, or will he invest? Hisbody and every organ is under the same law. His body is a jar,in which the liquor of life is stored. Will he spend forpleasure? The way to ruin is short and facile. Will he not spend,but hoard for power? It passes through the sacred fermentations,by that law of Nature whereby everything climbs to higherplatforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. Thebread he eats is first strength and animal spirits: it becomes,in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higherresults, courage and endurance. This is the right compoundinterest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; manraised to his highest power.

EMERSON AND CHINA THOREAU AND CHINA






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During this year Waldo Emerson contributed the following deeply profound thought about our human trajectory to his journal:

At the end of the journal entries for this year, Waldo listed his recent readings in Oriental materials: “Plotinus; Synesius; Proclus; Institutes of Menu; Bhagavat Geeta; Vishnu Purana; Confucius; Zoroaster; Saadi; Hafiz; Firdusi; Ferradeddin.”

Emerson also incidentally mentioned in his journal for this year someone he had been reading, Charles Kraitsir, mentioning all the languages in his head. A few pages later he included something that Kraitsir had written, that “All the languages should be studied abreast.”

1847

It is not determined of man whether he came up or down: Cherubim or Chimpanzee.

The culture of the Imagination, how imperiously demanded, how doggedly denied. There are books which move the sea and the land, and which are the realities of which you have heard in the fables of Cornelius Agrippa and Michael Scott.

Sweetness of reading: Montaigne, Froissart; Chaucer.

Ancient: the three Banquets [Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch].

Oriental reading: [HE FORGOT TO FILL THIS OUT]

Grand reading: Plato; Synesius; Dante; Vita Nuova; Timæus (weather, river of sleep); Cudworth; Stanley.

All-reading: Account of Madame de Staël’s rule; Rabelais; Diderot, Marguerite Aretin.

English reading: Clarendon; Bacon; Milton; Johnson; Northcote.

Manuals: Bacon’s Essays; Ben Jonson; Ford; Beaumont and Fletcher.

Favorites: Sully; Walpole; Evelyn; Walton; Burton; White’s Selborne; Aubrey; Bartram’s Travels; French Gai Science, Fabliaux.

Tonic books: Life of Michael Angelo; Gibbon; Goethe; Coleridge.

Novels: Manzoni.

Of Translation: Mitchell.

Importers: Cousin; De Staël; Southey.






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June: Herman Melville read the Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s 1812 translation of Dante Alighieri’s DIVINE COMEDY.9

The initial installment of what Dr. John Aitken Carlyle intended to become a translation of the entirety of Dante Alighieri’s DIVINA COMMEDIA appeared as DIVINE COMEDY: THE INFERNO. A LITERAL PROSE TRANSLATION WITH THE TEXT OF THE ORIGINAL COLLATED FROM THE BEST EDITIONS, AND EXPLANATORY NOTES (NY: Harper & brothers).10

This volume would be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library.

1848

1849






This drawing is by Mark Summers.



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January 17, Saturday, or 22, Thursday: Per Leary, Henry Thoreau began the process of creative reshaping of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, onto 67 leaves of white and cream paper marked with the GOODWIN*HARTFORD anchor watermark, which following Ronald Earl Clapper we refer to as “Draft D.” For instance WALDEN 314,

9. There have been over the years a very great many attempts to accomplish this:1782 Charles Rogers’s INFERNO only (blank verse)1785-1802 Reverend Henry Boyd’s DIVINE COMEDY (rhymed six-line stanzas)1805-1806 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO only (blank verse)1812 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY (blank verse)1807 N. Howard’s INFERNO only1833-1840 I.C. Wright’s DIVINE COMEDY

1836 Odoardo Volpi’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian1842 C. Hindley’s INFERNO only (in prose)1843 Reverend John Dayman’s INFERNO only1849 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose)1850 Patrick Bannerman’s DIVINE COMEDY

1851-1854 C.B. Cayley’s DIVINE COMEDY

1852 E. O’Donnell’s DIVINE COMEDY (in prose)1854 T. Brooksbank’s INFERNO only1854 Frederick Pollock’s DIVINE COMEDY

1846 James Henry Leigh Hunt’s STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY

1859 J.W. Thomas’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian1859 Bruce Whyte’s INFERNO only1862 “Hugh Bent” (nom de plume)’s INFERNO only1862 W.P. Wilkie’s INFERNO only1862/1863 Mrs. Ramsay’s DIVINE COMEDY

1865 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 17 cantos of INFERNO

1865 James Ford’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian1865 Reverend John Dayman’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian1865 William Michael Rossetti’s INFERNO only1865/1866 Reverend H.F. Cary’s INFERNO only, illustrated by G. Doré1867 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) (2d edition)1867 Thomas William Parsons’s first canticle of INFERNO only1867 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s DIVINE COMEDY

1867 Reverend Henry F. Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY

1867/1868 D. Johnston’s DIVINE COMEDY

1871 Miss Rossetti’s SHADOW OF DANTE, portions of DIVINE COMEDY

1871 Ernest Ridsdale Ellaby’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian1876 J.W. Parsons’s nine cantos of PURGATORIO

1877 Mrs. Oliphant’s FOREIGN CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY

1892 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO with illustrations by Gustave Doré1899 Thomas Okey (PURGATORIO), Dr. John Aitken Carlyle (INFERNO), and Philip H. Wicksteed


1980 C.H. Sisson’s DIVINE COMEDY

1994 Robert Pinsky’s THE INFERNO OF DANTE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

1852




http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/WALDEN/WALDEN.html


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Henry_Leigh_Hunt



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added into draft D of 1852:

This process would continue into September.

