Volume 33, Number 21 & 22 · January 15, 1987
Thoreau's Book of Life
By Geoffrey O'Brien
Henry David Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walden; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod
The Library of America, 1114 pp., $27.50
Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind
by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
University of California Press, 455 pp., $25.00
The Winged Life: The Poetic Voice of Henry David Thoreau
edited and with commentaries by Robert Bly
Sierra Club Books, 151 pp., $18.95
Thoreau's work disconcerts most by its lack of clear boundaries. It is like swamp or thick woods; it's hard to say where it starts or stops. You begin by reading a book and find that you have crossed over into a life. As if seeking to become his own writing, Thoreau made his life into an immense and unfinishable text, a palimpsest of drafts which it would take another lifetime to read as deliberately as he meant it to be read. This text—consisting of both the journal and all the books fashioned from it or conceived within it—never quite becomes a discrete entity; the author is still attached to it, and not the author alone but the 'infinite extent' of the relations that tie him to the world.
Review, 7524 words
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