“In his last decade Thoreau repeatedly invoked chaos and contingency, the generational source, the saving “wild”, which alone could redeem an encrusted, static, and alienated civilization. The terms of his late writings suggest something incongruously akin to “postmodernism,” an association which turns inside out modernism’s own association with organicist wholes, attended by a literary historical periodization which has locked in the very structures Thoreau strove to keep fluid and interactive. The resulting popular image envisions Thoreau as a premodern isolate who turned his back on society to rhapsodize about a pure, untainted, Edenic American nature. This iconic figure reasserts the tragic and sterile dualisms between subject and object, freedom and fate, spirit and matter, the human and the natural, which Thoreau himself inherited from Emerson and Coleridge, which he lived and experienced fully, and which he fought to disrupt and disown in the name of creating a future that might succeed the “evil days” ushered in by romantic alienation in a commodified society. ”
- Seeing New Worlds. Henry David Thoreau and Ninetheenth-Century Natural Science. By Laura Dassow Walls.
There was a book I picked up at the ranger station on Sunday. Flipped through it and read pieces here and there for 10 minutes or so. Put it down and went over to see if there were any new maps or whatever, then I went back over to the book and read it some more. Put it down, then picked it back up again. Looked at the back cover and it was $20. It was really full of a lot of useful material. It was more than the natural history of the Sierra. It was an excellent guide on the macro and regional development of the Sierra. I walked away from the book.
There was a black bear outside the front door with a ranger so I had to go see what that was about.
Regret not getting that book. It reminded me about Bill Guyton’s book on Sierra Glaciers. I read through that and emailed him about what I thought about it. I was just thrilled and inspired when he emailed me back about that.
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