Henry Thoreau reminisced about the two young women who borrowed his dipper while he was living at the pond and then failed to bring it back:

January 17, Saturday, 1852: One day two young women–a sunday–stopped at the door of my hut andasked for some water. I answered that I had no cold water but I would lend them a dipper. They never returnedthe dipper–and I had a right to suppose that they came to steal. They were a disgrace to their sex and tohumanity. ... Pariahs of the moral world– Evil spirits that thirsted not for water but threw the dipper into thelake.– Such as Dante saw. What the lake to them but liquid fire & brimstone. They will never know peace tillthey have returned the dipper– In all the worlds this is decreed. ...

A disgrace to their sex and to humanity! —It really sounds as if these two had attempted to flirt with him. However, this is all of the incident that got into the book manuscript:

January 17, Saturday, 1852: ... Evergreens would be a good title for some of my things.– or Gill-go-over the Ground.– or Winter green–or Checker-berry. or Esnea lichens. &c &c Iter Canadense....One day an innoffensive simple minded pauper from the almshouse–who with others I often saw used as fencing

We should be fortunate & blessed if we were so sane &in season, with our robes always tucked up, that wewere able & could afford to live in the present withoutany definite or recognized object from day to day.If we could without be thus [?] always where God &Nature are, and not live on a tangent to the sphere,for the world is round. As an old poet says “Though manproposeth, God disposeth all.” What have we to boastof. We make ourselves the very sewers, the cloacae ofnature. I too revive as does the grass after rain.We are never so floundering, our day is never so fair,but that the sun may come out a little brighter throughmists and we yearn to live after a better fashion.

TIMELINE OF WALDENWALDEN A ----> G

DANTE

WALDEN: Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and theinside of my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for aglass of water. I told them that I drank at the pond, and pointedthither, offering to lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I wasnot exempted from that annual visitation which occurs, methinks,about the first of April, when every body is on the move; and Ihad my share of good luck, though there were some curiousspecimens among my visitors.






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stuff standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle from straying–visited me. and expressed a wishto live as I did. He told me in the simplest manner–(and therefore quite superior to anything that is calledhumility–it was too simple & truthful for that) that he was deficient in intellect these were his words–the Lordhad made him so–and yet he supposed that the Lord cared for him as much as for another. Said he I have alwaysbeen so from my childhood I never had much mind. It was the Lord’s will I suppose. I am weak in the head”–I was not like other children.” I have rarely been so fortunate as to meet a fellow man on such promising ground.It was so solemnly true–all that he said.The other day the 14th, as I was passing the further Garfield house beyond Holden’s with my pantaloons asusual tucked into my boots (there was no path beyond Holden’s) I heard some persons in Garfields shed but didnot look round–and when I had got a rod or two beyond–I heard some one call out impudently from the shed–quite loud–something like “Ho’lloa–mister–what do you think of the walking?” I turned round directly and sawthree men standing in the shed. I was resolved to discomfit them–that they should prove their manhood if theyhad any–and find something to say though they had nothing before.– that they should make amends to theuniverse by feeling cheap. They should either say to my face & eye what they had said to my back–or theyshould feel the meanness of having to change their tone. So I called out looking at one do you wish to speak tome Sir? no answer– So I stepped a little nearer & repeated the question– When one replied yes sir. So Iadvanced with alacrity up the path they had shovelled. In the meanwhile one ran into the house. I thought I hadseen the nearest one– He called me by name faintly & with hesitation & held out his hand half unconsciouslywhich I did not decline–and I inquired gravely if he wished to say anything to me, he could only wave me tothe other & mutter my brother. I approached him & repeated the question. He looked as if he was shrinking intoa nutshell–a pitiable object he was–he looked away from me while he began to frame some business somesurveying that he might wish to have done I saw that he was drunk–that his brother was ashamed of him–andI turned my back on him in the outset of this indirect but drunken apology.When Madame Pfeiffer arrived in Asiatic Russia she felt the necessity–of wearing other than a travelling dress,when she went to meet the authorities–for as she remarks she “was now in a civilized country where – –people are judged of by their clothes.” This is another barbarous trait.It seemed that from such a basis as the poor weak headed pauper had laid–such a basis of truth & frankness–our intercourse might go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages.It was on the 4th of July that I put a few things into a hay-rigging some of which I had made myself,& commenced housekeeping.There is the worldwide fact that from the mass of men–the appearance of wealth–dress & equipage alonecommand respects,–they who yield it are the heathen who need to have missionaries sent to them–and they whocannot afford to live & travel but in this respectable way are if possible more pitiable still.In proportion as I have celestial thoughts, is the necessity for me to be out and behold the western sky beforesunset these winter days. That is the symbol of the unclouded mind that knows neither winter nor summer.What is your thought like? That is the hue–that the purity & transparency and distance from earthly taint of myinmost mind–for whatever we see without is a symbol of something within–& that which is farthest off–is the symbol of what is deepest within. The lover of contemplation accordingly will gaze much into the sky.–Fair thoughts & a serene mind make fair days.The rain bow is the symbol of the triumph which succeeds to a grief that has tried us to our advantage–so that at last we can smile through our–tears– It is the aspect with which we come out of the houseof mourning. We have found our relief in tears.As the skies appear to a man so is his mind. Some see only clouds there some prodigies & portents–some rarelylook up at all, their heads like the brutes are directed toward earth. Some behold there serenity–purity beautyineffable.The World run to see the panorama when there is a panorama in the sky which few go out to see.Methinks there might be a chapter–when I speak of hens in the thawy days & spring weather on the chips–called Chickweed. or Plantain.To sea-going men the very Mts are but boats turned upside down–as the North men in Norway speak ofthe “keel-ridge of the country” i.e. the ridge of the Mts which divide the waters flowing east & westThose western vistas through clouds to the sky–show the clearest heavens–clearer & more elysian than if thewhole sky is comparatively free from clouds–for then there is wont to be a vapor more generally diffusedespecially near the horizon–which in cloudy days is absorbed as it were & collected into masses. And the vistasare clearer than the unobstructed cope of heaven.The endless variety in the forms & texture of the clouds! Some fine some coarse grained. I saw tonight overhead–stretching 2/31] across the sky what looked like the back bone with portions of the ribs of a fossil monster.Every form & creature is thus shadowed forth in vapor in the heavens.Saw a teamster coming up the Boston road this afternoon sitting on his load which was bags of corn or saltapperently behind 2 horses & beating his hands for warmth. He finally got off & walked behind to make his

IDA PFEIFFER






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blood circulate faster– and I saw that he was a large man– But when I came near him I found that he was amonstrous man & dwarfed all whom he stood by–so that I did not know whether he was large or they weresmall. Yet though he stood so high he stooped considerably more than anybody I think of & he wore a flat glazedcap to conceal his hight. & when he got into the village he sat down on his bags again. I heard him remarkto a boy that it was a cold day & it was. But I wondered that he should feel the cold so sensibly–for I thought itmust take a long time to cool so large a body.I learned that it was Kimball of Littleton–that probably he was not 20. The family was not large Wild who tookthe census–said so and that his sister said he could’nt do much” health & strength not much. It troubled him thathe was so large–for people looked at him. There is at once something monstrous in the bad sense suggested bythe sight of such a man. Great size is inhuman. It is as if a man should be born with the earth attached to him.I saw him standing upon a sled talking with the driver while his own team went on ahead. And I supposed fromtheir comparative height that his companion was sitting–but he proved to be standing. Such a man is so muchless human–that is what may make him sad.Those old Northmen were not like so many men in these days whom you can pass your hand through becausethey have not any back-bone. When Asmund was going to kill Harek of Thiottö with a thin hatchet,King Magnus said “‘Rather take this axe of mine’. It was thick, and made like a club. ‘Thou must know,Asmund,’ added he, ‘that there are hard bones in the old fellow’.” Asmund struck Harek on the head & gavehim his death wound, but when he returned to the king’s house, it appeared that “the whole edge of the axe wasturned with the blow”.It appears to me that at a very early age–the mind of man–perhaps at the same time with his body, ceases to beelastic. His intellectual power becomes something defined–& limited. He does not think expansively as hewould stretch himself in his growing days– What was flexible sap hardens into heartwood and there is nofurther change. In the season of youth methinks man is capable of intellectual effort & performance whichsurpass all rules & bounds– As the youth lays out his whole strength without fear or prudence & does not feelhis limits. It is the transition from poetry to prose. The young man can run & leap–he has not learned exactlyhow far–he knows no limits– The grown man does not exceed his daily labor. He has no strength to waste.

Some men are never where they For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. By Throughan infirmity of their our natures, they we suppose a case, and put themselves ourselves into it, and hence theywe are in two cases, the actual and the supposed, at the same time, which is to be in a dilemma, and it is doublydifficult to get out. A few healthy & true men In healthy and true moments In sane moments we regard only thefacts, the case that is…. Any truth is presentable. better than make-believe. (Clapper 862-7; WALDEN, 326-7)

[I]n an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter…. [T]ime had been anillusion…. Some men are never where they For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position.By Through an infirmity of their our natures, they we suppose a case, and put themselves ourselves into it, andhence they we are in two cases, the actual and the supposed, at the same time, which is to be in a dilemma, andit is doubly difficult to get out. A few healthy & true men In healthy and true moments In sane moments weregard only the facts, the case that is…. Any truth is presentable. better than make-believe. (Clapper 862-7;WALDEN, 326-7)

Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. (Clapper 256-7; WALDEN,81)

January: Three cantos of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of the PARADISO (the third and final part of Dante Alighieri’s COMMEDIA) appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.11

1864






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Thomas Hicks painted his “Authors of the United States” as a name-dropping set piece to show off various of the portraits of prominent personages he had painted at his studio in New-York. We have no idea as to the present whereabouts of the original of this, but an engraving of it was made by A.H. Ritchie. We note that the statues on the upper balcony are of course of founding literary giants Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William


















1866







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Shakespeare, and Dante Alighieri. Henry Thoreau is of course as always not noticeably absent, since he would not emerge into his present renown until well into the 20th Century.

The personages depicted are 1=Washington Irving 2=William Cullen Bryant 3=James Fenimore Cooper 4=Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5=Miss Sedgwick 6=Mrs. Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney 7=Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth 8=Mitchell 9=Nathaniel Parker Willis 10=Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 11=Kennedy 12=Mrs. Mowatt Ritchie 13=Alice Carey 14=Prentice 15=G.W. Kendall 16=Morris 17=Edgar Allan Poe 18=Frederick Goddard Tuckerman 19=Nathaniel Hawthorne 20=Simms 21=P. Pendelton Cooke 22=Hoffman 23=William H.Prescott 24=George Bancroft 25=Parke Godwin 26=John Lothrop Motley 27=Reverend Henry






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Ward Beecher 28=George William Curtis 29=Ralph Waldo Emerson 30=Richard Henry Dana, Jr. 31=Margaret Fuller, marchesa d’Ossoli 32=Reverend William Ellery Channing 33=Harriet Beecher Stowe 34=Mrs. Kirkland 35=Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 36=James Russell Lowell 37=Boker 38=Bayard Taylor 39=Saxe 40=Stoddard 41=Mrs. Amelia Welby 42=Gallagher 43=Cozzens 44=Halleck.

In a 2d, revised edition of Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s “English prosing” of Dante Alighieri’s INFERNO, the translator mentioned plans to also issue translations of PURGATORIO and PARADISO (he would work at this but of course it would not happen).12

THE DIVINE COMEDY OF Dante Alighieri / translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston: Ticknor and Fields; Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Company; Authorized edition Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 186713

Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1869-1871, [Volume 1, 1871]Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870Boston: James R. Osgood & Company, 1875Boston and NY: Houghton, Mifflin and company 1882Boston and NY: Houghton, Mifflin and company, [1886]With an introd. by Henry Morley. London: G. Routledge, 1886Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., [1888, c1867]

Reprinting, unchanged, of the 1867 edition of Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s “English prose” version of Dante Alighieri’s INFERNO.

The Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge edited and annotated a metrical translation by Miss Anna Swanwick of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s FAUST.

1867

1882


MISS SWANWICK’S FAUST





http://books.google.com/books?id=incGMwEACAAJ&dq=Hedge+Faust&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nF16Usu2Beq-sQSJ3IHgAQ&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAQ



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THE DIVINE COMEDY by Dante Alighieri. Translators Thomas Okey (PURGATORIO), Dr. John Aitken Carlyle


















1899







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(INFERNO), and Philip H. Wicksteed (PARADISO). With full notes.




























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Joseph Chesley Mathews’s “Thoreau’s Reading in Dante,” Italica 27 (1950):77-81.

Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: ENSAÍSTAS AMERICANOS. Coleção Clássicos Jackson, vol. XXXIII. Tradução de Sarmento de Beires e José Duarte. Contém “Andar a pé.” São Paulo: W.M. Jackson. 360 pages.

As I recollect, it was in about this year –after having successfully pioneered the copying of an old typesetting tape of the King James Bible into straight ASCII test and burned it onto a CD-ROM, and after having belatedly realized that technological advances of this sort were immaterial unless someone could somehow be induced to access the electronic results– that I began to muse on the prospect that, as Dante had used Virgil as his guide through INFERNO, PURGATORIO, and PARADISO, we might with benefit use Henry Thoreau as our guide through the known and unknown universe of our own divine comedy:

WE NEED A TRAVELING COMPANION

We live in an educated age – at least people generally read andwrite. We live in a religious age – at least people attendvarious worship services and seek “a religious experience.” Butwe no longer study our Scriptures as we should. This is a problemin all religious traditions, but in particular, to my ownmortification, Quakers don’t study the Bible. We find ourselvesencouraged to peruse a whole lot of quasi-religious stuff suchas what my monthly meeting’s “reading club” is currently sittingaround reading to each other on a series of Thursday nights, M.Scott Peck’s THE DIFFERENT DRUM, but after our childhoodindoctrination or immunization we no longer pay much attentionto our traditional stuff.

1950

1988

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

ASSLEY






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The result is that we are shallow. For instance, we are quiteunable to read WALDEN as it was written: not only do the greaternumber of Thoreau’s allusions to the Hindu spiritual traditionescape us, but also even his allusions to the dominant spiritualtraditions of New England. I offer that at least part of theproblem of our unfamiliarity with our heritage is that in thisera we no longer have an adequate “persona” to guide us in ourreligious wanderings. We need a READER’S GUIDE TO PROFOUND LITERATURE.When a tired traveler takes a Gideon BIBLE out of a dresser drawerin a Duluth motel, and flips through it, scripture isencountered directly, as a “writing” severed from all context,or worse, this tired traveler has an image of the member of theGideon Society who placed that Gideon in that drawer. The imagewe tend to have (which may be false!) is that of a spiritualmolester – it is the image of some self-righteous businessmanwho is trying to salve his tired soul by saving others’ souls.Consequently, resistance to the sacred words puts the tiredtraveler to sleep. Our Bibles have become pillow books, pillows,pills.But as the image of Virgil once guided Dante over thesupernatural terrain of the INFERNO, might not the image ofThoreau be a suitable guide for us through the texts of thesacred scriptures?

We may any day take a walk as strange as DanteAlighieri’s imaginary one to L’INFERNO or PARADISO (MLJ29: 242-43; MS only).

As Dante Alighieri once allowed the image of Virgil to guide himover the supernatural terrain of the INFERNO, let us allow theimage of Thoreau to guide us beyond the strangeness of, beyond






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our estrangement from, our sacred texts.

It is a matter of what is significant to us. Auto repairinstructions are currently being put on CD-ROM for a number ofreasons centering around the concept of accessibility. We mightbe as willing to do this for our scriptures as for our repair






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manuals, for they are no less significant to us. Now that thetechnology is available, putting the scriptures of the world onCD-ROM –at least one English translation of the books of theBIBLE, and the BHAGAVAD GITA, and the FOUR BOOKS of China, and theQUR’AN, etc.– would be no stunt. It would not be in the sameleague with using a microscope to inscribe the Lord’s Prayer onthe head of a pin as was popular in my youth. It is a vitalproject.Just as this is more than just a technological project, todemonstrate that it is possible to user modern technology tocreate a new kind of scholarly journal that is cumulative fromissue to issue, it can be more than just a literary or historicalproject in academia. Yes, I am well aware that no-one who ispresently unwilling to muse on Scripture out of a bound bookwill be eager to scroll through the same words on a green screen!There is much more to this than technology or literature orhistory: we can use Thoreau as a persona to guide us in ourreligious readings, in such a manner as to make ourselves eagerto scroll through them on the computer screen. The linkage isutterly simple: Thoreau loved all these old books with the mostsincere passion, and we all love Thoreau. Although our disk ofreligious writings will serve the purposes of a study of aninteresting and almost contemporary life, Thoreau’s life, it canin fact have other uses, devotional uses. For our Thoreau wasnot merely a poet or nature watcher, or merely an Emerson clone.When Thoreau cries “Blake! Blake! are you awake?” he is of courseattempting to speak like a man in a waking moment to a man inhis waking moment and he is of course summoning his definition“Morning is when I am awake and there is dawn in me” which hederived from his reading of the VISHNU PURANA in early 1850: “Allintelligences awake with the morning.” He is suggesting to Blakethat his two observations of maternal behavior at the depôt aresomething that we will need to stand on tiptoe to understand andsomething that we will need to devote our most alert and wakefulhours to. What I am adding to Thoreau’s insistence on alertnessis my own insistence that, for these intricate studies into ourbest thoughts, we must utilize the most advanced and capablecomputer hardware, operating systems, applications software,and multimedia hypertext contextures. –We need all the help wecan get, so our task will not be quite beyond our abilities.






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July 6, Monday: Andrew Delbanco, who edited and wrote the introduction to Viking’s THE PORTABLE ABRAHAM LINCOLN, reviewed the new volume 4 of Henry Thoreau’s JOURNAL14 in the pages of The New Republic (v207, n2:37-42):

[go to material presented on next screen]

There is an unprovable, intriguing story that when Thoreau wasteaching school in Concord (a plum of a job after the 1837financial crash), a school board member visited his class andreprimanded him for failing to cane his students. Thoreau walkedback into the classroom, selected six students at random, andbeat them vigorously. And then he quit. The story accords withThoreau’s spirit, if not necessarily with the facts; and thereis a hint in it of his peculiar position in the American literarytradition. The better-known part of Thoreau was the gentledissident who spent a night in Concord jail rather than pay thepoll tax. But he had also a certain pursed-lipped sourness; outon the trail he was adept, as one of his best recent critics hasput it, at consuming wild berries that “were so tart it was atriumph to eat them.”Thoreau’s was an unreconciled temperament. He was acountercultural hero, a nineteenth-century combination of PeteSeeger and Noam Chomsky. If he wrote reverently about nature,he was equally capable of writing about people with a shrivelingdisdain:

One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with”; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.

Thoreau would have something acerbic to say, in this spirit,about his appearance in one of the black-jacketed volumes of theLIBRARY OF AMERICA, for which he has been cut to the same size,bound in the same cloth, and furnished with the same typefaceand bookmark ribbon as the other writers (including, now, acouple of generals and politicians) who have been designatedAmerican classics. Being packaged as a worthy would make himuneasy, since he was, among the great figures of the AmericanRenaissance, the most suspicious, arch, macabre. He wascorrosively skeptical of all established structures and quickto categorize other men even as he condemned them for havingcategorical minds. In his lapidary technique and ghoulish humor(in the “Higher Laws” chapter of WALDEN he says that he is

1992

14. Henry Thoreau. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY D. THOREAU, JOURNAL, VOLUME 4: 1851-1852, ed. Neufeldt, Leonard N. and Nancy Craig Simmons, Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1992

TIMELINE OF JOURNAL







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“strongly tempted to seize and devour [a woodchuck] raw”), hebore less resemblance to the earnest New Englandtranscendentalists than to the alien writer whom Emerson called“the jingle man,” that is, to Poe.Wounded by a sense of disfranchisement –the son of apencilmaker, he was short of money most of his life– Thoreau wasalways contemptuous of social organizations, even those thatwere willing to include him. When he replied to the Harvardalumni questionnaire by acknowledging that he was onlymarginally employed, he declined to be considered a charitycase, and offered advice to any of his classmates who might wishsomething more valuable than money. Asked to join the Brook Farmcommunal experiment, he declined on the grounds that “I hadrather keep bachelor’s hall in hell than go to board in heaven.”And when he traveled through New England in search of thereceding wilderness, walking “across-lots” and following hiscompass and ignoring the fences and hedges that marked propertylines, he saw nature as a great contaminated garden, and couldseem oblivious to the plucky men who struggled to make a livingfrom what nature supplied them:

No wonder that we hear so often of vessels which are becalmed off our coast, being surrounded a week at a time by floating lumber from the Maine woods. The mission of men these seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver-swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.

The hovels of the cattle, he remarks, could be distinguishedfrom those of the loggers only because they have no chimneys.For the last twenty-four of his forty-five years, Thoreau kepta journal that ran to nearly 2 million words. Out of the morethan forty volumes of what John L. O’Sullivan called “privateinterviews with nature,” he fashioned two books that werepublished in his lifetime, A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERSand WALDEN. Through the efforts of friends, two more volumes,THE MAINE WOODS and CAPE COD (which had appeared partially inmagazines), and several collections of essays and letters werepublished posthumously. As a result, we think of Thoreau as awriter of books. But it is not clear that this is the way hewanted it to be. “I do not know,” he wrote in his journal in1852, “but thoughts written down thus in a journal might beprinted in the same form to greater advantage – than if therelated ones were brought together into separate essays. Theyare now allied to life – and are seen by the reader not to befar fetched.”The fact is that Thoreau did fetch his own words from afar –fromback volumes of his journal– for both A WEEK and WALDEN, whichare books more constructed than written, in which the writer hasplagiarized himself. Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, in a cabinof his own construction (neighbors helped to raise the frame)for twenty-six months, beginning on July 4, 1845. While otherNew Englanders went on grand adventures –R.H. Dana to the opensea, Francis Parkman to the Oregon territory– Thoreau remarkedcoyly that he had “traveled much in Concord.”His two years at the little pond outside the village have struck






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many readers as somehow comical, like a child camping in thebackyard, bravely holding back urine until morning to avoidhaving to squat outdoors. He “sneaked back from Walden in theevening,” says Harold Bloom, “to be fed dinner by LidianEmerson,” But these chastisements miss the point. Thoreau wasnot embarked on some Outward Bound test of manhood, yet where he

lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.

Walden is the honest record of this self-exile. It is not anadvertisement of competence or courage. Much of what Thoreauwrote in his journal while at Walden found its way, after manyrevisions, into the final version of the book, which waspublished in 1854. But the text as we know it also draws onearlier and later sources – notes he took on Staten Island yearsbefore; short, self-contained essays on what we would call thesemiotics of clothing (“the head monkey at Paris puts on atraveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same”)that he had written out in the early 1840s. Thoreau was acraftsman who worked with self-quotation and shuffled words thathad once been, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “the spontaneous overflowof powerful feelings,” but function later like modular blocksthat can be placed in new relations with others composed inentirely discrete moods and moments.There is, as a result, a certain technological quality to thewriting that Thoreau supervised for publication, as if heanticipated the new compositional possibilities made availableto us all through the word processor. In this sense he belongsto a tradition of esoteric virtuosity; there are puzzles andclues embedded in WALDEN, a book that bristles with jokes inseveral languages and contains brilliant set pieces, such as thepassage in which a wounded ant becomes Patroclus and hisferocious ally who avenges him by “gnawing at the near fore-legof his enemy” becomes a formic Achilles.A great deal of Thoreau’s laborious artifice has been detailedby recent critics, but it was recognized already in his own timeby his fellow transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. She wrote hima shrewd rejection note in response to an early submission tothe DIAL:

Last night’s second reading only confirms my impression from the first. The essay






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is rich in thoughts, and I should be pained not to meet it again. But then, the thoughts seem to me so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without pain. I never once felt myself in a stream of thought, but seem to hear the grating tools on the mosaic.

This is perhaps the most acute comment ever made about Thoreau.Its establishment of the “stream of thought” as the ideal ofliterary representation that eluded him predates William James’s“stream of consciousness” by fifty year and Gertrude Stein byseventy-five. And when Fuller speaks of the pain that she feltin both approaching and leaving Thoreau’s prose, she hasrecognized in him a certain penal quality that is his genius andhis limitation.Thoreau inflicts a kind of punishment on his reader because hehated, more than anything, intellectual laziness. He hated itin the way that Harriet Beecher Stowe hated slavery. He forbidsus to relax into any accustomed mental posture: “We wished,” hewrites in CAPE COD, “to associate with the ocean until it lostthe pond-like look which it wears to a countryman.” The pointis to attach all received ideas and images until theydisintegrate under the assault. WALDEN is a lethal work (“I hadthree pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified tofind that they required to be dusted daily, when the furnitureof my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out thewindow in disgust”) that leaves no structure standing throughwhich we may see, sense, or think the world as we had done beforewe read it. WALDEN is, in this sense, a very intolerant book.Its Emersonian project of destruction proceeds through a prosestyle that moves almost mechanically back and forth betweencontradictory assertions. “Old people,” Thoreau tells us, “didnot know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep thefire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, andare whirled around the globe with the speed of birds.” But atthe same time the idea of progress is one of the myths he wishesmost urgently to discredit: “We are eager to tunnel under theAtlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new;but perchance the first news that will leak through into thebroad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaidehas the whooping cough.”Reading Thoreau is like walking a line held taut between twoopposite-leaning posts. The prose retains its tension becauseof its internal antagonisms, which is why WALDEN has latelyproved so attractive to the deconstructionists. Thoreau was notonly a contradictory writer, he was also a contradictory man –a conservationist who once burned down 300 acres of woods byleaving a campfire undoused; a victim, according to some recentmedical historians, of narcolepsy, who proclaimed his commitmentalways to wake with the sun. A man’s “growth requires,” he tellsus, that he “remember well his ignorance,” yet he sends thisproposition into collision with another one equallyauthoritative: “Those who have not learned to read the ancientclassics in the language in which they were written must have avery imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race.” Thebuilding materials of rustic WALDEN are its aphorisms modeled






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on classical sententiae; it is a book that summons us back toignorance even as it rebukes us for the very ignorance we aresupposed to recover.Beneath this vibration of contraries is a dreadful emptiness.The most cultivated and scholastic of the writers of theAmerican Renaissance, Thoreau was ultimately a despiser ofculture. He faced, I think, an abyss of his own creating – thespecter of absolute self-reliance in a more radical sense thaneven Emerson contemplated. What Thoreau discovered was thatlanguage itself, in the narrow sense of verbal vocabulary andin the wider sense of gesture and accoutrements, made him feeldead, because it subjected him to the worn and degradedinventions of other minds. We are “like cowbirds and cuckoos,which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, andcheer no traveler with their chattering and unmusical notes.”Thoreau wanted desperately to make his own music, “to brag aslustily as Chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost,if only to wake my neighbors up.” Without the sound of his ownvoice, in the fullest proprietary sense, he felt lost in thecacophony of culture, and regarded himself as a bloodlessautomation.Yet language was the human thing he most loved. One becomes awareof this from the way he italicizes certain words like auctionand malaria, which carry, for him, not merely their conventionalcontemporary meanings (a public competitive sale; a feverishdisease) but also older etymological meanings (an increase; badair) – resonances from the Latin and Italian that have becomealmost inaudible beneath the parochial hum of culture. Theseancient meanings are precious to Thoreau, not because theyconfer upon such words that dignity of age, or require acts ofarchaeology from the superior reader, but because they suggesta pure point of locatable origin behind the process oflinguistic change. Words, for Thoreau, carry traces of God.WALDEN, in this sense, is a redemptive book. It peels away thelayers of culture from everything it examines –words, dress,social habits– because beneath them, Thoreau believes, lies someultimate stability that exists outside time. He was less themodern writer than his contemporary Melville, who, though heshared Thoreau’s quest for divinity in and through language,suspected that “by vast pains we mine into the pyramid; byhorrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espythe sarcophagus; but we lift the lid –and no body is there! –appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of man!”Facing the prospect of such deserted ruins, Thoreau because whatI would call a secret Catholic – the pilgrim who discovers andtakes refuge in what he judges to be the one durable Church inwhich the spirit of God has consented to be realized in humanform. Of the members of Emerson’s circle, only Orestes Brownsonactually converted to Rome, but Thoreau, no less passionately,made a Church of his own words. “It is something to be able topaint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to makea few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carveand paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look.”Words themselves become objects of worship – through which “we






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are enabled to apprehend ... what is sublime and noble ... bythe perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality whichsurrounds us.”As WALDEN proceeds with this sanctifying fervor, it is writtenmore and more as if its own purified vocabulary were literallythe only words God had permitted to be left in the word. Thiskind of self-enclosure may be seen in the stunning chapter on“The Village,” which describes the Main Street of Concord as acomplete digestive system, by which the traveler is ingested,passed, and excreted “out through the rear avenues.” One canread this passage again and again without noticing theexcremental metaphor, but once it is pointed out (as it was tome years ago by Joel Porte) the passage can never be readinnocently again.Though it may certainly have precedents in Dante Alighieri andRabelais and others, Thoreau’s own metaphoric invention nowcontrols us utterly. Concord becomes a permanently cloggedintestine, and his revulsion becomes our own. After reading thisit is hard to visit Concord as a cheerful tourist again –as unlikely as tapping one’s foot to “Singin’ in the Rain” afterseeing A Clockwork Orange.This passage, like many others among the most achieved in WALDENand A WEEK, had first been written out years before in thejournal – and is placed like an adjusted piece of masonry intoa waiting slot in the book. Here, I think, we come to the heartof Thoreau’s dilemma. The project of his books is to break downthe structures that intervene between culture and nature: “Ifyou stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you willsee the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were acimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the hearand marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortalcareer.” But in the end this ecstatic suicide cannot beperformed through highly conscious craftsmanship, which createsopaque, if impressive, new edifices.The most moving moments in WALDEN are those where Thoreaurecognizes this impasse:

Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the icemen have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples.... It struck me again tonight, as if I had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years, –Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; ... it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and it may be to me.

Thoreau speaks here of the lake as if he has puppied after it(“almost daily”) like a shooed-away lover who will not give up;but the more devastating confession is that the aliveness thathe had once known is slipping away. Thoreau’s self-portrait inWALDEN belongs with Dreiser’s portrait of Hurstwood andHemingway’s of Jake Barnes. They are failing. Through andagainst language, Thoreau tries to get these powers back.Another way to put this is to say that death is the specter overThoreau’s work. Magnifying the deadly struggle of the red and






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black ants under a tumbler on his windowsill, he writes withefficient fascination about the “breast all torn away,” theexposed vitals, “the still living heads... hanging on eitherside of” one ant “like ghastly trophies at his saddlebow.” Inthe harrowing first chapter of CAPE COD he walks the beach aftera ship carrying Irish immigrants has run aground and broken up:

I saw many marble feet and matted heads as the cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl, –who probably had intended to go out to service in some American family, –to which some rags still adhered, with a string, half concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck; the coiled-up wreck of a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless, – merely red and white, –with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, deadlights; or like the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand.

This kind of writing, posing as an aesthetic evaluation, isreally a test of Thoreau’s capacity to keep from flinching as“the sweet edge” of death cuts him “through the heart and marrow”– as he had been cut years before by his brother’s agonized deathfrom lockjaw. He presents, for his own strengthening, the imageof the men with carts busily collecting the seaweed which thestorm had cast up, and conveying it beyond the reach of the tide,though they were often obliged to separate fragments of clothingfrom it, and they might at any moment have found a human bodyunder it. Drown who might, they did not forget that this weedwas a valuable manure.One is tempted to hear in this report the old intolerant voiceof the lemonish Thoreau, as if he is judging these scavengersfor disrespecting the dead. But I think the emotion here iscloser to envy than to disgust. These stoic New Englanders arepart of the natural cycle of things, salvaging the seaweed,preparing it for market or their own use, undefeated by theprospect that each new wave may wash up a new corpse and remindthem of their own mortality. Thoreau wants not to dismiss them,but to find a way –despite all his contempt for the drudgery andthoughtlessness of their labor– to join them.He wants, in other words, to be somehow immunized against thefate of one woman who had come over [from Ireland] before, buthad left her infant behind for her sister to bring, [and who]came and looked into these boxes, and saw in one ... her childin her sister’s arms, as if the sister had meant to be foundthus; and within three days after, the mother died from theeffect of that sight.Thoreau’s writing is, in the final analysis, an effort to trainhimself to go on living after such a sight.The finished books are the public testimonies of his survival.But his real self-therapy was his journal. It was published atthe beginning of this century in a bulky edition, but is nowbeing edited into a new clear text by a team of scholars atPrinceton University Press, who have included some materialnever before published – fragmentary remains of portions of thejournal from which Thoreau tore out sheets for insertion intoworks in draft. In this latest volume of the Princeton editionwe can see Thoreau’s conception of the journal changing from a






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storehouse to be raided to an integral work in its own right. Iwould venture the prediction that Thoreau’s reputation has notyet reached its peak, because we are only beginning to know thejournal. As it emerges we will recognize, more and more, hisprescient formulations of what has become the leadingintellectual problem of our time: the effort to move from theskeptical to the constructive mood; to come to terms with thediscovery that rationality is just one in the infinite range ofpossible cultural performances; to remake a humane world at atime when the human “sciences” seem devoted to exposing theirown arbitrariness.Thoreau’s skepticism was no less stringent that our own. Whathe had that we are losing was the redemptive idea of nature. Itis in the journals even more than in the great books of “naturalhistory” –A WEEK, WALDEN, THE MAINE WOODS, CAPE COD– that he takes uswithout stint to the experience of “fronting” nature. In themost careful study yet of the compositional relations betweenthe journals and the books, H. Daniel Peck remarks that

for Thoreau, the very act of making a “book” implied closure.... To make a book like WALDEN means drawing a boundary around the experiences it describes ... and it is precisely because he did not have to think of his JOURNAL as a text that he felt free to range between category and relation exactly as the power of paradigms, on the one hand, and the power of the world’s images, on the other, moved him.

One sample from the extraordinary journal, from July 1851, willillustrate Peck’s important point:

Now I yearn for one of those old meandering dry uninhabited roads which lead away from towns –which lead us away from temptation, which conduct to the outside of earth –over its uppermost crust –where you may forget in what country you are traveling –where no farmer can complain that you are treading down his grass –no gentleman who has recently constructed a seat in the country that you are trespassing –on which you can go off at half cock –and waive adieu to the village –along which you may travel like a pilgrim –going nowhither. Where travelers are not too often to be met. Where my spirit is free –where the walls & fences are not cared for –where your head is more in heaven than your feet are on earth –which have long reaches –where you can see the approaching traveler half a mile off and be prepared for him –not so luxuriant a soil as to attract men –some root and stump fences which do not need attention –Where travelers have no occasion to stop –but pass along and leave you to your thoughts –Where it makes no odds which way you face whether you are going or coming –whether it is morning or evening –mid noon or mid-night –Where earth is cheap enough by being public. Where you can walk and think with least obstruction –there being nothing to measure progress by.

The exhilarating forward pressure of the open punctuation, theindifference to time, the ebullience of the Janusfaced traveler,all ensure that wherever we stop quoting from this passage, wehave severed it from itself. Thoreau could not “walk and thinkwith least obstruction” in the confines of a book. He was freestin his journal, and he knew, even as he made more than oneliterary monument out of it, that he was doing it a violence.Reading Thoreau, whether in the spontaneous journal or in thefinished books, one feels accused of hoarding comforts. Among






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the strongest reactions I have ever witnessed in a student wasduring a class on WALDEN when one of my undergraduates, adaughter of Korean immigrants, protested almost to the point oftears that she valued her clothes, her furniture, her things,and that she resented this man for trying to take this capacityfor pleasure away from her. “It is desirable that a man be cladso simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, andthat he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, thatif an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher,walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.” My student didnot want to hear that. Her protest was heartfelt because Thoreauhad reached her, as we say, where she lives.He is, despite all the barricades he erected around himself, anirresistible writer; to read him is to feel wrenched away fromthe customary world and delivered into a place we fear as muchas we need. Midway on his hike toward Mt. Katahdin, he acceptsa drink of cedar beer from a backwoodsman and finds that “it wasas if we sucked at the very teats of Nature’s pine-clad bosom.”Then, in words of wonderful pungency, he gives us (and himself)the full flavor of the drink:

it tasted of the sap of all Millionocket botany commingled, –the topmost, most fantastic, and spiciest sprays of the primitive wood, and whatever invigorating and stringent gum or essence it afforded steeped and dissolved in it, –a lumberer’s drink, which would acclimate and naturalize a man at once, –which would make him see green, and, if he slept, dream that he heard the wind sought among the pines.

To read Thoreau is almost to taste this elixir, and, with theunbearably tactile sense he gives of its absence, to crave itall the more.






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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <[email protected]>.

Prepared: November 17, 2013

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST




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Well, tomorrow is such and such a date and so it began on that date in like 8000BC? Why 8000BC, because it was the beginning of the current interglacial -- or what?

Bearing in mind that this is America, "where everything belongs," the primary intent of such a notice is to prevent some person or corporate entity from misappropriating the materials and sequestering them as property for censorship or for profit.



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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request wehave pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out ofthe shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). Whatthese chronological lists are: they are research reportscompiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data moduleswhich we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining.To respond to such a request for information, we merely push abutton.






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Commonly, the first output of the program has obviousdeficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modulesstored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, andthen we need to punch that button again and do a recompile ofthe chronology — but there is nothing here that remotelyresembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know andlove. As the contents of this originating contexture improve,and as the programming improves, and as funding becomesavailable (to date no funding whatever has been needed in thecreation of this facility, the entire operation being run outof pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweakingand recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation ofa generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward andupward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place your requests with <[email protected]>.Arrgh.




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PEOPLE MENTIONED A WEEK DURANTE DEGLI ALIGHIERI1

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